1A Follow Your Passion Lesson #1, 2-23-23

1A Essay #1 (Essay worth 200 points): Is Following Your Passion Bogus Career Advice?

Due on March 16 as an upload on Canvas.

The Assignment:

In a 1,200-1,500-word essay that adheres to current MLA format and provides a minimum of 4 sources for your Works Cited page, write an argumentative essay that defends, refutes, or complicates Cal Newport’s claim from his online article “The Passion Trap” that the career advice to follow your passion is dangerous and should be replaced by the craftsman mindset. Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section in your essay.

Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section. 

When you write an argumentative essay, most likely you will be required to write a counterargument-rebuttal section in which you address your opponents’ objections to your argument. The following are templates for counterarguments followed by rebuttals:

• Some people may object to my point X, but they fail to see Y.
• Some people will take issue with my argument X, and I will concede their point to some degree. However, on balance, my argument X still stands because______________________________.  
• It is true as my opponents say that my argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that Y, but I would counter-argue by observing that ___________________. 
• I would be the first to agree with my opponents that my argument can lead to some dangerous conclusions such as X. But we can neutralize these misgivings when we consider __________________________. 

Your Essay Design & Structure

From a design and structure standpoint, you are learning to write an argumentative essay in the tradition of the Toulmin Model, named after philosopher Stephen Toulmin. In this essay, you will make an argumentative claim about how persuasive or not Cal Newport is in his critique of “Follow Your Passion.” Your claim will be followed by supporting paragraphs and before you arrive at your conclusion you will provide at least one counterargument-rebuttal in which you anticipate how opponents would disagree with your claim.  

Default Setting Essay Template for 1,000-1,200-word essay

8 Paragraphs, 130 words per paragraph, approx. 1,000 words (1,040 to be exact)

Paragraph 1: Attention-getting introduction

Paragraph 2: Transition from introduction to argumentative claim (thesis)

Paragraphs 3-5: Body paragraphs that give reasons for supporting your claim.

Paragraphs 6 & 7: Counterarguments in which you anticipate how your opponents will disagree with you, and you then provide rebuttals to those counterarguments.

Paragraph 8: Conclusion, an emotionally powerful re-statement of your thesis.

Make sure to include a Works Cited page.

An Analogy to Help Further Your Understanding of the Topic:

As you consider Cal Newport’s rejection of “Follow your passion,” it might be helpful to consider the analogy between looking for the ultimate career and looking for love. What Cal Newport is saying is this: Looking for your “dream job” is futile if you’re not a highly skilled dream employee. It’s like love. No “right” person can cure a selfish emotionally-challenged narcissist. Such a person will go through an endless parade of failed jobs & relationships & be perpetually bitter and angry because “nothing ever works out for me.” In other words, such a person might be well served to reach a point where he or she says, “The problem isn’t the job or the other person. The problem is me.”

The Purpose:

From a thematic level, the purpose of this assignment is for you--a college student embarking on a journey that will take you through higher education and help escort you to what is hopefully a rewarding career-- to take a deep dive into a principle that has most likely been drilled into your brain since you can remember: “Follow your passion.” It should seem self-evident that you would want to follow your interests and passions and veer away from those subjects that you find boring or even repellent. No one is arguing against that. What we are exploring here is the value in the mantra, “Follow your passion.” What, if any, is the value of “Follow your passion”? What possible dangers might lurk behind the slogan of pursuing your dreams? Therefore, you want to do a deep dive into the “Follow your passion” mantra and see if under scrutiny the principle has any value that is proportionate to its popularity from counselors, gurus, teachers, educators, and other well-intentioned adults who tell young people or anyone having an identity crisis to follow their passion. What possible traps lie in following your passion? How might you avoid these traps? How could this essay actually affect your higher education and career plans? These questions are of paramount importance. That is why this is your first essay assignment for the semester. 

 

Use MLA Format for Your Essay

Your essay should follow the conventions of the MLA format.

For MLA format, I recommend the following:

Jason Morgan’s video:

Formatting a paper in MLA style 

“Setting Up MLA Format Paper in Google Docs”

Setting Up MLA Format Paper in Google Docs

Support Your Essay with Sources Using MLA In-Text Citations:

Also be sure to use signal phrases for your correct MLA in-text citations, as explained in this Purdue Owl article. 

