In olden days, when you started a career, nobody told you to “follow your passion.” You joined the family business or found another job. If you liked it, you did what your boss asked, and maybe more, to earn a raise and get promoted. If you didn’t like it, you did the minimum the boss expected, so you could collect the wage, and look for ways to spend less time at the office. Passion wasn’t part of the story (except winking about someone’s romance off in the stockroom). Your job was following instructions of the person you reported to; the career advice was “just make your boss look good.”
Causes That Make The Heart Grow Fonder
Today, the new career wisdom is finding work you love. Whatever you do, go after a job or organization that emotionally grips you, where you can “find personal meaning;” “join a cause you care about;” “make a difference.” Above all, when building your career, to thine own self be true.
There’s nothing wrong with crafting a career that engages you with all you like and believe. Plenty of research supports “employee passion and engagement” leads to higher morale and performance. If you’re lucky to be in a job that pays you fairly to work on something you absolutely love—well, step on the accelerator. Such gigs are rare, and don’t last forever.
They also have the added benefit of making bosses, supervisors, or “accountable team leaders” less important to your satisfaction. You can deal with annoying management if you’re over the moon with the work. If you’re really lucky, Mr. or Ms. Higher Paygrade actually helps you be more successful. Here, by all means, stay-and-play and count your blessings every day. You’re probably in the top 10% of working stiffs out there.
Quandary In The Middle
At the bottom of the distribution is perhaps another 20%–people who have just awful jobs, grinding, boring, poor pay, stupid co-workers, abusive bosses. If you’re one of these poor souls, you’re trying to find something better, every day. Godspeed.
Harder is when you’re in a job like 70% of the world actually has. The job is sort-of OK but the program is not something you really love. Or something changes to cool the passion you first had. Maybe you’ve discovered the dream project you were promised was just cleverly labelled drudgery. Maybe the company that so intrigued you when you applied takes a new direction, abandoning the mission once so engaging to you. Maybe the boss who was first cheering you is succeeded by a total jerk. Who wants to follow him or her? Or stay in a company when your passion goes cold?
Here’s some grey-haired wisdom: don’t pull the rip-cord too fast. Bailing out prematurely might cost you career enhancing opportunities.
Put aside obvious considerations about risk, compensation, and “grass is always greener” mirages in today’s volatile economy. If you’re in search of more passion at work, sometimes staying put—and following the boss for a while longer—can be the wisest course.
The Bank Shot Strategy
Here’s why. Smart and ambitious people always do some job-hopping. It’s how you find what you like and what likes you; it’s how you raise your experience and salary. But the cleverest people play the game like billiards: they don’t always knock the ball in the pocket straight-on. They use a bank shot. Sometimes you have to zig before you zag to work that thrills you.
You might feel faint enthusiasm—or even hate—your job and your boss right now. But before you rush after some new opportunity, consider some critical assets you could be building by staying put, at least a little longer. Right there in River City there’s a potential platform of skills, knowledge, and networks that might accelerate your access to—and faster success in—a job you really want.
Before You Bail
Before you discard your current situation, take stock of three questions:
1. Does today’s boss/company/project build my skills for a future passion?
Enthusiasm and excitement will not be enough to succeed in your dream job. You’ll have to be good at lots of different things, many not part of your wheelhouse today.
A young professional I knew had a passion to work in a “food revolution start-up.” He had plenty of experience in biology and agriculture, but needed more operational chops. He took a job at an online retailer, and weathered through long and mind-numbing hours, and a decent enough if not necessarily inspiring boss, managing warehouse logistics. He left a year later for a bigger, better position, overseeing all operations for an urban farm start-up.
“No question, the former warehouse experience was major in landing the new position,” he reports.
2. Does today’s boss/company/project build knowledge for a future passion?
Excelling at a job—and landing one you dream about—requires not just skills but more general understanding too: of an industry, trends and changes affecting its businesses, and even the lingo of its practitioners. You can learn a lot of that just by coming into a sector that interests you, even in a lowly or boring job: get familiar with the problems leaders in that world wrestle with, how the winners within it talk and think, how its business models are changing.
If you open your eyes, and talk to your boss about those things, you can make yourself a much more strategic candidate for the dream job later. If you want to join an educational technology disrupter, work first in a public school, and absorb the dynamics of classroom teaching and administrative budgets; if you crave a cool job in publishing, benefit from peripheral lessons about customers and merchandising in your menial job at Barnes and Noble . Ralph Lauren began his journey as a global fashion magnate by first selling ties at Brooks Brothers.
3. Does today’s boss/company/project build networks and relationships for a future passion?
You’ll always need strong networks and connections to people who can supply money, knowledge, and innovation for the work that you love. How can you use today’s situation, including relationships offered by your boss, to extend your own networks? You may be sitting on more golden people capital today than you realize.
Earlier in my own career, I ran an intern program at United Way Worldwide. The organization was, in the eyes of the young professionals we recruited, an old-fashioned, staid charity. But the ambitious interns figured (rightly) they could use their UWW experience not just to build meat-and-potatoes skills in fundraising and donor management, but also to cultivate relationships with other mission-driven organizations in the United Way ecosystem. The stars of the program tapped networks to land future positions in social innovation start-ups, urban community organizations, non-profit consultancies, and international development NGOs.
Timing the Leap
Stated simply, sometimes following a current boss, even if less than inspiring, can let you extract a lot of professional development value for a passion to come later. When you’re on your way up, and are eager to make a change, rethink the old saying. Don’t just look, but learn before you leap.
Originally published on Forbes.com