Avoiding the passion trap

What if the golden rule of career fulfillment is keeping us stuck?

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👋 Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight brand, marketing, and creative learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities. We’ll also feature insights from our digital community of super smart folks (come join us!).

Wishing you a great week!

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If you’re of “working age” in 2025, you’ve likely been told that the surefire path to career fulfillment is this:

✨Follow your passion.✨

And we’ve been told this not by our parents, actually, but by our culture. By movies. By celebrities. By Girl Bosses and Silicon Valley podcast gurus. By Linked-freaking-In.

It feels like in the global imagination, the common-denominator poster child for a “fulfilling career” is either:

1. An internationally recognized, monetarily successful artist of some kind, or

2. One of dignified personal sacrifice with little monetary gain (like teachers, first responders, activists, aid workers), or

3. More and more commonly, a rich entrepreneur

Let’s talk about that last one there.

This “fulfilling career” archetype is a business person with a passion for realizing a particular vision, who overcomes all odds and setbacks to achieve it, and is laying the obvious groundwork for a legacy of killer Harvard Business Review case studies, memorized by MBA students and recited by CEOs on podcasts the world over.

This is someone whose passion is somehow—get this!—monetizeable. Commercially viable. Scalable even!

No waaaay!

There’s a reason that cultures in the (non-literal) Global West celebrate and lionize this particular kind of meaningful, fulfilling career:

Because it’s good for—say it with me!—c a p i t a l i s m.

Of course it’s advantageous to our current system to encourage everyone to be using as much of their time as possible to make money rather than spend that time doing leisure activities that are often free. You know what you’re not doing when you’re quietly reading, playing in your rec soccer league, volunteering at the animal shelter, canning your own fruit, trying new recipes, growing flowers, playing board games, doing Pilates, making costumes for your pets, solo traveling?

You’re neither generating wealth nor dispensing it, you dirty hippie!

A passion-based vision of career fulfillment promises purpose and meaning if you just take something you love beyond reason and find a way to get other people—lots of other people—to buy it, promote it, invest in it. Which means that you have to promote it and invest in it yourself first.

That’s a heavy burden to put on your passion, isn’t it? And not only that, but this idea of “follow your passion” has us scanning our lives for everything we truly love and evaluating its worthiness to be the basis of financial security and career fulfillment.

Scanning for monetizable passions… Please wait…

In other words, it asks us to take something we have a passion for and twist and torture it into a business. And if it comes up short? If your passion for vintage video games or handmade clothing doesn’t turn into a successful streaming channel or online shop, then not only have you probably wrung every last drop of joy out of something you used to love, but you’re also now in an impossible position: You followed your passion. It didn’t work. So now you’ll never have a fulfilling career.

Yeesh.

And none of that even accounts for the fact that passions can and do change with the seasons of our lives. Being passionate about different things over time doesn’t make you inconsistent or unreliable; it makes you interesting! Nobody talks about how following your passion and making it into your career incurs the opportunity cost of having other passions.

Now, I’m not saying you should pick the most boring, mind-numbing job possible so you can dedicate every ounce of energy to your extracurricular passions. It’s extremely important to enjoy what you do to earn a living! But if you aren’t going to follow your passion to the paradise of a fulfilling career, what do you follow instead?

A better compass: The Four Cs

Instead of asking yourself what you are passionate about, try using the following 4 territories to guide your career design decisions. As you answer these questions, you might start to see areas of overlap—these are the most promising directions to go in!

To make it simple, let’s call these territories The Four Cs. They are Curiosity, Creative Friction, Contribution, and Context. Let’s explore questions around each C that will help you chart your path.

1. Curiosity

Relevant questions:

• What naturally pulls your attention?

• What do you keep returning to?

• What could you read a whole book about…or a whole shelf of books about?

2. Creative friction

Relevant questions:

• What challenges you in ways that stretch, not drain?

• What kinds of problems do you like to solve, and at what level? (e.g. big picture thinking vs. meticulous details)

• What tasks, projects, or environments have challenged your abilities in a way that felt meaningful? (e.g. solo work vs. groups; having lots of autonomy vs. a clear plan to follow)

3. Contribution

Relevant questions:

• What kind of impact do you want to make in the world, and for whom?

• What do people regularly come to you for advice or help with?

• What do you care about deeply, even when it’s inconvenient or unpopular?

4. Context

Relevant questions:

• What season of life are you in, and what matters now?

• What responsibilities, constraints, or commitments do you have right now?

• What resources do you currently have access to? (e.g. time, money, connections, skills)

Bringing it all together

Your answers to the above questions should start to reveal potential paths for a career that is uniquely yours: neither stuck in jobs you hate nor wringing every last potential dollar out of your passions.

These questions are about helping you move with intention—continually, gradually, gracefully, in sync with your current season of life—not chase some mythical perfect path that leads to a permanent destination. So take the pressure off your passion! Some things can just be for you.

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Notable links, convos, and events

You can see all this and more in our Campout community.

• Career design is on our minds this week after we welcomed

  Mary Jantsch
  for an event, Find Your Fit: Reshaping Your Career, Not Yourself (free replay here!) where she shared her wonderful Career Ecology Framework.

• Resource: If you’re on a paid membership or free trial in Campout, you can get our Discovering Your Professional Values exercise—very relevant to these topics!

• Our next public event will be on May 21st with executive comms expert and Campout member Meg Moore from The Thought Agency. It’s a relevant one, folks: Beyond Prompts: Elevating Your Voice When AI Wants to Make You Boring. Register now!

  

• Speaking of executive comms, PR expert and Campout member Suzanne Block from Shape & Scale shared her article Do you need media training? Spoiler, the answer is yes, which you can feel free to passive-aggressively drop in whatever Slack channel your executives lurk in.

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