Kate Guthrie Caruso has made an excellent video on MLA in-text citations titled “MLA Formatting: In-Text Citations--Basics.”

MLA Formatting: In-Text Citations--Basics

Other Sources for Your Essay:

For other sources to help you further understand Newport’s critique of “Follow your passion,” you should read “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” (book summary) by Cedric Chin, “On Passion and Its Discontents” by Cal Newport, “Don’t ‘Follow Your Passion’” by Janie Kliever, “Why ‘Find Your Passion’ Is Bad Advice” by Terri Trespicio, “The Career Craftsman Manifesto” by Cal Newport, and the YouTube video “Follow Your Passion Is Bad Advice” by Cal Newport. 

Following Your Passion Is Bad Advice  

Your Introductory Paragraph

I recommend one of four approaches for your introductory paragraph. 

Approach #1: Write a paragraph in which you write an extended definition of what Cal Newport means when he critiques “The Passion Trap.” Then transition to your thesis paragraph in which you agree, disagree, or both agree and disagree with Newport’s claim. 

Approach #2: Write a personal paragraph about your struggle to find a career that you are passionate about on one hand and is practical for your long-term financial needs on the other. Then transition to your thesis. 

Approach #3: Write a paragraph about someone you know who started a career with minimum interest and passion but over time as the person became more skilled at this career the person’s passion sprung from the added skills and expertise. 

Approach #4: Write a paragraph about someone you know who pursued his or her passion and how this resulted in a Big Nothing Burger, a complete flop because the person’s pursuit of passion was done blindly. 

Example of Approach #4 Introductory Paragraph with Transition to Thesis Paragraph

Stanley was a big proponent of "follow your dreams." After he graduated from high school in 1977 and took some acting classes at a local community college, he dropped out to move to Los Angeles where he spent the 1980s working as a waiter and trying to make a break into Hollywood. He spent his money on coaches, mentors, acting gurus, body language masters, voice instructors, New Age positive thinking experts, all in an attempt to step up his game.  He landed a few small parts here and there, just enough work to make him feel he was on the verge of making it. His optimism grew in the 1990s when he met some film directors who gave him some small roles and hinted at getting him larger roles when the opportunity came. Feeding on these dreams while living in a squalid apartment in the 1990s, Stanley continued to live a life of abject obscurity and futility with the hope that he just had to follow his dream and be persistent and that these two qualities would guarantee his success. He remained inside this delusional bubble for nearly two more decades while he lived in a roach-infested apartment in downtown L.A. where he supplemented his income by delivering plasma and working as a masseuse, a job he had to give up when his hands become afflicted with arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome.  At the age of 60, around 2018, Stanley got strep throat and couldn't afford antibiotics since none of his part-time gigs offered health insurance. Curled into the fetal position on his apartment's bare mattress with roaches crawling over him, he wept as he felt betrayed by the fact that he had done what the American Dream told him to do: He sacrificed everything to follow his passion and remained tenacious over four decades to bring his dreams to fruition, but he knew in that moment that he was a pathetic, miserable failure, and that his dreams had soured and curdled into rotten milk. 

Thesis Sample

This curdling of our dreams and the false promise of following those dreams is explored in Cal Newport's important book So Good They Can't Ignore You and his accompanying YouTube video "'Follow Your Passion' Is Bad Advice" in which Newport makes a persuasive case for replacing the Passion Hypothesis with the craftsman mindset. His claim rests on four compelling observations. Passion without spending time mastering a craft is worthless. Passion is not some low-hanging fruit that we pick from a tree, but an asset we develop over 10,000 hours of sustained hard work and tedium. Only 2% of the human race work at a "dream job." Most of us must find happiness because we are a "dream employer" who is valued based on the mastery of our craft. And finally, courage to pursue your dream without an honest assessment of your capital is dangerous and self-destructive. 

Unpacking the Above Thesis: Notice How Every Part Directs Your Body Paragraphs

The above thesis (your essay’s purpose statement) is, contrary to what you’ve been told, comprised not of one but of two sentences. It’s perfectly fine to write a one-sentence thesis, and this is the most common approach to thesis development. However, often I find students benefit from a second sentence, what is commonly called the clarifying thesis statement, which breaks down the reasons you’ll be explaining in your body paragraphs. 

