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Your honour, the defense pleads YOLO

Your honour, the defense pleads YOLO published on No Comments on Your honour, the defense pleads YOLO

“Follow your passion” was a pretty popular piece of advice in the early days of the social web, as a new sense of limitless possibility swept the world. Well, North America. Okay, Silicon Valley. Okay, already-prosperous people in Silicon Valley.

My point is… that now there’s a passion backlash. (Packlash? Backpash?) Some have argued that “follow your passion” is a pretty self-centered way of looking at the world, or that it has little guidance for someone whose passion and skills lie along very divergent paths. (Ask anyone who’s heard me play keyboards.)

Others point out that many of us don’t have that one big passion in life. Just as the fox knows many little things but a hedgehog knows one big thing, your search for that all-consuming passion may lead you to overlook—and miss—the smaller, quieter satisfactions in life.

(Or it may lead you to write Twitter and LinkedIn bios that claim you’re passionate about {{insert sales keywords here}}, which nobody believes about you. Please, for the love of all that’s holy, stop it.)

Maybe the way we square that circle is by looking not only at our passions for doing, but for the kind of impact we want to have in the world. There are a thousand roads to truth, beauty, love and justice, and you may not be passionate about all of them—but you probably have at least some strong feelings about the destination.

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