'Follow your passions': wise words or 'Utter BS'?

Red meat For Mushy Moderates

Then-Vice President Joe Biden delivers a commencement speech to the graduating class of 2015 at Yale University. - David Lienemann, Wikipedia

In case you hadn’t noticed, late May and early June are commencement weeks. Surrounded by pomp and circumstance, high school and college seniors are part of an elaborate procession, they sit, listen and watch their fellow graduates accept awards. After grabbing their diplomas, most of them just want to get the hell out of there and find the nearest graduation party.

But first they must listen to someone they might or might not respect — or might not even have heard of — deliver the commencement address. Perhaps the most common exhortation coming from the speaker is to “Follow your passions!” Is this sage advice or, as Scott Galloway recently labeled it, bovine feces?

“It’s terrible advice,” said Galloway, who teaches business and marketing at New York University. “When someone tells you to follow … your passion, it means they’re already rich.”

Galloway has been preaching against simply following one’s passions for years, but he crystalized it yesterday in an interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish. Click on the screengrab below to view the exchange:

At Galloway’s own commencement at Berkeley (MBA ‘92), he heard a celebrity actor (he did not say who) telling graduates to go where their passions lead them. Galloway’s mother was in the audience. She had cancer and needed expensive care.

“I had $40,000 in student debt but I was supposed to follow my passion?” Galloway asked rhetorically. “What utter bullshit! Your job is to find something you’re good at, invest 10,000 hours in becoming great at it, and become great at something that people will pay for.”

As Smerconish noted, Galloway was channeling Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell, who posited in his bestselling book Outliers that in order to master anything, one must put in 10,000 hours of practice. It’s a generalization and an approximation, of course, but the idea that hard work is required to become skilled is a generally accepted principle.

“You had an actor giving a commencement address,” Galloway told Smerconish. “98% of actors don’t make a living. You and I both have a podcast. 1% of podcasters make 99% of the revenue. Your chances of becoming a global fashion designer are 1 in 160,000.”

The good news, however, is that if you become great at something beyond your “passion,” you can achieve what many people dream of: economic security; relevance; pride. People who manage to do this will, Galloway said, lead to what my high school alma mater calls “lives of consequence.” You will experience setbacks, you will probably even get fired but you will eventually be stronger for it.

I know exactly what Galloway means. I studied drama in college and wanted to be a stage actor. I was pretty good at it but needed additional training, an expense I simply could not afford; nor was I terribly interested in borrowing the money after I saw what I was up against.

My acting coach told me if I had a good audition, he would lobby for me to be admitted to the National Theatre School of Canada, where he himself had been trained. The most likely employment after three years at NTS in Montreal would be with a theatrical touring company. The money wasn’t bad but it would demand in excess of 180 days per year on the road — not a great situation if you wanted to eventually get married and have a family. Then I learned that the unemployment rate at any given time at Actor’s Equity, the union representing stage actors, was nearly 90%. The fires of my “passion” were quickly doused.

Teaching high school students, which I did for about a dozen years, was more stable but never felt like my calling, even when directing student stage productions. Then a setback: the school I worked at in Connecticut was downsizing dramatically, resulting in a 30% reduction in the size of the faculty. I was making what passed for good money so … poof … I became unemployed at the end of the 1996 school year.

My wife and I pondered my future. I had always had an interest in journalism. I wrote popular op-eds for the college paper and at all times enjoyed having my work read and appreciated — and sometimes critiqued aggressively by those who disagreed.

The only good grades I got in high school were courses that required expository writing. During the one-term journalism elective I took, we were assigned to investigate a fire that had destroyed a classroom wing at our school some 10 years earlier. I busted my ass and got an A. Not surprisingly, I didn’t receive many marks like that at the highly competitive high school I attended.

Some 20 years later, I used my exit from teaching as an opportunity to do something I really cared about. No longer was I going to be a writer trapped in an English teacher’s body. I took a job as a reporter at the Lakeville Journal, starting out at the company’s sister paper in New York’s Hudson Valley.

I left journalism a couple of times to work in fundraising, where I toiled for nine miserable years, because by then I had a family and the money was so much better. But I hated raising money for mediocre private schools, kissing the asses of board members and putting a smiley face on the school for external constituencies even when there were big problems. I had always been much more adept at telling the unvarnished truth and letting the chips fall where they may. Thence springs the passion!

Like Galloway, who worked in banking at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, “More money was not enough to keep me happy. If you hate something you’re not going to be great at it.” Finding himself miserable at Goldman, where he was likely making seven-figures, Galloway exited and eventually went into marketing, academia and philanthropy.

So the lesson: It’s better to follow your talents than your passions. Of course, it’s sometimes possible to do both and be successful. But just as importantly, be practical and understand that leading a life of consequence can be a reward in itself.

“Beyoncé followed her passion and is now a billionaire,” Galloway added. “Assume you’re no Beyoncé.”

Beyoncé performing alongside Bruno Mars at Super Bowl 50 halftime show in February 2016 -Wikipedia