Passion Isn't Sharp

Jake Goodman (MBA ‘26) shares his musings as the leaves turn.

Oh boy, by golly, deck the halls, it’s time to pontificate. I’m ready to make the argument that you don’t need to have passion for your career path. First, I will chart the history of career passion as a modern bourgeois phenomenon driven by the entanglement of the means of production with a consumerism that is obsessed with seeing the worker in the things consumed. Second, I will write a series of paragraphs that show how entrepreneurs founded companies in sectors they had no connection to and, through a series of shove-it-in-your-face examples, you will come away entirely convinced that passion is sorta lame, corny, for squares, and an extra spice that’s not going to change the taste profile of your startup. Passion is a dish best served cold.

In my conclusion, I will convince you that you might as well go around flaunting your lack of passion. The unsexier the industry, the better, because if the industry is unsexy, then, by definition, your inclination towards passion will be stunted, cut off at the stem. You must surrender yourself to a life in which the industry you spend your waking moments in is entirely irrelevant to the base urges of your soul. Furthermore, your soul is unreliable. At first, when you were a child, it thought you would be a star quarterback, winning state championships until you progress to big-time sponsorships and game winning touchdowns on national TV. Now it dreams of automating workflows in legacy industries that still run on random spreadsheets and rogue WhatsApp messages. You are a person who stands to rationalize, to automate, to professionalize, to deliver value, all through AI-based solutions. You can do that now.

Passion is a paperclip, not the paper. So I declare! Instead, the holy grail, the manna itself, should be the problem, the impact, the fulfillment, some other third thing that radiates from your being. It shall be backsolved from your daily tasks. Passion shall be the thing evoked when you have most of the letters filled out in Hangman and you know the word, so you feel compelled to scream it out loud! But you don’t scream it because you’ve become a mild person who’s not easily excitable anymore. You’ve read cases across a variety of legacy and even new and exciting industries. Money is a lucky rabbit foot found in all types of niches.

So I have convinced you. Wring out the passion out of you like a soggy towel. Commit to a simple monasticism. Read case. Speak in class. Spangler food. Chew. Coffee gulp. Home. Search for a lucky rabbit foot of money in a niche. Sleep. Wring yourself out again of passion. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. But behind the monasticism is a person with little remnants of passion, itty bits of non-sharp excitement for topics, topics that you could perhaps write a Substack about or even, dare I say, a Harbus article.

After all, many passions, if they are to be considered passions at all, are not sharp. They are not prickly. They are smooth sedimentary rocks, things eroded to the point where a smooth underbelly remains. These are what passions are after all the cases and two years of career deferral. Passion may be for a religion, which once occupied the familiar recesses of the mind but now stands as a front row sedimentary rock. Perhaps the MBA is the best time to embrace a religion that is fundamental to one’s self but was otherwise eroded in one’s consciousness by the general overwhelming busyness of non-MBA life, the so-called real life. Perhaps alternatively it’s a hobby that has returned, the instrument that went untouched that has been brought back to one’s hands or the dance practices that feel like a relic of one’s undergraduate days but are suddenly embraced as a memorable activity of the MBA, one of the things you can’t imagine not doing.

Shall I venture into self help? Shall I instruct, or more softly, shall I advise one to find these sedimentary rocks of passion? Oh, but do I have the strength!? The letters are filled in, and I know the word, but I don’t want to win the Hangman game just yet. I need this next semester to wring myself out, to slither a river over who I am, and to see what limestone is left. I will not be pricked by a passion. I will remain calm, writing an essay, first to myself and then maybe to the paperclip, to the thing that holds all my thoughts together. 

Jake Goodman (MBA ’26) is originally from Davie, Florida. He graduated from Brown University with an honors degree in English and Economics in 2019. Prior to HBS, Jake worked in corporate development, strategic finance, and retail strategy and operations at Gopuff, a rapid convenience app, in Miami, and for Barclays in New York City. He is an avid banjo and guitar player and misses the Florida sun dearly.