‘Don’t chase your dreams’—do this instead
Reese Witherspoon has some career advice you might not want to hear.
The “Legally Blonde” and “Big Little lies” actress posted an Instagram video on Feb. 17 offering a tip in response to a young woman she’d spoken with who was unhappy in her job and looking to switch roles.
“Okay, well what are your talents?” Witherspoon said she asked the woman, who struggled to name her specific talents.
“Everybody has dreams. Doesn’t mean you’re going to be that thing. You are supposed to do what you’re talented at,” Witherspoon said. “It’s your job in life to figure out what your specific, unique talents are and go chase them. That’s what you’re going to do,” she added. “You don’t chase your dreams, you chase your talents.”
Witherspoon’s advice might sound unconventional — and she didn’t explain her reasoning. But leadership coach and “The Ambition Trap” author Amina AlTai likewise says it’s bad advice to follow your passion. “Passion by nature is fickle” and building your career around it “positions us to fizzle out fast,” she told CNBC Make It in December.
“Allow yourself to be passionate about things, and allow those passions to change without feeling the impulse to anchor it to your entire purpose, because it is so changeable,” AlTai said.
NYU Stern School of Business professor, researcher and author Suzy Welch says it’s important to identify your aptitudes, or “the inborn faculties that make us good or better at certain skills, competencies, and areas of expertise.”
The methodology she teaches and writes about in her book, “Becoming You: The Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career,” is all about finding your “area of transcendence” at the intersection of your values, aptitudes and economically viable interests.
Dreams — probably interests with a hint of values in Welch’s terms — aren’t enough. The right career path is also aligned with your values and financially feasible, according to Welch. And you need to know what you’re good at. Aptitudes “unlock the work we should be doing and the life we should be living so that we can thrive and flourish,” in Welch’s words.
Though you might think these would be obvious, “identifying your aptitudes almost always does take work,” Welch writes. Various tests exist that can help you identify yours so you can do work you’re well-suited to and avoid the “aptitude-misalignment-hellscape,” as she calls it. Because “an aptitude fit can make or break the deal, and your heart.”
Witherspoon’s fellow actress Tracee Ellis Ross has shared similar sentiments around pursuing your dreams, emphasizing that you need to consider the effort required in addition to the talents.
“People always say dream big, but what I learned in my childhood was dream big but know that you’re the one that’s gonna be doing the work,” Ross said on an episode of Emma Grede’s “Aspire” podcast in October. “Dream at a pace and in a way that you can actually maintain what it takes to do that.”
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