Should passion be a job requirement? Curt Rosengren, longtime blogger, Worthwhile magazine contributor, and Passion Catalyst thinks so!
Curt gave a talk at Microsoft to 150 employees interested in actively managing the direction of their careers. I was lucky enough to have Buzz Bruggeman as a guest for the lecture, and in a short breakout we got to discuss things that we're personally passionate about. (If you know Buzz, you'll guess one thing we share in common: connecting with people and sharing ideas.)
“Passion for Technology” has long been one of the trademarks of Microsoft employees. And over the past several years, “Passion for Customers and Partners” has been given more and more emphasis.
Do you come to work every day feeling passionate about what you’re working on? If yes, you’ve done a good job managing your career. If you feel lucky to be doing what you really love, you might feel like you can’t believe you get paid to do what you’re doing. And believe it or not, employers (or even customers) are the ones that benefit the most, since you’re dedicating your most creative, energetic, and focused efforts to doing your job—talk about win-win!
How do you get to that place, where you can’t wait to wake up and get to work, where you have to drag yourself away from your job to get lunch or go home at the end of the day? That’s the core concept of
Curt recently published a couple of ebooks, and he’s posted “The Five Fundamentals of Occupational Adventure” on his site as a free download. Check it out!
Curt's “Occupational Adventure” model. It takes some time and effort, but you can start by really identifying what it is you love to do. Whether it’s bike riding, mountaineering, public speaking, photography, brainstorming, or playing Xbox games, if you can determine the why behind what you love, you should be able to start looking for jobs that provide those things. At the very least, you might realize that the jobs you’ve been assigned might not fit too well. For me, this process resulted in helping me weed out jobs I might have otherwise chosen, and it’s allowed me to ask for assignments that match my personal passions.
Curt pointed out that most hiring managers consider someone’s enthusiasm for the new job as a key trait they look for, but often employees lose that after being in a job for some time.
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