So in the example above, we have the actual thesis statement in which I am making the argument that Cal Newport’s critique of “Follow your Passion” is persuasive:

This curdling of our dreams and the false promise of following those dreams is explored in Cal Newport's important book So Good They Can't Ignore You, and his accompanying YouTube video "'Follow Your Passion' Is Bad Advice" in which Newport makes a persuasive case for replacing the Passion Hypothesis with the craftsman mindset. 

Then in the clarifying thesis statement, I list my reasons for arguing that Newport’s argument is persuasive. 

His claim rests on four compelling observations. Passion without spending time mastering a craft is worthless. Passion is not some low-hanging fruit that we pick from a tree, but an asset we develop over 10,000 hours of sustained hard work and tedium. Only 2% of the human race work at a "dream job." Most of us must find happiness because we are a "dream employer" who is valued based on the mastery of our craft. And finally, courage to pursue your dream without an honest assessment of your capital is dangerous and self-destructive. 

Notice in the above clarifying thesis, there are mapping components that outline the essay’s supporting paragraphs:

• Paragraph: Passion without spending time mastering a craft is worthless. 
• Paragraph: Passion is not some low-hanging fruit that we pick from a tree, but an asset we develop over 10,000 hours of sustained hard work and tedium. 
• Paragraph: Only 2% of the human race work at a "dream job." Most of us must find happiness because we are a "dream employer" who is valued based on the mastery of our craft. 
• Paragraph: And finally, courage to pursue your dream without an honest assessment of your capital is dangerous and self-destructive. 

It’s possible that the above reasons may require more than one paragraph, but the point is the same: A clarifying thesis helps us outline or map our essay and gives us a clear direction. 

For an argumentative essay, providing compelling support paragraphs to make your claim or thesis persuasive is not enough. You also need a counterargument-rebuttal section. 

To earn credibility in an argument, good writers anticipate how opponents will disagree with their claim, so they actually provide an anticipated disagreement with their own thesis. Often they will write this counterargument-rebuttal section after their supporting paragraphs (and before their conclusion). 

To write an effective counterargument-rebuttal, good writers use a variety of sentence structures:

• Some people may object to my point X, but they fail to see Y.
• Some people will take issue with my argument X, and I will concede their point to some degree. However, on balance, my argument X still stands because______________________________.  
• It is true as my opponents say that my argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that Y, but I would counter argue by observing that ___________________. 

I would be the first to agree with my opponents that my argument can lead to some dangerous conclusions such as X. But we can neutralize these misgivings when we consider __________________________. 

Example:

My opponents will take offense to my argument that “Find your passion” is dangerous because they will accuse me of telling my students to sell themselves for money only and to be “soulless robots” who completely divorce themselves from passion as a consideration in their career choice. However, these critics are in egregious error, for they are twisting my words and failing to see what I am really arguing, namely that _____________________________________. 

Writing Your Conclusion

Your conclusion is about creating emotional power and finding a way to reiterate your essay’s purpose in order to maximize the strength of your persuasion. 

Since you want emotional power in your conclusion, you want to avoid cliches or overused (hackneyed) conclusion structures. 

Some conclusion transitions to avoid:

• In conclusion,
• As you can now clearly see,
• Before we get out of here let me just say, 
• To wrap things up, 
• Just in case you forgot, 
• To sum up what I just said,
• Sorry for this lousy essay, but just in case you didn’t understand what I was saying, 

Effective Conclusion Strategies:

• Use the “full circle” technique. If you begin with a story or image in your introduction, return to that story or image in your conclusion. 
• End on a rhetorical question.
• End with a gut-punching quotation.
• End with an indelible image. 
• End with a dire warning.
• End with a universal truth that applies to your specific argument. 
• End with an emotionally-powerful restatement of your thesis. 

Works Cited

After your conclusion, you will cite a minimum of 4 sources on a separate page for Works Cited using current MLA format as explained in this these videos:

Purdue OWL video for Word 

Purdue OWL video for Google Docs

Title for Your Essay

Make sure your essay has a strong title. Avoid a generic title like “Follow Your Passion” or “Essay 1.” Try to have a catchy title that is relevant to your focus. 

