It seems like everywhere I look someone is offering instruction on developing passive income.  At the center of these programs is the promise that there is a path to wealth and fulfillment that doesn’t involve hard, grinding work.  This is not only misleading, it’s a dangerous goal to pursue.  It’s downright tragic that the persona of the businessman on perpetual vacation has usurped the craftsman or the artisan as the ideal today.  In order to achieve professional fulfillment, like the craftsman, you need to focus on delivering value by developing and mastering skills.  The pursuit of valuable skills puts you in the right frame of mind, is the most reliable path to mastery and sets you up to adapt as you learn.

Pursuing value by developing skills

The problem with that passion mindset is about attitude and your approach to work.  It leaves you constantly asking what the job has given you.  This cycle of expectation and disappointment leads to job churn and creates an existential crisis for many.  Pursuing valuable skills is the antidote to this ailment.  At the core of value is a consideration for other people – especially as you think about a profession.  Vigorously pursuing the most powerful way to help or positively impact others puts you in a giver’s frame of mind.  The cycle that results is one where you ask yourself how you can give more – make a bigger difference, and that leads to real fulfillment.

Mastery is a means within itself

Mastery is the pursuit of excellence in the context of a discipline and is considered one of the most powerful internal motivators.  Getting better at something is exciting and exhilarating.  It is also inexhaustible resource; no matter how good you are, you can always get better.  It should come as no surprise that mastery, across all job types, is linked with satisfaction.  This helps explain the multitude of people that have stumbled accidently into their careers and FOUND true pursuits of passion.  As they gained greater and greater skill, their engagement and results acted like a positive flywheel, and they’ve found themselves in an accidental career that they absolutely love.

This pursuit allows you to adapt while you learn

One of the biggest problems with starting your career pursuit with an end in mind is that you don’t know what you don’t know.  The reason that so few dream of being a contract lawyer for a multinational logistics company is that you need a certain level of skill and mastery to even know of or understand that job.  In other words, you find where your talent lies and what interests you in the midst of your pursuit.  If you pursue valuable skills with real presence, you begin to see where your talent aligns with what the market wants.  As you get these insights, you make small adjustments and continue your pursuit.  The beauty in this strategy is that the skills you employ to get good at one things translate easily into the next adjacent possibility.  You become adept at building and honing the skills while taking the temperature and evaluating your strategy.  If you look at the stories of the greats in any industry, they did just that.

Passion is huge, but it is incomplete.  Get passionate about giving and learning.  Mastery is where it’s at.  Build skills in an effort to overwhelm people with value and you will never work a day in your life.