Part1: Do you have the Passion for Engineering or are you just doing a job? By Dilip G. Saraf
Summary: Many professionals wait their entire life trying to uncover their passion to find out what career they should choose to engage that passion. Engineer turned Career Coach Dilip Saraf’s experience with successful clients shows that they have it backwards: Passion is the outcome of a meaningful engagement and effort, and not the cause. Once you embrace this notion, you’ll change how you look at your career and how you manage it! In this first part, he explores the distinction between having a passion versus just doing a job.
“Success causes passion more than passion causes success.”—Scott Adams
Having now worked with more than 7,000 clients in hundreds of careers and in 23+ countries I have come to the conclusion that most professionals miss out on pursuing a purposeful career because they maunder through jobs and their lives wondering what their true passion really is, and, often, not finding it, yield themselves to a life of mediocrity, false expectations, and regret as they eke out their regular paychecks, often in discomfiture.
This is particularly true for those in engineering, and especially those in high-tech jobs such as software, hardware, and systems design, later in their careers. This is mainly because the pace of technology evolution is fierce in these areas, and it is difficult to keep up with advances and compete in the job market with the younger crowd. My experience with those in engineering as they advance in their tenure, without keeping up with their professional growth in these technology specialties, surrender to becoming project or program manager, which can start their downward career spiral. Don’t get me wrong here, some intentionally pursue this path as they keep their technical edge to expand their career repertoire and become successful, applying their technical edge to become awesome project and program managers.
On the flip side of this scenario, after seeing many successes with clients who first came to me not knowing what their true calling really was, imploring me to help them uncover their inner passion for them to pursue a great career using that passion, I have come to realize that most disillusioned engineers use their continued lack of engagement in their jobs to their inability to engage with passion, and not to their ability to compete as they fall behind in their skills, which often is the underlying cause.
They rationalize their lack of engagement to their apparent lack of passion, which if they uncover, would change their life. I can almost hear them muttering to themselves, “If only someone could point out to me my true passion, I’d be leading a different life.”
Nothing could be further from the truth!
The successes of many of clients that belong to the other camp, who went on to achieve C-level roles in major companies, engaging in their dream jobs, now tell a different story that is almost universal: Waiting to uncover your passion for something to pursue, hoping that it would change your life is a delusional pursuit.
On the contrary, if they view passion as the effect and not as the cause of success in one’s career, it flips on its head that whole idea of having to wait for someone to help them uncover their passion to engage with purpose. I have now come to realize that passion results from pursuing something that stems from your inner gifts (your genius—aptitude in everyday vernacular) and then harnessing one of those gifts in a systematic way to make an impact on the world, which helps you achieve a certain level of actualization. It is this actualization that drives your passion, and not the other way around.
To explain this contrarian view I have developed a model that embodies several factors and their interplay in how one achieves a unique position in their endeavors; an interplay of these forces results in developing their unique brand that can be viewed as their actualized reality. If this view of how to pursue a career, deeply engaging in your work without knowing what your real passion is from the get-go, and then whetting your passion as you get more and more engaged in your work is metaphorically akin to eating an appetizer before a meal.
This model is shown in accompanying Figure and will be explained in detail in the Part-2 of this article.
About the author:
Dilip Saraf is a highly sought after career coach who keynoted at ASEI’s 33rd Annual Convention last year and seeing the value ASEI provides, joined as a professional member of our SiliconValley chapter. An IIT and Stanford alum, he has leveraged his experience going through five different careers to establish a career coaching practice, which enjoys global clientele. www.Dilipsaraf.com
