So I'm going to talk about career advice, my topic.

I want to push back a little bit on some of the ideas that

we assume are true and don't question much anymore.

And I'm going to try to replace them with some ideas

that I think the evidence actually supports better.

And I figured being at Google, the right place to start would

be saying controversial things about Steve Jobs.

So I think that's a good place for us to get going.

So in particular, I want to talk about the summer, early

summer of 2005, when Steve Jobs took the podium at

Stanford Stadium to give his--

I recognize someone down there, Chris [? Pleho ?]

AUDIENCE: Hey, how's it going, man?

CAL NEWPORT: All right.

There we go.

You remember those ages.

Anyways, I'm sorry.

I'm not going to get distracted with Chris stories.

So let's go back to summer of 2005.

Steve Jobs takes the podium, Stanford Stadium.

He's there to give the commencement address to the

graduating class of Stanford.

So this is kind of a big deal, because Jobs did not give a

lot of these sort of personal talks, reflective talks.

It wasn't really his style.

But he did give this talk.

He came.

He did wear sandals under his robe, but he did come.

And he gave this talk, and it was a good one.

And if you look at, say, YouTube views-- and I think

that's the authoritative way of ranking social impact--

the two videos of this talk have 6 million views.

So this was an important talk.

It went really far.

So he had a lot of points that he made, but I went back and

looked at the social media reactions and the news

reactions that immediately surrounded the talk's release.

And what you could see is there was one point in

particular that seemed to get people excited.

And that's about halfway through this speech where he

says, "You have to do what you love.

And if you haven't found it yet, keep looking.

Don't settle."

So, again, if you go to these social media reactions, you go

to the news reports that surround the speech, it's

pretty clear how people interpreted what Steve Jobs

was saying there.

They interpret him as saying, guys, if you want to love what

you do for your living, you need to figure out what you

love, and then you need to go match this to your job, and

then you'll have a career that you love.

This was people's interpretation.

Now, in popular slang we often summarize this with the phrase

"follow your passion." Jobs didn't say the phrase "follow

your passion," but this was people's interpretation of

what he meant with that point in his talk.

So, of course, Jobs was not the first person to introduce

this idea that you should follow your passion.

In fact, I actually went back to research where

did this come from.

When did this phrase enter into our cultural

conversation?

Right?

What's the history of this phrase there right now that

seems so universal?

And once again, because I seem to rely on Google for just

about everything I do, I used Google's Ngram Viewer.

Do you guys know this tool from Google Labs?

So I used Google's Ngram Viewer to try to understand

where this phrase came from.

So if you don't know this tool, you can put in a phrase.

And it will actually go through the--

Google's corpus of digitized books and try to understand

the occurrences of this phrase in the printed English

language over time.

So you can put "follow your passion" into this tool and

see where does it show up in printed books, and when do we

actually see it raised.

And I was actually surprised.

Here's my early-morning trivia question--

when you think the first decade was that we actually

see the phrase "follow your passion" show up in the

printed English language?

What would you guess?

AUDIENCE: '60s.

CAL NEWPORT: '60s.

AUDIENCE: '80s.

CAL NEWPORT: '80s.

AUDIENCE: 1700s.

CAL NEWPORT: I don't think they go back that far in the

Ngram Viewer.

But I'm sure if they did, it might be there.

It was actually in the 1940s and '50s.

There was a play in which a group of three woodcutters

stood around.

And someone uttered for the first time that I can find in

the printed English language, "Follow your passion." But

they were talking about a different type of passion, and

I wouldn't recommend using this play as the foundation

for your career advice.

So that was the '50s.

You see a kind of spike up throughout the '60s as that

play is reprinted.

It's really the 1980s that we start to see "follow your

passion" show up in the context of career advice.

In the '90s that graph of occurrences

begins to trend upwards.

By the early 2000s, it's really

spiked and hit its peak.

By the time Jobs stood up there and gave his speech at

Stanford Stadium , "follow your passion" had become a

sort of de facto piece of advice for American career

planners and seekers.

It got to the point where non-technical career guides

don't bother anymore to try to explain what the strategy is

or try to give a justification for why

this is a good strategy.

They assume you know it.

They assume that you agree that it's the right strategy.

