Don’t Follow Your Passion

Follow your passion. 

It's career advice we've heard a lot. And it makes sense. After all, who wants a career they hate for their entire lives?

But the advice isn't quite accurate.

After all, there have been many thousands of failed musical theatre majors who followed their passion.

So it's obvious that following your passion isn't enough.

The proper phrase should be, "Work at your passion."

Put in the hours. Do the experimenting. Learn from your failures. Move forward. Don't settle for less than being all that you can be.

And in an extremely-competitive field like musical theatre, don't settle for less than being the best.

In the case of musical theatre, working the passion would look something like this:

• Studying the careers of everyone who made it in musical theatre, especially what they did to get there.
• Talking with musical theatre pros for career advice, well before even starting the degree.
• Performing in public as often as possible, inside and outside of school.
• Becoming familiar with every musical that has ever been on Broadway.
• Learning how to dance as well as any professional dancer.
• Learning to sing as well as any professional singer.
• Looking for feedback constantly, and applying it to become better and better.

If you try working at it, and you decide you don't like the work, that's okay. It means this kind of career probably isn't for you.

Because if you're passionate about the end result, you'll put in whatever work is necessary.

I'm not familiar with the demands of going into musical theatre. But, as a casual-yet-distant observer of musical theatre majors from my undergraduate years, these bullets alone would set most apart from the rest.

Otherwise, the default path of the "follow your passion" musical theatre major is to:

• pay lots of money for college.
• take the required courses.
• hope for the best when you get out.

Which I understand rarely works out in this field.

But, the best part about working your passion is that you become immersed in the work. You thrive on the incremental improvements. You do the things that other people won't do to get where you want to go.

And that kind of work is much more exciting than blindly following.