• Is the Passion Trap Really Trap?
• Is “Follow Your Passion” a Worthy Life Principle Or an Empty Cliche?
• “Follow Your Passion” Is the Most Dangerous Advice Ever Told
• Cal Newport Is Wrong About Passion

 

Content Resources:

Your main sources are the following:

• Cal Newport’s blog post “The Passion Trap” 
• Cedric Chin’s book summary post“So Good They Can’t Ignore You”
• Cal Newport’s blog post  “On Passion and Its Discontents” 
• Janie Kliever’s article “Don’t ‘Follow Your Passion’” by Janie Kliever
• Terri Trespicio’s article “Why ‘Find Your Passion’ Is Bad Advice” 
• Cal Newport’s YouTube video “Follow Your Passion Is Bad Advice”

Following Your Passion Is Bad Advice  

Suggested Supplementary Material

Talks at Google YouTube video: Cal Newport “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”:

So Good They Can’t Ignore You

How Points Are Earned on This Assignment

Essay 1 has a maximum 200 points. You earn points through the following:

1. One. Meaningful thesis statement that generates compelling body paragraphs of an argumentative thesis or claim and a strong exposition driven by a distinct writing voice (authorial presence). This thesis produces meaningful content and a powerful writing voice that passes the “So what?” question, meaning that the writing matters, is significant, and elevates the reader to a higher understanding about an urgent topic. 80 points maximum.
2. Two. Clear organizational design, also called an expository mode, that has a logical sequence and follows Toulmin Argument Model. 40 points.
3. Three. The use of signal phrases and correct MLA in-text citations whenever you cite paraphrased, summarized, or quoted material. 30 points.
4. Four. The essay has sound sentence mechanics, sentence variety, correct spelling, and correct grammar usage suitable for college-level writing. The most common grammar errors students make that diminish their essay grade are comma splices and sentence fragments. 30 points.
5. Five. The essay conforms to updated MLA format for pagination, spacing,  and Works Cited page. 20 points.

Building Block Assignment #1 

Due as an upload on February 23 for 25 points.

Learning Objectives for Building Block #1 Follow Your Passion Essay:

One. Write an introduction paragraph for your first essay that frames the debate of whether or not we should follow our passion when we select a career.  

Two. Use this paragraph as a building block for your Follow Your Passion essay. 

Three. Show an authentic connection to your subject matter to make your readers care about your exposition. 

Assignment Description

Write an Introductory Paragraph

I recommend one of four approaches for your introductory paragraph. 

Approach #1: Write a paragraph in which you write an extended definition of what Cal Newport means when he critiques “The Passion Trap.” Then transition to your thesis paragraph in which you agree, disagree, or both agree and disagree with Newport’s claim. 

Approach #2: Write a personal paragraph about your struggle to find a career that you are passionate about on one hand and is practical for your long-term financial needs on the other. Then transition to your thesis. 

Approach #3: Write a paragraph about someone you know who started a career with minimum interest and passion but over time as the person became more skilled at this career the person’s passion sprung from the added skills and expertise. 

Approach #4: Write a paragraph about someone you know who pursued his or her passion and how this resulted in a Big Nothing Burger, a complete flop, because the person’s pursuit of passion was done blindly. 

The Passion Trap: How the Search for Your Life’s Work is Making Your Working Life Miserable by Cal Newport

The Priest and the Parachute

It began with a joke.

In 1968, Richard Bolles, an Episcopal priest from San Francisco, was in a meeting when someone complained about colleagues “bailing out” of a troubled organization. To remind the group to return to this topic, Bolles jotted a clever phrase on the blackboard:  “What color is your parachute?”

The line got a laugh, but as Bolles recalls in a 1999 interview with Fast Company, “I had no idea it would take on all this additional meaning.”

Two years later, Bolles lost his job as a priest and was shuffled into an administrative position in the Episcopal Church, advising campus ministers, many of whom were also in danger of losing their jobs. Noticing a lack of good advice on the topic, Bolles self-published a 168-page guide to navigating career changes, which he handed out for free. Looking for a catchy title, he re-purposed his blackboard one-liner. The initial print run was one hundred copies.

The premise of Bolles’ guide sounds self-evident to the modern ear: “[figure] out what you like to do…and then find a place that needs people like you.” But in 1970, this concept was a radical notion.

