No one is born with a natural inclination to study or work hard. The quote from Confucius represents the misconception rooted down in the mind of many people-“Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Most people interpret the quote as their passion would make their life a cakewalk. The hard reality of life consists of work and when you don’t feel like doing work even though you are doing it, you are in a great position to revolve your life around relaxation.
Many of you had heard about the struggles and hardships of your parents and grandparents to obtain a good education. Now in this era, things have changed and new issues have arrived. In the modern digital society, there are so many things to enjoy and be distracted that a student with almost no work ethics would repeatedly fall into the temptation. In that regard, many of them would start searching for an easy path and look for idols to follow. In most cases, the idols would be actors, singers, You Tubers, and players. A naive mind would find the life of these celebrities very glamorous and wants to imitate them in every aspect of life. This would be reflected in starting smoking, drinking, and literally copying them to the point of utter nonsense.
Then the growing child (even adults) would search for a link between their life and life of their idols. Since they couldn’t find many, they certainly gravitate towards cooler things in their idol’s life like music, acting, games, and so on. These things appear to be cooler than study which they think is boring. Though coolness is a very subjective term on what particular trait you put emphasis on, they follow the herd instinct in this regard. When people argue that grades do not matter, the question is whether or not they are doing things that matter. If you are sure about what you want to do in life and it has nothing to do with grades, by all means never ever think about grades again. But most students at this stage never know what they are going to do in life so giving their best at school is mostly the best option.
Most of the people who argue on points like grades do not matter and the education system is garbage whether adults or children are mere escapists and demonstrate a great love for the mirage of instant gratification, in whatever form it may arrive. Most activities they spend in their day are trivial pursuits that do not help them in any positive way. Doing your best is an alien term to them and they cannot often recall last time when they gave their 100%, their everything for excellence. After wasting hours and hours of time on social media, YouTube videos, memes, hanging out, chatting, movies, sleep, gossiping, and games they finally realize the need to feel good about whatever they have accomplished. And there are countless articles, videos, and posts on the web and people in real life just to do the same. All of us are susceptible to any advice that harmonizes with our weaknesses, so much that we even forget to evaluate the credibility and level of information we are consuming. People consume what they want to consume and the vicious cycle of time waste, guilt, realization, and validation go on and on. If people argue that education has no value then they must be doing something that has way more value than doing their best at college. Probably smoking, drinking, wasting time, and Netflix binges would never justify that.
There are many misconceptions about the passion mindset rooting from movies like “3 Idiots” to Steve Jobs Commencement Speech at Stanford. Firstly, people assume that only things they seem cool or secondly things that look easy on the outset can be passion. Working in the office can be a passion as well, more so if there is an opportunity to grow. Most people do not even have the slightest idea of how much effort it’s going to take to where they want to be. More specifically, most people can’t even imagine the work in the process. There are countless other factors from the competition in your chosen field to survivorship bias that come into play. But most people simply subscribe to the passion mindset to avoid suffering from work and not to give their best blaming others if they don’t succeed. In his bestselling book ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest of Work You Love’, the author Cal Newport proves with compelling evidence about why “Follow your passion” is not so good advice and can be dangerous indeed. Following quotes from the same book illustrate the concept very well:
“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.”
“If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (“what can the world offer me?”) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (“what can I offer the world?”).”
“No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it — and the process won’t be easy.”
“Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.”
