George Appling: Why 'Follow Your Passion' is Terrible Advice for Your Career

On our latest episode, we welcomed entrepreneur and leadership coach George Appling, who challenged the common advice to “follow your passion” when planning a career. George outlined five different ways young people can intentionally connect passion and work and concluded with advice for students to take a holistic, structured approach to career planning.

Julie Lammers

Today, we’re welcoming entrepreneur, author and leadership coach, George Appling. George describes himself as a “passionpreneur,” someone who builds businesses around the things that he loves. His career has spanned industries and continents, from leading teams at Fortune 500 companies to creating his own mead making business, a medieval festival and a summer camp. We’re thrilled to have him on.

Michael Horn

And a mead making business sounds pretty good to me. So, Julie, I agree. I’m incredibly excited for this conversation given his research. And George first, welcome. You’ve built an incredible career by developing passions that you could build real businesses around and then helping other leaders do the same through your work as a Vistage chair. And of course your book, Don’t Settle: A Pick-Your-Path Guide to Intentional Work. So what’s your advice for middle and high schoolers on how they can do the same? Is it as simple as just follow your passions?

George Appling

My number one piece of advice for young people as they think about their career is this: You’re probably being told over and over again by lots of different people to follow your passion or follow your heart or follow your bliss. And I think that’s terrible advice. And I think at some level you probably know that that’s terrible advice because you may not know what your passion is. You may not be able to make money at your passion. You may not be able to make enough money at your passion. If you make money at your passion, your passion may go away.

And so I think there’s… you need to think about this in a much more sophisticated way. And that’s what my book is about. It’s about choosing the relationship between your passion and your work intentionally. And I lay out five different ways that your passion and your work can relate to each other, particularly targeted at young people. So those five ways are passion. now which is under certain circumstances, it does make sense to follow your heart immediately as a young person. But those are pretty specific circumstances, mostly that you know what your passion is, you know you can