“[At the time], the idea of doing a lot of pen-and paper exercises in order to take control of your own career was regarded as a dilettante’s exercise,” Bolles recalls. It was also, however, a period of extreme workplace transition as the post-war industrial economy crumbled before an ascendant knowledge work sector. Uncertain employees craved guidance, and Bolles’ optimistic strategies resonated. The book that began with an one hundred copy print run and a clever name has since become one of the bestselling titles of the century, with over 6 million copies in print.

This story is important because it emphasizes that one of the most universal and powerful ideas in modern society, that the key to workplace happiness is to follow your passion, has a surprisingly humble origin. What began as a quip jotted down on a blackboard grew into the core principle guiding our thinking about work. “What color is my parachute?”, we now ask, confident that answering this question holds the answer to The Good Life.

But when we recognize that this strategy is not self-evident — and in fact not even all that old — we can begin to question whether or not it’s actually right.

And when we do, it’s dismaying what we find…

The Passion Trap

Let’s summarize Bolles’ insight as follows: the key to a fulfilling career is to first figure out what you’re passionate about, and then go find a job to match. For simplicity, I’ll call this the passion hypothesis. We can think of the past forty years — the post-Parachutes era — as a vast experiment testing the validity of this hypothesis.

The results of this experiment, unfortunately, are not pretty.

The latest Conference Board survey of U.S. job satisfaction, released earlier this year, found only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs. This number has been steadily decreasing from the mark of 61% recorded in 1987, the first year of the survey.

As Lynn Franco, the director of the Board’s Consumer Research Center, notes, this is not just about a bad business cycle: “Through both economic boom and bust during the past two decades, our job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downward trend.”

Though many factors can account for workplace unhappiness, a major cause identified by the survey is that “fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.”

Put another way, as we’ve placed more importance on the passion hypothesis, we’ve become less interested, and therefore more unhappy, with the work we have. I call this effect the passion trap, which I define as follows:

The Passion Trap
The more emphasis you place on finding work you love, the more unhappy you become when you don’t love every minute of the work you have.

I argue that the passion trap is an important contributing factor to our steadily decreasing workplace satisfaction. So far, however, my evidence for this claim is circumstantial at best. We need to dig deeper.

The Young and the Anxious

If the passion trap is real, recent college graduates should be the most affected. At this young age, before the demands and stability of family, their careers are more likely to define their identity. It’s also the period where they feel the most control over their path, and therefore also feel the most anxiety about their decisions.

This predicts, therefore, that the passion trap would make young workers the most unhappy. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what the Conference Board survey finds. Roughly 64% of workers under 25 say that they are unhappy in their jobs, the highest levels of dissatisfaction measured for any age group over the twenty-two year history of the survey.

To better understand why young people are so unhappy, let’s turn to Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner’s 2001 ode to youth disaffection: Quarterlife Crisis. This book chronicles the personal testimony of dozens of unhappy twentysomethings, and as the passion trap predicts, most of the stories revolve around uncertainty regarding the search for the “right” job.

Consider, for example, the tale of Scott, a 27-year-old from Washington D.C.:

“My professional situation now couldn’t be more perfect,” Scott reports. “[I] chose to pursue the career I knew in my heart I was passionate about: politics.”

Scott succeeded in this pursuit. Though he had to start at the bottom, as a volunteer campaign aide, within two short years after college graduation he had the “Capital Hill job I dreamed of.”

Rationally, he should be happy with his work: “I love my office, my friends…even my boss.” Yet he’s not. “It’s not fulfilling,” he despairs. He has since restarted his search for his “life’s work.”

“I’ve committed myself to exploring other options that interest me,” Scott says. “But I’m having a hard time actually thinking of a career that sounds appealing.”

The passion hypothesis was so ingrained into Scott’s psyche that even his dream job, once obtained, couldn’t live up to the fantasy. Unhappiness followed.

Story after story in Quarterlife Crisis follow this same script:

“I graduated college wanting nothing more than the ultimate job for me,” says Jill. Not surprisingly, she hasn’t found it.

“I’m so lost about I want to do,” despairs 24-year old Elaine, “that I don’t even realize what I’m sacrificing or compromising.”

And so on. The passion trap strikes again and again in these pages.

This all points towards a troubling conclusion: not only is the passion hypothesis wrong, it’s also potentially dangerous, leading us into a passion trap that increases our feelings of unhappiness and uncertainty.

