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长久以来，大家鼓励年轻求职者找自己感兴趣的工作。但近来，这条建议似乎遭到半路夭折，而且反对理由十分充分。这不意味着做自己感兴趣的事情不再重要，事情并不如此。只不过，作为一种职业规划建议，按兴趣求职的想法显然出自一种精英主义，而没有考虑到工作的实际层面。

当然，许多人仍深深地向往着一份能够满足自己精神需求的工作。近来，盖洛普咨询公司（Gallup）的一项研究受到广泛援引，该研究发现具有工作积极性的美国员工不超过三成。由此观之，渴望从工作中获得更多满足感的劳动者之众，实在不足为奇。

不过，想要真正获得更能满足个人需求的职业发展，不必纠结于“我的兴趣是什么”，还有更多实际问题值得思考。我们应该更切实地考虑个人的动机、需求和技能，还有自己为了一个良好的工作机会，愿意作出多大的努力和牺牲。以下五大问题值得我们扪心自问。

1. 为什么希望为兴趣而工作？

有人想要找到个人兴趣，这或许是参照同伴的做法，又或是因为职业咨询师对他们开口闭口谈兴趣，这种人我见过特别多。由于情况普遍，许多人往往因为自己没有“从事自己感兴趣的工作”而认为自己很失败。其实，我们必须认识到动机决定个人行为。这句话听似简单，但想要深刻认识个人动机，实则很难。

在没有接近问题实质前，尝试问自己五遍“为什么”。或许你会发现很多问题：例如自己追求的并不是兴趣本身，而是一种攀比行为；又比如自己讨厌一份工作并不是因为职业规划不合理，而是因为憎恶自己的顶头上司。

2. 工作在个人生活占多大比重？

“追求个人兴趣”的潜台词是工作的意义大于其本身——换言之，为工作而生活，而不是为生活而工作。但工作跟兴趣脱钩也完全没有问题。对工作的热爱消减到某种程度就会变成厌恶——热爱时，工作代表个人身份和成就，厌恶时，则是一种苦差事。

多数人在谈论工作与生活之间的平衡或统一时，关注的其实是这种热爱或厌恶的程度。也就是说，我们首先得明确自己想要什么样的生活，工作在个人生活中所占的比重。明确了这两点，就可以根据职业情况调整个人期望。事实上，将全部或大部分的成就感寄托在生计活之外，并不是一种失败。

3. 我感兴趣的工作是什么？兴趣点在哪里？

每当我们谈到兴趣追求，谈的基本上是自己喜欢的事物，这有点像毫无目标的无头苍蝇。广泛撒网、眼界开放有好处，但立足于当前的个人需求才是实际。就业市场提供了什么样的工作机会？又需要什么相应的技能和经验？真正清楚的人不多。

因此，即使我们明确了个人兴趣，也不一定知道如何找到符合兴趣的工作，如何将兴趣最大限度地与工作相结合。举个例子，对于喜欢写作和儿童工作的人来说，他们是否知道要写什么？怎么与儿童工作相结合？

纽约大学职业路径规划测试（NYU Career Tracks exercise）颇得我喜爱，它要求人们标记起50种自己感兴趣的职业，并找到这些职业之间的共同点。即吸引你的是什么？为什么？这跟你当前的兴趣一致吗？是否指向新的兴趣点？获得这些工作需要什么条件？这些职业主要集中在什么领域？这些问题都会帮助我们确定个人兴趣点，从而对接下来的职业规划有着更清晰的想法。

4. 我想要精于哪种业务？

卡尔•纽坡特（Cal Newport）在《难以忽略的优秀：技能比兴趣更能决定你最爱什么职业》（So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love）一书中提出，工作的质量和个人从工作获得的技能在很大程度上决定了职业成功和成就感。相对于令人兴奋的虚幻想法或话题，技能意味着做事本身带来的兴奋感，重视技能的好处体现在三方面：一是获得使人乐于工作的精湛技术，这也是得到研究证明的； 二是让我们的工作更有意义，对所从事的慈善或商业事业作出更大的贡献；三是帮助我们克服工作本身——我们每天必须去完成的任务。虽然要明确我们想要使用和提高的技能、确定自己想从事的职业，需要一定的时间和尝试，但是这种方法更能实际帮助我们发现自己对工作的真正需求。

5. 我愿意牺牲什么？

非盈利机构Encore的市场营销和公关业务副总裁马斯•阿尔博赫（Marci Alboher）让我认识到这个问题。资深职业人跳槽到一家非盈利机构前，得考虑薪酬减等多方面的变化，阿尔博赫专门针对这部分人群提出这个问题，但这其实对于所有人都同等适用，毕竟每个人在做职业决定前都得考虑机会成本。

常见的机会成本主要是收入和自由支配时间，同时还有一些其他的因素没有得到充分重视。跳槽后，通勤会更加方便？上班地点更合适？个人技能得到更大发挥？工作节奏更快或更慢？我们应该思考上一份工作的优点和弊端，知道自己想要哪些方面得到改善。

