Many people spend more time planning their vacations than they do planning a career, but we only spend two weeks on holidays and a lifetime working. Sadly, statistics show that eighty percent of people in the workplace are unsatisfied with what they do for a living. Finding a fulfilling career is one of the most challenging decisions that you can make. Whether you re a student who s still unclear on career goals or someone who s already in the workplace and unhappy where you are, Passion Driven Profession offers an outline for your path to success. You ll learn to clarify your goals, identify the natural strengths and abilities that will make you employable, and determine occupations that offer potential for personal fulfillment. With its insightful perspectives and much practical, hands-on advice about how to focus on and move toward employment goals, Passion Driven Profession offers an opportunity to invest in yourself and begin the career of your dreams. The secret to success is closer than you think!"

Probing the ominous side of career advice to "follow your passion," this data-driven study explains how the passion principle fails us and perpetuates inequality by class, gender, and race; and it suggests how we can reconfigure our relationships to paid work. "Follow your passion" is a popular mantra for career decision-making in the United States. Passion-seeking seems like a promising path for avoiding the potential drudgery of a life of paid work, but this "passion principle"—seductive as it is—does not universally translate. The Trouble with Passion reveals the significant downside of the passion principle: the concept helps culturally legitimize and reproduce an exploited, overworked white-collar labor force and broadly serves to reinforce class, race, and gender segregation and inequality. Grounding her investigation in the paradoxical tensions between capitalism's demand for ideal workers and our cultural expectations for self-expression, sociologist Erin A. Cech draws on interviews that follow students from college into the workforce, surveys of US workers, and experimental data to explain why the passion principle is such an attractive, if deceptive, career decision-making mantra, particularly for the college educated. Passion-seeking presumes middle-class safety nets and springboards and penalizes first-generation and working-class young adults who seek passion without them. The ripple effects of this mantra undermine the promise of college as a tool for social and economic mobility. The passion principle also feeds into a culture of overwork, encouraging white-collar workers to tolerate precarious employment and gladly sacrifice time, money, and leisure for work they are passionate about. And potential employers covet, but won't compensate, passion among job applicants. This book asks, What does it take to center passion in career decisions? Who gets ahead and who gets left behind by passion-seeking? The Trouble with Passion calls for citizens, educators, college administrators, and industry leaders to reconsider how we think about good jobs and, by extension, good lives.

Many people spend more time planning their vacations than they do planning a career, but we only spend two weeks on holidays and a lifetime working. Sadly, statistics show that eighty percent of people in the workplace are unsatisfied with what they do for a living. Finding a fulfilling career is one of the most challenging decisions that you can make. Whether you’re a student who’s still unclear on career goals or someone who’s already in the workplace and unhappy where you are, Passion Driven Profession offers an outline for your path to success. You’ll learn to clarify your goals, identify the natural strengths and abilities that will make you employable, and determine occupations that offer potential for personal fulfillment. With its insightful perspectives and much practical, hands-on advice about how to focus on and move toward employment goals, Passion Driven Profession offers an opportunity to invest in yourself and begin the career of your dreams. The secret to success is closer than you think!

In his best-selling book, The Passion Plan, Richard Chang showed individuals how to discover their passion and turn it into personal and professional fulfillment. Now, in The Passion Plan at Work he shows how to bring passion into the workplace--and turn good companies into great ones. Adapting his seven-step model for individuals to an organizational perspective, Chang explains how passion can provide direction and improve performance at all levels of a company. Carefully leading readers through his do-it-yourself process, Chang provides specific guidelines for creating an action plan that galvanizes an organization around passion. Along the way he provides practical tools--questionnaires, worksheets, and checklists--to help assess an organization's Passion Profile and make passion a big part of your company's ongoing success.

This book encourages individuals to understand their strengths, explore and gather occupational information, make decisions, set goals and take action from a Biblical perspective. Discover the history of work and hear what the Word of God says about work. Propel your interests, skills, and personality traits. Investigate all the career choices, options, and opportunities available to you, and setting goals to pursue employment. Career Planning is a lifelong process, which includes choosing an occupation, getting a job, growing in our job, possibly changing careers, and eventually retiring. It involves a series of steps to help facilitate your journey of finding purpose-driven employment.

Passion is a pervasive concept in the work domain. Workers aspire to be passionate in the hope of finding meaning and satisfaction from their professional life, while employers dream of passionate employees who will ensure organizational performance. Does passion for work matter ? Does passion invariably bring about the anticipated positive outcomes or is there a darker side to passion for work that can also lead to negative outcomes for individuals and organizations? The goal of this book is to address these issues. This volume reviews major theories of work passion, focusing specifically on the dominant theory: the Dualistic Model of Passion. This theory distinguishes between two types of passion-harmonious and obsessive- and their associated determinants and consequences. This volume provides a comprehensive understanding of passion for work by addressing the origin of the concept and its theoretical issues: how can passion for work be developed, what are the consequences to be expected at the individual and organizational levels, and how can passion for work shed new light on contemporary issues in the workplace. Passion for Work: Theory, Research, and Applications synthesizes a vast body of existing research in the area, provides insights into new and exciting research avenues, and explores how passion for work can be cultivated in work settings in order to fulfill both workers' and employers' hopes for a productive and satisfying work life.

In an unorthodox approach, Georgetown University professor Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice, and sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving their careers. Not only are pre-existing passions rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work, but a focus on passion over skill can be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers. Cal reveals that matching your job to a pre-existing passion does not matter. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it. With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to "be so good they can't ignore you," Cal Newport's clearly written manifesto is mandatory reading for anyone fretting about what to do with their life, or frustrated by their current job situation and eager to find a fresh new way to take control of their livelihood. He provides an evidence-based blueprint for creating work you love, and will change the way you think about careers, happiness, and the crafting of a remarkable life.