Passion projects
When I was in 10th grade, my high school brought in some parents to talk about their careers. There must have been several parents who took a turn, but I can only remember one: the accountant.
This accountant faced our class, well dressed in his starched white shirt, dark suit and silk tie. He told us, without hesitation, that he really doesn’t like his job at all, and in fact, he hates it. But it does pay very well, which is why he has to keep doing it.
This was over twenty years ago for me, but I can still hear his voice, this memory, etched into my brain.
I can only imagine his thoughts— when he first got the call to come speak to the class; or that morning, as he drew his Windsor knot tight around his neck; or while his Mercedes idled in the school parking lot for an extra moment, before he cut the engine. I have a message from the future. I must tell them, before it’s too late.
How many other adults do you know in this situation? Seemingly trapped in an unfulfilling career. Pretty much everybody? How did that happen? I think it starts in grade school. I got the message that accounting was a horrible career (at least it was for this brave man). But I suspect we’re all programmed to miss the bigger message.
School trains us to look at someone else’s path, someone else’s definition of success, and then to follow that path as perfectly as possible. At the end of the path, we are handed a grade. If you follow the path exactly, then you get a very good grade. If you always follow the path exactly, then one day, if you’re lucky, they may just put your name up on a plaque in the school. Excellent path following! Your future is bright!
If you get a bad grade, you face shame. Your parents say you need to get back on that path kid, or else you will be confined to your room. And you can’t have the keys to the car on Saturday! If you don’t submit to the path, you are in for a very long slog.
You can protest, but it’s useless. What’s the point of this? When will I ever use this trigonometry? Why do I have to learn this? Because it’s on the path! Now be quiet and listen to me talk.
But then, after 12 years of this training, a well intentioned man or woman sits across a desk from you and says: “So what do you want to do with your life? What do you really love? Follow your heart! Oh, and by the way, if you don’t do a better job following this path, then you won’t get to follow the next path for the next four years, and you know what that means… So get to work!”
Huh? This sounds cynical, but only because it’s so ridiculous when you think about it. I’m positive that adults, parents, and people who work at schools mean very well for kids. So, there’s no cynicism here, really. It’s just that we’ve been doing this for hundreds of years. Something about discipline, an old agrarian culture, or maybe the industrial revolution. I don’t know why it started, but the problem is clear.
What is the solution? How can schools and parents teach people to create and follow their own paths? How can schools and parents encourage people to pursue something they love?
People will learn how to pursue their passions in life if pursuing their passions brings them success. And the definition of success has to be expanded beyond the economic. Following through on passions, no matter what they are (and assuming no one is harmed in the process), should be considered an acceptable, productive activity in society. We should celebrate it like an A on a math test.
My 4-year-old son loves trains. He will play with trains for hours. He sets up his Thomas the Tank Engine track, creates scenes, crashes them. Then he goes upstairs and rearranges the model trains on his shelf, and wants to play “train repair shop” with me. And before dinner he asks to watch a Thomas video.
As a parent, what do I do? Well, of course—two weeks ago I got the old model train set out of my parent’s attic and I’m going to set it up with my son. He’s beside himself with excitement. The transformer is at the hobby shop right now for repair, and he can’t wait for it. Any parent would do this.
What does this have to do with school? Let’s say my son is 11 years old and he still loves trains (or heavy metal music, or Harry Potter, or basketball, or Transformers, or camping, or ninja weapons, or probably something I couldn’t guess right now.) Why not let him pursue these interests in an academic setting? What if a teacher said to every kid: what are you truly interested in? Come up with a project that centers on that interest. It’s due in three months, and we’ll set time aside in class every other day so you can work on it.
If you’re a goth kid and you hate the world, it really turns the tables if you’re allowed to do a goth project for a grade. Create a bleak photo slideshow, set to a mix of the world’s most depressing goth songs. A timeline detailing the history of goth music and culture. A film biopic of goth kids who have committed suicide because life sucks so badly. I have no idea what a goth kid would find interesting, but I bet if you ask kids to do a project on anything they want, they will pick something they care about.
I’m personally not going to wait for schools to implement this. They may be headed in the other direction with all the standardized testing. But as a parent, I’ve got my eye on it. I want my son to follow his passions throughout his life, whatever they are at the time, and I want to encourage him to be productive with them. Do some passion projects. There is no wrong topic. Because it’s not about the subject matter, it’s about learning how to turn passions into meaningful work. This is so much more useful in life than trigonometry.
There’s a recent article by Po Bronson about how Pokemon cards made his son better at math. I like this story because Bronson and his wife didn’t want their son to have these cards at first, for moral reasons.
Also, if you haven’t read Paul Graham’s essays, you should because they’re all excellent. He’s inspired my thinking on this topic. Graham comes from a computer hacker / start-up perspective, and he encourages people to follow their passions. Check out this one, How to Do What You Love.
