Passion vs competency

There is a saying that do a job that you love so you don’t have to work for your lifetime.  Is it that simple and easy to do a job that we are passionate about or is there anything more to it?

Yes. There is something more to passion which is competency. Let us look at the following scenarios 

# You love cricket and you are prepared to spend our whole life time just playing cricket. However, after few months into practice, you realize that you just don’t seem to pick the skills, be in batting or bowling etc.,

# You are passionate about photography. A few months into Training, you realize that you are not just creative enough.

# You are passionate about arts and  you realize that your dexterity is not good enough to make it big in drawing. 

You can add many more such scenarios from your experience. 

Under the above circumstances, do you think it would make sense to continue to do just because we are passionate about it.  No doubt that practice makes a man perfect.  However, we also need to make realistic assessment of ourselves in terms of how competent we are.  If we are not competent enough and we are not able to scale up, however passionate we are, we may not reach our destination.

Let us look at the other side, ie., You are competent but you are not that passionate about what we do. Few examples given below.

# A competent doctors who always frowns / does not respect and reacts to his patients. 

#A teacher with good knowledge who does not have the patience to teach the kids.

Excellence happens only when there is a perfect match between passion and competency.  If you look at any successful and extra-ordinary achievers in any profession, they would have had both passion and competency. Example - Mohammad Ali was highly competent and passionate about boxing. 

There are lot more examples like Magnus carlsen and Vishwanthan Anand in Chess, Kamal hassan in Acting and lot more. 

So there are 3 scenarios / quadrants that I talked about..

1) Being Passionate but incompetent or not competent enough

2) Competent but not passionate

3) Passionate and competent.  And the fourth quadrant is

(4) Not passionate and incompetent.

When we set life goal and work towards achieving it, we need to see in which quadrant we are likely fall in. If we are not making it to the 3^rd quadrant, it’s not worth doing it which we will realize sooner or later. And it’s always better to do a course correction quickly.

Even in hiring, we should not hire someone for just competency. They may not be good leaders. They cannot motivate or enthuse their team members. We should look for both competency and passion.

Have you come across or worked with people who are highly competent with low passion / People who are both competent and passionate ? what was your experience ? Do share it…

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