You do feel the dilemma right after graduating or while stepping into your professional life for the first time whether your targeted job will end up making your content or not. No matter how skilled you are in a particular segment, your interest rate might feel the peak is totally irrelevant activities.

We did question different parties in our schooling period regarding the vicious math lessons, whether we need them in our real life or not. A Venn diagram could have answered a lot of our brain had the capability to understand the effectiveness of it in our early years of life.

Let’s take a musician doing a bachelor's in business administration for example. He definitely has his passion for music but ending up in a bank job, in the long run, might not be a happy or right profession for him. On the other hand, he might never have a good market for his passion.

In our country, there are different mindsets for certain careers among typical people. A good portion of people/students consider banking as a boring but profitable job & try to get in for sure monetary benefits. Whereas people who have a love for numbers and finance easily climb the ladder. Often corporate feels, in the long run, no matter how much degree they add which supports their profession, they end up working hard without professional development. It’s because if you do not enjoy what you do, you might end up being stuck at a certain point. In our country, we do have doctors who ended up running coaching centers or as bankers, engineers. The reason is pretty simple, lack of passion for the degree you achieved.

Why do you often see actors, directors, entrepreneurs without university degrees being invited to your graduate program for the Speech? They couldn’t take the forces of the external parties seriously over their own passion. It is very vicious when after going halfway through college students start feeling confused regarding their earlier decision about choosing that particular academic path.

Now for a better understanding let’s explain the diagram (Source: collected) below. As you can already see the 3 yellow circles resemble 3 situational aspects regarding your profession or the path you want to adopt as a career. The first circle on top resembles your passion for certain things, activities. The left circle from the bottom resembles things or activities you are good at, simply your skillset. Lastly, the right one resembles the market which pays well for your current activities, simply whether you have a good market waiting for you or not. Now the most interesting part begins when you connect yourself to this diagram and see whether your passion & skill set will be supporting you to choose the right career rather than a socially accepted career. If A & B exist in your scenario but not C then you end up as Happy but Poor because C resembles the market which pays for your activities. On the other hand, if you don’t get in touch with B which represents your skillset even if you have the passion for a market to pay you, it remains just a dream for you, and the possibility of that dream turning into reality is nipped in the bud. And the most interesting scenario is when you have both B and C but not A and this sort of intersection has started appearing across the local corporate environment where even talented individuals are becoming less motivated despite being paid well. And it’s a paradox where you have been given the privilege of having an extravagant lifestyle but at the end of the day, you find your life stuck in a loop.

Though the intersection of the three circles represents the winning formula of the desired career, it may not be wise to reach out for that intersection in the early days of your career. You may consider starting your career in a small company as the learning in a small company might make you competitive enough in the future to pursue your passion. Hence focusing on gradual learning will ensure a competitive edge for the long run. Sometimes we stop pursuing our passion as we find no potential market to nurture it, but if you believe in your passion, it’s possible to create your own market riding over the exponential growth of recent digitization. For example, the number of YouTubers has created new avenues across the globe that do support their passion.

Lastly, you should not dwell around for motivation, rather a few tools like the Venn diagram may provide legitimate inspiration but the core condition of it is to believe in yourself & have the right amount of dedication for your passion. Still, tools like this are never the end of the world if your motivation from within is bigger than any other influence against your dream.

Tajdin Hassan,

Head of Marketing | The Daily Star