George Appling: Why 'Follow Your Passion' is Terrible Advice for Your Career

On our latest episode, we welcomed entrepreneur and leadership coach George Appling, who challenged the common advice to “follow your passion” when planning a career. George outlined five different ways young people can intentionally connect passion and work and concluded with advice for students to take a holistic, structured approach to career planning.Julie LammersToday, we’re welcoming entrepreneur, author and leadership coach, George Appling. George describes himself as a “passionpreneur,” someone who builds businesses around the things that he loves. His career has spanned industries and continents, from leading teams at Fortune 500 companies to creating his own mead making business, a medieval festival and a summer camp. We’re thrilled to have him on.Michael HornAnd a mead making business sounds pretty good to me. So, Julie, I agree. I’m incredibly excited for this conversation given his research. And George first, welcome. You’ve built an incredible career by developing passions that you could build real businesses around and then helping other leaders do the same through your work as a Vistage chair. And of course your book, Don’t Settle: A Pick-Your-Path Guide to Intentional Work. So what’s your advice for middle and high schoolers on how they can do the same? Is it as simple as just follow your passions?George ApplingMy number one piece of advice for young people as they think about their career is this: You’re probably being told over and over again by lots of different people to follow your passion or follow your heart or follow your bliss. And I think that’s terrible advice. And I think at some level you probably know that that’s terrible advice because you may not know what your passion is. You may not be able to make money at your passion. You may not be able to make enough money at your passion. If you make money at your passion, your passion may go away.And so I think there’s… you need to think about this in a much more sophisticated way. And that’s what my book is about. It’s about choosing the relationship between your passion and your work intentionally. And I lay out five different ways that your passion and your work can relate to each other, particularly targeted at young people. So those five ways are passion. now which is under certain circumstances, it does make sense to follow your heart immediately as a young person. But those are pretty specific circumstances, mostly that you know what your passion is, you know you can make money at it, you know you want to, and you can make enough, which probably means your need for financial security is low.This is how the framework gets built in the book. Two is independence, which means your passion and your work don’t have anything to do with each other. That’s kind of the default path, meaning the economy will force you into that if you don’t choose. But my belief is that if you make the choice yourself, you’ll be much happier with it because it’s your choice. Three is experiment. That tends to be for people who don’t know what their passion is. And so the experiment path, and there’s a whole set of guidelines on this, is about opening yourself up to different opportunities and ideas and locations and functions and sectors, looking for that spark of something that you might be able to fall in love with. Four is the money path.I think there’s a lot of people who just aren’t going to be at peace until they have financial security. So this tends to be for people whose need for financial security is high, they might fall to the money path. And the money path is you’re going after the dollar. That might mean investment banking or venture capital or strategy consulting or all sorts of things where you’re chasing money. And the last one, which is the one that I did, is the balance path. The balance path is, you know, that you want to monetize a passion or marry your work and your passion. Make that the same thing, but not yet. You’re going to do it later.And so what you’re going to do is spend the 5, 10, 15 years preparing for that day. And by preparing, I mean working in a regular career, ideally, that you really enjoy. But what you’re doing is you’re increasing the probability of success of monetizing a passion later in life. And that may mean having financial security. It may mean building certain capabilities or certain brands or certain networks or just certain understanding of things. And so the idea of the balance path is you’re very intentionally building out what you need to succeed when you switch over to the passion path later in life. So those are the five ways that passion and work can relate. They each have their audience.I’ve got a huge data set that says there’s a significant audience of young people that choose, you know, one of these five paths. And so the next time someone says, follow your heart, follow your passion, you should think, you know what? That’s terrible advice. I may not even know what my passion is. I may know what my passion is and understand that if I try to make money out of it, it’s not going to be my passion anymore. So my advice to you is to think holistically and in a structured way about how your passion and your work can relate to each other, and make that choice yourself. You can learn more about that in my book, Don’t Settle, A Pick Your Path Guide to Intentional Work. All right, thanks, everybody.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. 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