An Essay On Differentiating Passion And Skill

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Differentiating Passion and Skill “Follow your dreams”, “Choose a career you are passionate about”. These are all things we have heard and been taught. What people do not always realize, is that passion and skill are two very different things. Webster's Dictionary defines passion as, “intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction” while it defines skill as, “the ability to use one's knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance”. It can easily be seen that you can be passionate about something, without having the skill to do it, just like you can have the skill to do something but not be passionate about it. This can be seen in the life of just about any individual. People have things they are passionate about and …show more content…

For passions, mine include, yo-yoing, hunting, fishing, hiking, exploring, learning, spending time with my mom, just to name a few. To be honest, I could find a way to make money doing any of these things IF I had the right amount of skill. I have enough skill to keep me interested but not enough to make money doing it. On top of that, I do not think any of these would be my passions anymore if I made them into a career. As far as skills go, I am good with math, science, physics, spanish, problem solving and just learning in general. This leads me to my career path choice of engineering, more so than my passions do. Through experience taking classes in school and researching different careers, I am leaning towards pursuing a career in engineering, which does not involve following my passion. Based on my skillset, engineering should be something that I am good at. Also, I enjoy many of the things that make up engineering but that is not what drive my decision. These factors lead me to my interest in this …show more content…

Joann Mckenna (2015) also alludes to various situations involving being unsuccessful while following your passion. You could: be passionate about something but lack the skill required to succeed, you could hate what you do but be good at it, or you could have both the passion and the skill, but the income just is not there due to lack of demand or a plethora of other reasons. All of these are negative scenarios fabricated by the fallacy that following your dreams is the way to

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