Happiness Beyond Passion

These initial articles in my Rethinking Passion series have been negative. My goal was to tear down our assumptions about workplace happiness, because as long we cling to the passion hypothesis, other factors will remain obscured in its high-wattage glare. Soon, however, I’ll be taking on the positive task of figuring out what does matter.  I’ve written at length about the importance of ability and craftsmanship in developing passion for your work (see here and here and here), but I also want to explore equally important (and equally nuanced) factors, such as:

• authenticity (why are we attracted to the stories of people living simply in beautiful surroundings?),
• autonomy (what’s the importance of having control over when and how you work?), and
• mission (how vital is a cause for transforming work into something meaningful?).

Stay tuned for this discussion to continue, and in the meantime, I welcome your own reflections on the reality — not cliches — of finding fulfilling work.

###

This post is the second in my series on Rethinking Passion, which tackles questions concerning the reality of building a deeply satisfying work life. Expect a new post in the series roughly once or twice a month. Here is the previous article in the series:

***

Why Passion By Itself as the Fuel for Success Is Bogus

You Need Passion to Avoid the Applebee’s Effect

Let us not dismiss passion as an important ingredient to the human condition. It has its place. 

We need a passion for our career, hobbies, our relationships, even our eating. Chewing on a flavorless meal from Applebee’s is a soul-crushing experience. For some people, going to work in a cubicle for thirty years, retiring, and dying, life is one, long, intractable, bland dining experience at Applebee’s. 

But there is a myth about passion, a fantasy from the bowels of Hakuna Matata, that picking a juicy, tasty career is as easy as picking sweet, deliquescing fruit from a tree. All you have to do is “follow your passion.”

Unpack “Follow Your Passion”

But in fact, if you unpack the meaning of “follow your passion,” you’ll find that the very notion of passion is complex, and this leads us to the first fallacy of “follow your passion” is that is based on simplicity when in fact it is based on layers of complexity. 

Fallacy #1: The Immaturity Trap: “Thirstiness” Is Not Passion 

If we are going to be honest, mature people have superior passions to immature people. A mature person’s desire to promote health in poverty-stricken parts of the world or produce beautiful music is superior to an immature person’s quest to be social media-famous as “social influencers.” 

There is a documentary called Fake Famous, which features aspiring influencers who take selfies all day. They’re not passionate about anything so much as they’re narcissists desperate for fame.

These aspiring influencers are “thirsty” or needy. 

Is such a state of thirstiness or neediness worthy of being called a passion and is such a “passion” an adequate foundation for a viable career pursuit? Of course not. 

So “follow your passion” doesn’t mean squat if you’re immature. 

Fallacy #2: The Impoverishment Trap

Being obsessed with fame is not passion. It’s desperation, and it’s ugly. The thirst for fame and bling are also based on psychological and spiritual impoverishment. 

People with no sense of self-worth look to fame and power because they feel, at a base level, a sense of gnawing impoverishment that informs everything they do. 

Pursing a “passion” too often is not built on meaning or purpose other than as a form of self-aggrandizement to compensate for a lack of self-worth. Vaingloriousness and low self-esteem are just opposite sides of the same coin. 

Fallacy #3: The Feeling Trap

Because we are an immature society heading down the path to Idiocracy (Mike Judge, 2006), we lack the critical thinking skills to question the notion that we should be ruled by our feelings.

“I’m just not feeling it,” or “I’m feeling this,” are the mantras of our time. 

Our lack of critical thinking skills has caused us, erroneously, to conflate feelings with passion. 

Having a strong feeling to play Brad Mehldau’s jazz transcription of Radiohead’s “Exit Music” is not the equivalent of having the discipline to practice piano for over a decade in order to play such an exquisite, complex piece of music. 

Having a strong feeling to enjoy the power and status of being a neurosurgeon isn’t the same as committing to the discipline and sacrifice of over a decade of medical school to become a real surgeon.

Feelings won’t make you become the person you want to be; nor will they pay your bills.

Fallacy #4: The Ephemeral Trap

The word ephemeral means changing, short-lived, and transitory. Your passions are most often ephemeral, subject to change. 

For example, several years ago, I had a student who changed boyfriends about once a month and each boyfriend was a completely different archetype from the previous one.

