 Cal Newport in his book, So Goodly Can't Ignore You, argues that following your passion is bad advice. If you told me this 10 years ago, I would have passionately argued with you. Yet with years of experience of indeed following my passion, I came to realize that practicing this advice isn't as simple as we'd like it to be, and that Cal actually has a good point. In this video, I will share how following my passion both worked out, and on many occasions failed me and other people around me, while also presenting some of the key arguments that Cal Newport states in his well-written book. I personally picked up the idea of following my passion in my early years as a teenager. Exploring how I went to live my life, I adopted such ideas as work the job you like, and you'll never have to work, and follow your passion, and everything will line up for you. I found these suggestions all over inspirational books and motivational lectures, and it sounded like great and motivating advice. Clearly, it seemed good enough since it led me to a decision not to study in university, a stigmatized choice in my country Lithuania, and instead to pursue my passion, a career in a martial art named Aikido, by becoming a full-time student living and training daily in the dojo in Switzerland for almost three years. My goal was to become a professional Aikido instructor and to open my own martial art school back in Lithuania, which at the age of 22 I was able to achieve. From early days of running my dojo, I experienced success. I had a thriving school with sometimes more than 100 members enrolled simultaneously. Many of my students and people around me were surprised that I managed to pull it off, especially at such a young age, while at the same time, most of my older Aikido counterparts weren't able to do it, even over the course of most of their adult lives. When I was asked what the secret of my success was, since the advice of following my passion seemed to have worked out for me, I was quick to suggest the same to others. Yet little did I know that the results of my students following this advice would lead to very different outcomes than I expected. My younger students looked up to me as an example that if they will follow their passion, surely they will also succeed in opening their own schools when they will turn 22. Following my advice, also a number of my adult students even quit their jobs, yet soon enough I started seeing these pursuits falling apart. New businesses opened by people encouraged by this advice failed, while others who developed a passion for Aikido around me tried to become full-time Aikido instructors and did not succeed either. I was surprised by these outcomes and started asking myself what led these people to their misfortunes. My first guess is where, maybe they weren't passionate enough, maybe their belief in their goals wasn't strong enough, or maybe it was the wrong passion. Looking back now, I realized how naive I was thinking that. Fortunately, with time and observation, I eventually understood where the fault in my logic was. To understand the cause of failure of people around me practicing the advice to follow the passion and not succeeding, I looked back at everything I did personally to achieve success and compared it to their cases. That is when I realized that there was a big difference between my quote unquote falling of passion and their versions. As I suggested others to follow their passion, explaining that it worked out for me, I eventually realized that at the same time I failed to mention a number of other key aspects. First of all, I wasn't just falling my passion. In fact, I was obsessed with it. I was guided by an additional intuitive idea in my late teens as I was preparing to exchange university into a school of martial arts that my success will depend on how much I will know and how good and exceptional I will be as an instructor of my chosen field. Led by this understanding, I started focusing less on high school and drove all of my attention to training and learning as much as possible about Aikido. I ended up reading countless books and training for hours upon hours, day in and day out, and I mean that literally. I would wake up with an Aikido or personal development book in my hands in the morning and I would read it before bedtime until I would fall asleep. Even in school, while regular lessons were going on, I read books of my own choice under the table. By the time I went to study Aikido full time as a living student, I already knew more than most of my counterparts at the day, but it didn't end up even there. Over the course of three years of being a living student, regularly training for three to six hours per day was still not enough for me. I would continue to train additionally before and after regular sessions. And when I wouldn't have the energy to train, I would do additional reading and research. When my instructor spoke, I listened as attentively as possible, always having a question to ask, as I was also ready for a conversation about Aikido with others at any time. Upon all of that, adding the extra four years that I trained Aikido before going to Switzerland, during which time I was a very devoted student as well. By the time I opened my Aikido school at 22, I had thousands of hours of practice, which likely was much more than that of a regular Aikido instructor, especially around my area. And that was evident to all of my students in the way I taught and spoke about this martial art. Even significantly older than myself, students would praise me for my knowledge and skill, sharing their surprise of how capable I was at such a young age. At that day though, I thought it was a normal thing and a natural consequence of simply following my passion. This is probably why I failed to communicate the essential part of this message, that just following your passion is not enough. Surely, a passion may help you in spending more time learning or practicing a skill you like, which is an advantage. But just being passionate about something is not enough. And this is what Cal Newport speaks about in his book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. First of all, Cal describes the importance of what he calls career capital, which is an accumulation of the skills you have that are rare and valuable to the working world. He states that this is the key currency for creating work you love and I tend to agree with him. I like to say that people value us as much as the value we give to them. Yet being passionate about something doesn't automatically make us good at creating value. First, we need to learn valuable skills and acquire knowledge ideally at a level, which is significantly greater than that of a common norm. At this point, our career capital becomes valuable enough to others, so that they are willing to offer financial payback for it and support us as we do the job we love. And that in turn creates the circumstances for quote unquote, doing the work you love while making a living from it. Yet too many people believe the same thing I used to believe myself, that it's enough to simply be passionate about something and that if you will do something that you're passionate about, things will simply work out. In So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport shares various stories of how following this idea, without understanding the importance of career capital, led various people to disasters and failure, showing that it is indeed a problem. I personally stumbled this way as well, trying to take on other endeavors, without a greater understanding of the importance of accumulated experience and hard work. As much as I observed my students being inspired by the idea of following your passion and eventually experiencing failure, and knowing what I know now, it is clear why it has happened so. Those students of mine who tried to become Aikido instructors too, in most cases studied Aikido only for a few years with me, compared to the eight years I've trained before I even opened up my school. And even more importantly, they did it mostly just a few hours per week. Surely they were passionate about it, but that was not enough of a career capital when time came to teach and guide droops on their own shoulders. And as upset as I am that I failed to guide them myself by explaining the importance of hard work and career capital at the time, I was a victim of the same bad advice, simply passing it along to others. While there are other valuable parts worthy of exploration on how to actually reach success during the work you love, and even the possibility of falling in love with the work you are already doing, I do hope that by listening to my story, you will reconsider the validity of the advice to follow your passion, and you will come to see that it's at best just a small piece of a greater advice which stresses the importance of hard work, consistency and career capital. I will also continue to explore this and other related subjects to mastery in future videos. So make sure to subscribe to this channel to know when the next video is out and join me on a journey to discover what works best in living a fulfilling life. Also, consider reading Cal's book So Good They Can't Ignore You, which covered this subject on this video in great detail. This was Rokas, and I wish you to work hard, smart and purposefully.