Putting Your Passion to Work

You should pursue your passion is a piece of advice for careers that we hear all the time, but how do you effectively put your passion to work? What would you say is your passion, and can you give some concrete examples of how you've been able to use that enthusiasm to successfully advocate for a cause or an organization?

Well, first as I'm talking with people on the whole passion question, I try to get young people to kind of put the old two by two matrix together in terms of low, passion to high passion on the X axis and yeah, low skill to high skill on the Y axis. And boy, if you're in that top right, good for you. But we don't often land in that top right corner. Or we lay in a place where our skills and our passions aren't the same thing. And so I try to encourage folks that, hey, if you've got a certain skill set, people want their economic independence too. Can you work in one area and then pursue your passion in other ways? For me, my background was engineering and MBA. So, I like business. So when I made the move to the not-for-profit space, I gravitated to the social enterprise model to put those practices and experiences and skills to work. And in the context of that deliver against a mission.