She dated the Jock, the Nerd, the Hipster, the Intellectual, and the Bad Boy. Her tastes were fickle, whimsical, and capricious. 

Passions are like that. You think you’re chasing a life-calling when in fact you’re just chasing a shimmering, scintillating chimera into the night. 

Maturity Changes Your Passion

Remember, don’t put too much faith in passion because passion is subject to change. As you grow and mature and experience the world, your passions change. 

You may not want to have a slime YouTube Channel like you once did.

You may not want to be a counselor or a yoga instructor like you once did.

I had a student, a recovering addict, who wanted to be a counselor, but while working for a social service network, she found all the other counselors used cheap psychology cliches and babied their clients with baby talk. She hated the industry and changed her major to English.  

The Solution to the Passion Traps: Strength of Character and Slowly Building a Passion Over Time

Solution #1: Strength of Character Is Far More Important Than Passion

Pedro was a student of mine 12 years ago, and we’re still friends to this day. Pedro has a strong character, strong discipline, and strong focus. Because he is both gifted physically and mentally and because he has a strong work ethic, he excels in everything he does.

Twelve years ago, Pedro was a state-champion boxer. He dominated over his competition. He wasn’t content to destroy them physically. He destroyed them mentally as well, killing their hearts by toying with them. To this day, he plays in a soccer league and he dominates his competition in the same way. 

But at the time, he got headaches. He came into my office with headaches, and he asked me for advice, and I told him his boxing career was over. 

So Pedro quit boxing and trained to be a firefighter. He was a firefighter in Compton for a while as a trainee and got full-time job offers in the wildfire areas of Colorado and elsewhere. He realized he didn’t want to be a firefighter, so he studied electrical engineering, and that’s what he does today.

At his firm, he is a rockstar. He is the only employee who is both an electrical engineer and a software engineer. He told me you can get a college degree in computer science, but if you can’t work on computer problems in real-time, you’re worthless. He is therefore the only functional software engineer at his firm. Word has spread about his rockstar status across the entire country and other engineering firms are making him offers, including Amazon. But I doubt he’ll leave because at his current job he is a shot-caller, and he values his independence. 

Pedro’s Success Not Based on Passion

Let us be clear: Pedro’s value and success are not because of his passion but because of his talent and the strength of his character. 

Firms aren’t dangling high-salary offers in front of Pedro’s face because of his “passion”; they are giving him offers because his skills and moral character make him VALUABLE, RELIABLE, and IRREPLACEABLE.  

The Pedros of the world don’t grow on trees; they are rare. It is therefore the exceptional skill of Pedro that makes him valuable, not his “passion.”   

Solution #2: Real passion is a function of time and an expert level of skills acquisition. 

Don’t be misled into believing there is Instant Passion. Passion takes a long time to cultivate. According to Malcolm Gladwell, real passion based on mastery of your craft takes over 10,000 hours. For example, I started playing piano when I was 17. I was terrible, and I wasn’t that passionate about it. Now I’m a lot better, and to no one’s surprise, my superior skills make me more passionate about playing. 

You don’t just have passion, like something that falls from a tree. You earn it through blood, sweat, and tears. Cal Newport is emphasizing a work ethic over feelings to achieve passion. 

Solution #3: Don’t Worry About Passion. Worry About the Kind of Student You Want to Be

I tell my students: Don’t worry so much about your passion. Worry more about what kind of student you want to be.

Do you want to be a Grazer or a Warrior?

• A grazer is someone who grazes on their phone all day, texting, messaging, liking, commenting, video watching. A grazer achieves two horrible things:
• She kills her valuable time.
• She kills her brain synapses that build the capacity for singular, long-term focus. 
• A grazer is manipulated by peer pressure and social media pressure. She loses her free will and free agency. 

You want to be a Warrior.

Remember, I told you about my student Pedro. We’re friends to this day, and I want to tell you something. He was a warrior as a student, an athlete, and an employee. 

He was working with Toyota and BMW on a car collaboration, and when Toyota did a stress test of some of BMW’s engine parts, Toyota sent the parts back because they were inferior. As Pedro told me, “Toyota doesn’t play.” What Toyota is to engine strength, Pedro is to the engineering world. He doesn’t play. 

