Passion og karrierevalg: analyse af to tekster

In this article named Why Following Your Passion Is Good For You (and How to Get started) from The New York Times from 2018, Lizz Schumer writes about why it’s good to follow your passion.

Schumer starts out by setting an example of someone who turned his life around and went from a depressive state of mind into someone who enjoys life. She writes that a study published in The Annals of behavior found that pursuing a passion is effective if you want to be happier.

She refers to a productivity expert, who writes about how to make time if you’re busy with life. She thinks that if you reprioritize a little time, a few hours, of your life to pursue something, it will benefit one on a large scale. There are a few specific things you can do, like having someone else watching your little ones while you do something. It’s also important to force yourself to it, there no one pressuring you into it, but yourself.

Assignment 6 – Analytical essay

Terri Trespicio, award winning writer and speaker, talks about her perception of passion and what it entails in Stop Searching For Your Passion.

We should start by looking at her intention of the speech, to speak to, mostly young people, who doesn’t know what job or career to choose: “The pressure starts really young, and it goes your whole life, but it’s perhaps most pronounced when you’re graduating from school” (p. 1 l. 10-11). She mentions that it’s mainly graduates who have this crisis, but she also points out that it goes on your whole life. Her own passion towards to career is also being discussed, she says that she, herself, has done a lot of different things in her life to get to where she is: “…at the time I’d been a catalog copywriter at a wig company” (p. 2 l. 41). By this, she thinks that you shouldn’t pick a career for your whole life but see where life leads you. She had also been a jewelry salesperson at private parties, not because she though it would be her finale job, but it did something else: “…but I was so glad that I did that because it planted an entrepreneurial seed…” (p. 3 l. 57). She here learned to think entrepreneurial, to learn from her experiences and that’s the way she ended up talking at a TED talk event, because she has learned from mistakes and teach other. That makes her, as a sender of the message, more reliable and you can mirror yourself in her. She has some interesting modes of appeal, where she uses both her personal and career life. She talks about how she sat watching Seinfeld in her underwear because she was so stuck (p. 2 l. 26-27). Her topic is mainly her young career paths, because that’s where we spend most of our time, so it’s important for all.