On Dominating the World

A Perhaps Ill-Advised Talk

I recently returned from Portland, Oregon, where I was a speaker at Chris Guillebeau’s World Domination Summit. I stood in front of a crowd of 1000 energized, non-comforming, optimistic folks and told them: “follow your passion” is terrible advice.

And I somehow escaped injury.

Actually, the most common response I received: “I completely agree, but other people are going to find your message radical.” After enough people told me they agreed, I concluded something I’ve suspected for a while now: this idea is less radical than we assume.

Perhaps our generation is tired of the passion hypothesis, but just hasn’t gotten used to saying it out loud yet.

All told, I met many interesting people and was exposed to many interesting thoughts. This was not a Study Hacks crowd, but it was a crowd I was honored to join.

If You’re New Here

If you’re a WDS person visiting to find out more about passion and its discontents, I want to point you to my upcoming book, SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU (pub date: September 18), which lays out my detailed case why “follow your passion” is bad advice, and what you should do instead.

Here’s my tentative call to action (I’m such a bad marketer that Chris Brogan, within an hour of meeting me, literally gave me an empty business card holder):

If you love this idea:  the single most useful thing you could do for the cause is to pre-order the book (this forces booksellers to take notice).
If you’re on the fence, but want to keep the conversation going: consider clicking that Facebook thumbs-up, likey button on the Amazon page.
If you want to learn more:  search my blog for the term “passion” (click here).

Will Return Soon

Anyway, I’m off to Funchal, Madeira tomorrow for a conference of an entirely different tenor (less inspirational speeches, more powerpoint slides full of equations), but I have a series of interesting posts backed up, waiting for my return.

Stay tuned…

(Photo by Chris Guillebeau)