Here’s what Pedro told me he did to become an engineer:

• One, Pedro got rid of all his distractions that got in the way of his studies. He deleted all his social media accounts.
• Two, Pedro committed himself to two-hour time blocks. He trained his brain to focus on one subject for a two-hour period. 
• Three, Pedro isolated himself. He sacrificed his social life to commit to his studies. 
• Four, Pedro only surrounded himself with people who lifted him up, which in his case was his girlfriend. 
• Five, Pedro developed a work ethic. What does that mean? It means he finishes his work before he rewards himself with his favorite hobbies: soccer, dirt bike racing, and computer games. 

Pedro is a successful engineer here in Torrance. He’s super loved and valued at work because of his work ethic. Do you know what his boss said to him a few weeks ago? “Pedro, you can’t get Covid because you’re the only person who can do this project.” So his boss has Pedro working from home where it’s nice and safe. He cannot afford to lose his Number One Employee. 

6 Keys to Success in a Writing Composition Class

I have been teaching college writing for over 30 years, and during that time I have been able to identify the things that make my students successful. 

Strong Life Skills

Generally speaking, students who do well in my class have strong life skills: They take care of themselves, eat, sleep, and exercise properly and consistently, use self-discipline to manage their time, limit their consumption of social media, maintain and forge strong relationships with family and friends, and show personal responsibility and accountability at school, work, and any other endeavors they pursue. Additionally, my successful students tend to have a lot of gusto, are engaged with life, and see every day as a new and exciting challenge. 

The above life skills are easy to talk about but hard to execute in real life. I can tell you, for example, that when I was in college, I had poor life skills: I lived too much in my head, didn’t make eye contact with people, was overly anxious, prone to panic attacks on the college campus, poor at developing social connections, and too often bored and disaffected with my professors’ syllabus material. I also hated sitting behind tiny desks and listening to professors bloviate for two hours. During those long lectures, I thought I was going to explode. I wanted more than anything to jailbreak from the confining, claustrophobic classroom, escape to the gym, and work out so that I could clear my brain. Additionally, I didn’t see every day as a new and exciting challenge. Rather, I saw every day as a horrifying jungle and I needed to bear my machete and hack my way through the thick foliage of anxieties to clear a path for myself. 

I present you with this thumbnail sketch of my personality profile during my college years to let you know that I am not judging you if you, like me, don’t have the ideal life skills for college. Being mindful of your psychological tendencies and actions and working on changing your habits, you can develop your general life skills to some extent. While I never became the ideal student, I did learn specific skills so that I could succeed in college.

 

 

 

Templates for signal phrases, counterarguments and rebuttals, and concession thesis statements. 

Common signal phrases

We read in Author X’s essay that:

We read in Corbin Smith’s essay “Alan Ritchson’s ‘Reacher” Is a Gigantic, Unstoppable Force” that Jack Reacher embodies “The four virtues of Stoicism.”

According to Author X, and As Author X writes: 

According to Corbin Smith, the Stoical Hero balances his passion with his powers of reason. As Smith writes: “You are passionate, but not completely driven by your baser instincts.” 

Author X argues that and As Author X observes:

Corbin Smith argues that Reacher’s appeal rests largely in the sheer physicality of its star Alan Ritchson. As Smith observes: Ritchscon “is a slab of rock-hard marbled beef with an unnerving square jaw and blue eyes that cut holes through steel.”

There are many more signal phrases. When you use them in a research paper, you need to include parenthetical citations. For a brief primer, consult this video:

When you write an argumentative essay, most likely you will be required to write a counterargument-rebuttal section in which you address your opponents’ objections to your argument. The following are templates for counterarguments followed by rebuttals:

• Some people may object to my point X, but they fail to see Y.
• Some people will take issue with my argument X, and I will concede their point to some degree. However, on balance, my argument X still stands because______________________________.  
• It is true as my opponents say that my argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that Y, but I would counter-argue by observing that ___________________. 
• I would be the first to agree with my opponents that my argument can lead to some dangerous conclusions such as X. But we can neutralize these misgivings when we consider __________________________. 

Four. Using signal phrases to introduce textual evidence in the form of direct quotations, paraphrases, or summaries. For an elaboration of quotations, paraphrases, and summaries, you can consult this video:

The best video I have seen for integrating sources in your essay with correct format is the following:

Five. Correct MLA format for essays in a college writing class. I recommend you consult this video: