Archive for December, 2009

Finding Your Passion: What If Meeting Your Expectations Doesn’t Bring Happiness?

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

Raise your hand if you went to school with a clear end game in mind: You would get your degree, find a great job out of college in your field, and rise to the top of your industry.

Keep that hand up if you made it to the top, and asked yourself: Is this all there is?

Case in point: Cate has the job she always dreamed about in journalism school. To know Cate was to know that she would clearly become a successful and respected editor—in fact, just 32, Cate is managing editor of a group of photography magazines. Let’s be clear: For Cate, this is the job.

Or at least it was…nine years ago as a college senior. Because today Cate no longer wants the big editor position. She’s lost the drive for the top.

So what if you get the dream, but it doesn’t actually fulfill you?

Which brings me to my new obsession: The hedgehog concept.

The wha? Stay with me for a second–I’ve been cuddling up with Jim Collins’ Good to Great, a study in what makes certain companies enduringly exceptional. I’ve been particularly caught up with his idea of the hedgehog concept, or “an understanding of what you can be the best at.” It involves the intersection of three crucial criteria that you can download here:

The Hedgehog Concept

So for Cate, she had two out of the three:

  1. She was one of the best magazine editors in her field
  2. She was making a decent paycheck, so clearly driving her economic engine

But what about that third point about passion? Ah—there’s the rub. For Cate, she had the skill and the money but not the fire in her belly for magazine editing—or journalism really—any longer.

So the lesson here: You can have the talent and the money, but still not be happy. For Cate, this ends up with a happy ending (or at least happy middle), which I will explain in part 2, where we will discuss how to figure out what you are deeply passionate about…

Meanwhile, for more info on how to find your own personal hedgehog, check out this video by Jim Collins and how you need to study the bug called you to better understand your hedgehog…there’s actually a ton of tools on this page to help explain the hedgehog concept…go ahead, get digging into a better understanding of you…

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