要分清楚哪些问题无可商量，哪些地方可有可无，并坦承面对：一些似乎微不足道的事情（例如通勤单程时间减少25分钟）其实很重要。如果这些小事能让你过得舒心，何乐而不为？

来源：《快速公司》杂志

5 Career Questions To Ask Yourself Instead Of, “What’s My Passion?”

For a while now, young jobseekers have been encouraged to find their passion and follow it. Lately, though, it seems as though that advice is falling by the wayside. And for good reason. It isn’t that being passionate about what you do doesn’t matter—far from it. It’s that when the notion is offered up as career advice, it can reek of elitism and ignore the, well, work aspect of work.

Still, many people do nurture a deep desire for a career that fulfills them in some way. After all, a widely cited Gallup study recently found that less than a third of American workers feel engaged at work. So we can hardly be surprised that so many of us are yearning for more.

But when it comes down to actually going after a more fulfilling career path, there are better questions to ask than, “What’s my passion?” You need to think more concretely about your motivations, needs, skills, and what you’re willing to do—or give up—in order to find that great opportunity. Here are five alternative questions to ask yourself instead.

1. Why do I care about finding my passion?

I’ve met a surprising number of people who want to find their passion because it’s what their peers are doing or because that’s how a career counselor started a conversation with them. Because of its ubiquity, that idea makes those who aren’t “doing what they love” feel like failures. It’s important to realize that your motivations determine the actions you take. That sounds simple—until you really try and get down to the bottom of your motivations.

Try asking yourself “Why?” five times until you get to the center of a really difficult problem. You might discover, for instance, that you don’t want to follow your passion per se; you really just want to compete with your peers. Or maybe you dislike your job because of your manager, not because you feel like you’re on the wrong career path altogether.

2. What role does work play in the kind of life I want?

“Follow your passion” implies that work has a greater value than just being a means to an end—in other words, living to work as opposed to working to live. But it’s totally okay if this is not your approach to work. There’s a continuum between loving your job and hating your job—between a job as an identity and fulfillment, and a job as drudgery.

Indeed, much of the debate around work-life balance and work-life integration centers on finding where you are on this continuum. In other words, you first need to decide what sort of life you want and what role work will play in it. You can then adjust your expectations and needs regarding your career. The fact is, you haven’t failed simply by deciding not to get all, or even most, of your fulfillment from the thing that pays your bills.

3. What opportunities excite me—and how come?

When we talk about finding our passion, we tend to reflect primarily on what we enjoy, which causes us to flail around a bit. While there’s some value to casting a wide net and keeping an open mind, it helps to stay grounded in what our needs are right now. We rarely have a full understanding of what opportunities are out there and the skills and experiences required for them.

As a result, even if we identify our passion, we might not know how to go about pursuing it or the full range of ways we can work our interests into our work lives. For example, you might love writing and want to work with kids. But writing what? Working with kids in what way?

I’m a huge fan of the NYU Career Tracks exercise that encourages you to bookmark jobs you like and, after you collect at least 50, go through them to identify what they have in common. What are you drawn to? Why? Does that line up with with your existing interests or point toward new ones? What’s required to get to those jobs? Where are those jobs located? These questions will help you ground your interests and paint a clearer picture of your next steps.

4. What do I want to get really good at doing?

In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, Cal Newport argues that success and fulfillment are largely about quality of work and the skills you develop. Focusing on skills—actually doing things (rather than on ideas and subjects) that excite you—can be beneficial for three reasons. First, it gets at what research has shown makes us happy at work: mastery. Second, it puts our work into context: the greater cause (whether charitable or commercial) that our work contributes to. And third, it helps us on the work itself: the actual tasks you perform day in and day out. Figuring out the skills we want to use and develop and the work we’d like to do takes time and experimentation, but it’s a far more practical way to get closer to what we actually want out of our jobs.

5. What am I willing to give up?

I learned about this question from Marci Alboher, vice president of marketing and communications at Encore, a nonprofit that helps people midlife and older find social-impact careers. Alboher developed it as a way to help older professionals—who might have to consider a pay cut and other changes in order to make a switch to the nonprofit sector—but it’s a useful way for anyone to consider the tradeoffs we need to make anytime we’re faced with a career decision.

The classic tradeoffs, of course, focus on pay and leisure time, but there are also some others that don’t usually get enough consideration. What about a better commute? Better location? Better use of your skills? Faster- or slower-paced culture? Think about what made previous jobs either great or intolerable, and what aspects you’d like your next move to improve upon.

Distinguishing between your non-negotiables and your nice-but-not-necessary items can give you some clarity. And be honest with yourself: Something that may seem frivolous (like 25 minutes off your travel time) might not be at all. If it’ll make you happier, don’t dismiss it.

Source：Fast Company

（责任编辑：职场达人）