The Importance of Passion in Choosing Your Career

The Importance of Passion in Choosing Your Career Your Name Subject and Section Professor’s Name July 22, 2019 Throughout the years several studies have already been conducted about the role of passion in shaping a person’s career. On the one hand, proponents of the idea that passion is important strongly suggests that passion leads to a greater overall success in life and in career. On the other hand, the opponents of this idea shows that there are a variety of factors that could affect one’s career paths and choices, making passion either less important of not important at all. In the succeeding chapters of this article, some of these arguments would be discussed in greater detail. Nonetheless, the author believes that while passion is important for achieving career success, there are a lot of other factors that must be considered to reach one’s dreams in life. Factors Affecting Career Success in Life Before working on the idea that passion is important for one’s success in career and in life, it is first important to understand the definition of success. While what is considered as successful can vary a lot from different individuals, its definition could be narrowed down to two important categories, namely (1) fulfillment and (2) monetary or status rewards. On the one hand, fulfillment refers to how a person views his career, position, or role in the workplace. Following this idea, a worker who feels ‘fulfilled’ with his role of photocopying documents, could be said as more successful than a CEO who feels unsatisfied with his rank and position CITATION Alh19 \l 1033 (Alhanati, 2019). In contrast to this, success could also be defined as the achievement of a high-ranking position in an organization or the acquisition of great sums of money in one’s profession CITATION Boh18 \l 1033 (Bohanes, 2018). This definition is the one that is more commonly known definition as compared to others. However, it must also be noted that these classifications are not mutually exclusive from each other. There are even times when the two is very difficult to distinguish from one another, especially since there are people who either acquires fulfillment through the acquisition of great sums of money, or those who gained a lot of money by following the things that they are passionate about. Thus, for the purpose of this article, success should always strike a balance between being able to do what one is passionate about and acquiring money and status out of it. Each of these factors would be discussed in the following sections. Theories on Passion and Success As stated earlier, there are different schools of thought related to the importance of passion towards success, or more particularly how could one strike a balance between ‘fulfillment’ and ‘monetary or status rewards’. To further understand these two approaches, two contradicting theories about passion for work should be noted, namely (1) fit theory and (2) develop theory CITATION Che15 \l 1033 (Chen, Ellsworth, & Schwarz, 2015). According to the fit theory, choosing a career that is in line with a personal passion and be true to the location where a person will find truly meaningful work. The fit theory advises that choose a career path that will give indivi...