They just jump right into how do you figure out what you're

passionate about, how do we build up the courage to go

after our passion.

So when Jobs stood up there and said something that people

interpreted as saying "follow your passion," this was not

the introduction of the idea.

It was more like the idea was being canonized.

So we can think of this as sort of the de facto moment

when "follow your passion" became the

American career gospel.

I mean, this is how we think about building a meaningful

career in this country.

So as I mentioned, this got people very excited, if you

look at the reports surrounding the talk.

We shouldn't be surprised that they got excited.

If you look at this idea "follow your passion"

objectively, we see that it's a sort of astonishingly

appealing concept.

Because it tells us that not only can you have this working

life in which you love what you do and it's very

meaningful and engaging, but that it's actually not that

hard to get there.

It's a simple equation.

You have to figure out what you love, which maybe takes

you a month of introspection.

You do some strength finders or whatever.

You got to figure out what you love, and then you

match it to your work.

Problem solved.

You'll love what you do for a living.

So it's sort of a astonishingly

appealing piece of advice.

But here's the problem.

The problem is that "follow your passion," in addition to

be astonishingly appealing, also happens to be

astonishingly bad advice.

And that's the idea that brought me here

today for this talk.

So I just published this new book, and the idea of this

book was to answer a simple question.

Why do some people end up loving what they do for a

living, while so many other people don't?

Now, obviously I'm young.

So this book was not me saying I will now draw for my years

of career wisdom and share my advice, having been in the

career market for two years now, if you

don't count grad school.

The point was I didn't have these answers.

I was at a key transition point in my own

early working life.

I was just finishing up my academic training, was about

to enter the academic job market.

And if this is done right, a professorship is supposed to

be a job for life.

So I was about to do what might have been my first and

last job interviews of my life.

And on the other hand, I had these really tight geographic

constraints, and it was a really bad academic market.

So there was this chance that I would have more or less have

to start from scratch after having trained for something.

So in that period of transition I said if there's

any time in my life that I need to understand how people

build careers they love, this has to be the time when I

understand this.

If I wait 10 more years, it might be too late.

So the book actually came out of me needing an answer for

that question.

It doesn't chronicle my own wisdom.

It chronicles my own quest to get this

wisdom from other people.

So you can think of the book as roughly being in two parts.

The first part I lay out my argument for why "follow your

passion" is actually bad advice if your goal is to end

up passionate about what you do for a living.

And then, roughly speaking, the second part is about,

well, what should you do instead.

If you study people who do end up loving what they do, if

they're not following their passion, what was it that they

did instead.

And that's more or less the second part.

So I thought what I would do today was tell two stories.

I can tell one story from the first part, and we can draw

some lessons from that about why I think "follow your

passion" is bad advice.

And then I'll tell a story from the second part, and then

we can draw some lessons from that about what I observed

seems to work better instead.

And then we can go to questions after that.

So let's jump right in.

The first story, I want to return to Steve Jobs.

But now I want to rewind time back a little further.

Let's say you had a time machine and you could go back

to meet a young Steve Jobs.

Probably the first thing you would do is go buy Apple

stock, but let's say you go back even earlier than that in

a high-school age Steve Jobs.

The biographical sources we have today suggest that if you

talk to a young Steve Jobs, you would not come away with

the idea that he was passionate about building a

technology company.

He did not have at that point in his life a passion for

changing the world through technology.

Right?

So Steve Jobs did not go to Berkeley to study electrical

engineering, which is what you would have done in that time

and that place if you were really passionate about

electronics.

And he didn't go to Stanford or UCLA to study business,

which is probably what you would have done in that time

and that place if you're very passionate about

entrepreneurship and business.

But he instead went to Reed College, a liberal arts school

up in Oregon.

He studied history, studied dance.

Pretty soon afterwards he dropped out and hung out on

campus, walking around barefoot, experimenting with

sort of extreme diets, bumming free meals from the Hari

Krishna temple.

Eventually, he got fed up with being completely destitute,

came back to California, took a night shift job at Atari.

And that was very specific, because he wanted flexibility

and not too much responsibility.

And he began to study Eastern Mysticism, way more seriously.

It had just arrived on the shores of the West Coast in