Passionate Work

If you are feeling like you have been settling for a mere job or paycheck - STOP! Regardless of where you are in your career, this book offers you a proven five-step process for discovering what you are meant to do... and then shows you how to do it! Read this book and you will find your own answers to: - Why are you working so hard? - Discovering your passion - Assessing your proficiencies - Setting your priorities - Making your plan - Proving your plan

Passion is a pervasive concept in the work domain. Workers aspire to be passionate in the hope of finding meaning and satisfaction from their professional life, while employers dream of passionate employees who will ensure organizational performance. Does passion for work matter ? Does passion invariably bring about the anticipated positive outcomes or is there a darker side to passion for work that can also lead to negative outcomes for individuals and organizations? The goal of this book is to address these issues. This volume reviews major theories of work passion, focusing specifically on the dominant theory: the Dualistic Model of Passion. This theory distinguishes between two types of passion-harmonious and obsessive- and their associated determinants and consequences. This volume provides a comprehensive understanding of passion for work by addressing the origin of the concept and its theoretical issues: how can passion for work be developed, what are the consequences to be expected at the individual and organizational levels, and how can passion for work shed new light on contemporary issues in the workplace. Passion for Work: Theory, Research, and Applications synthesizes a vast body of existing research in the area, provides insights into new and exciting research avenues, and explores how passion for work can be cultivated in work settings in order to fulfill both workers' and employers' hopes for a productive and satisfying work life.

In Passionate Work, Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being “passionate about your work” as an affective project that encourages people to endure economically trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work. Tracking the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, Hong demonstrates how passion can emerge in instances that would not typically be understood as passionate. Gamification numbs crippling boredom by keeping call center workers in an unthinking, suspensive state, pursuing even the most banal tasks in hope of career advancement. Coworking spaces marketed toward freelancers combat loneliness and disconnection at the precise moment when middle-class sureties are profoundly threatened. Ultimately, Hong argues, the ideal of passionate work sustains a condition of cruel optimism in which passion is offered as the solution for the injustices of contemporary capitalism.

Probing the ominous side of career advice to "follow your passion," this data-driven study explains how the passion principle fails us and perpetuates inequality by class, gender, and race; and it suggests how we can reconfigure our relationships to paid work. "Follow your passion" is a popular mantra for career decision-making in the United States. Passion-seeking seems like a promising path for avoiding the potential drudgery of a life of paid work, but this "passion principle"—seductive as it is—does not universally translate. The Trouble with Passion reveals the significant downside of the passion principle: the concept helps culturally legitimize and reproduce an exploited, overworked white-collar labor force and broadly serves to reinforce class, race, and gender segregation and inequality. Grounding her investigation in the paradoxical tensions between capitalism's demand for ideal workers and our cultural expectations for self-expression, sociologist Erin A. Cech draws on interviews that follow students from college into the workforce, surveys of US workers, and experimental data to explain why the passion principle is such an attractive, if deceptive, career decision-making mantra, particularly for the college educated. Passion-seeking presumes middle-class safety nets and springboards and penalizes first-generation and working-class young adults who seek passion without them. The ripple effects of this mantra undermine the promise of college as a tool for social and economic mobility. The passion principle also feeds into a culture of overwork, encouraging white-collar workers to tolerate precarious employment and gladly sacrifice time, money, and leisure for work they are passionate about. And potential employers covet, but won't compensate, passion among job applicants. This book asks, What does it take to center passion in career decisions? Who gets ahead and who gets left behind by passion-seeking? The Trouble with Passion calls for citizens, educators, college administrators, and industry leaders to reconsider how we think about good jobs and, by extension, good lives.

One of the Best Feel-Good Books of 2021 by The Washington Post A hilarious and honest not-quite-self-help book in the vein of Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies and I Used to Have a Plan. Every person on the planet wants their life to mean something. The problem is that you’ve been told there’s only one way to find that meaning. In Unfollow Your Passion, Terri Trespicio—whose TEDx talk has more than six million views—questions everything you think you need: passion (fun, but fleeting), plans (flimsy at best), and a bucket list (eye roll), to name a few. Instead, she shows you how (and why) to flip society, culture, and the #patriarchy the bird so you can live life on your terms. Trespicio effortlessly guides you through her method of unhooking yourself from other people’s agendas, boning up on the skills to move you forward, and exploring your own creativity, memory, and intuition to unlock your unique path to meaning—while also confronting the challenges that stop you in your tracks, like boredom, loss, and fear. Unfollow Your Passion is a fresh and fearless “must-read for anyone looking for a more meaningful life” (Mel Robbins, author of The 5 Second Rule).

Passion is a pervasive concept in the work domain. Workers aspire to be passionate in the hope of finding meaning and satisfaction from their professional life, while employers dream of passionate employees who will ensure organizational performance. Does passion for work matter ? Does passion invariably bring about the anticipated positive outcomes or is there a darker side to passion for work that can also lead to negative outcomes for individuals and organizations? The goal of this book is to address these issues. This volume reviews major theories of work passion, focusing specifically on the dominant theory: the Dualistic Model of Passion. This theory distinguishes between two types of passion-harmonious and obsessive- and their associated determinants and consequences. This volume provides a comprehensive understanding of passion for work by addressing the origin of the concept and its theoretical issues: how can passion for work be developed, what are the consequences to be expected at the individual and organizational levels, and how can passion for work shed new light on contemporary issues in the workplace. Passion for Work: Theory, Research, and Applications synthesizes a vast body of existing research in the area, provides insights into new and exciting research avenues, and explores how passion for work can be cultivated in work settings in order to fulfill both workers' and employers' hopes for a productive and satisfying work life.

In an unorthodox approach, Georgetown University professor Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice, and sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving their careers. Not only are pre-existing passions rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work, but a focus on passion over skill can be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers. Cal reveals that matching your job to a pre-existing passion does not matter. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it. With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to "be so good they can't ignore you," Cal Newport's clearly written manifesto is mandatory reading for anyone fretting about what to do with their life, or frustrated by their current job situation and eager to find a fresh new way to take control of their livelihood. He provides an evidence-based blueprint for creating work you love, and will change the way you think about careers, happiness, and the crafting of a remarkable life.

The coauthors of the bestselling Peak Performance dive into the fascinating science behind passion, showing how it can lead to a rich and meaningful life while also illuminating the ways in which it is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to cultivate a passion that will take you to great heights—while minimizing the risk of an equally great fall. Common advice is to find and follow your passion. A life of passion is a good life, or so we are told. But it's not that simple. Rarely is passion something that you just stumble upon, and the same drive that fuels breakthroughs—whether they're athletic, scientific, entrepreneurial, or artistic—can be every bit as destructive as it is productive. Yes, passion can be a wonderful gift, but only if you know how to channel it. If you're not careful, passion can become an awful curse, leading to endless seeking, suffering, and burnout. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness once again team up, this time to demystify passion, showing readers how they can find and cultivate their passion, sustainably harness its power, and avoid its dangers. They ultimately argue that passion and balance--that other virtue touted by our culture--are incompatible, and that to find your passion, you must lose balance. And that's not always a bad thing. They show readers how to develop the right kind of passion, the kind that lets you achieve great things without ruining your life. Swift, compact, and powerful, this thought-provoking book combines captivating stories of extraordinarily passionate individuals with the latest science on the biological and psychological factors that give rise to—and every bit as important, sustain—passion.