My elder daughter is now a teen and considering her career options. The two of us are at loggerheads. Everyone around her tells her she must “follow her passion”.

I think that’s rubbish advice.

But to inspire her, there’s a cottage industry that thrives off recycling posters of Steve Jobs with “Follow Your Passion” plastered on them. All narratives have it that this is what Steve Jobs told students at Stanford in 2005. The 23,000 people in attendance gave him a standing ovation when he was done talking. The commencement speech went viral and I remember feeling goosebumps when I first saw the video.

How am I to argue against Steve Jobs? Even my kid won’t take me seriously.

May I submit then that the real import of his advice was lost on most people? His official biographer Walter Isaacson pointed out to the irony of it all in a conversation with the writer Cal Newport. Isaacson spent hundreds of hours with Jobs, including during the last year of his life, in 2011.

To cut a long story short, as a young man, Jobs was passionate about the liberal arts, and design. That is why he took courses on these themes when in college. He was passionate about travel and spirituality. That led him to goof off for a while as a backpacker in India.

Very soon though, it became clear to him that if he continued doing only what excited him, he would go nowhere. To get somewhere, he needed to find a purpose. In attempting to explain that to Isaacson, Jobs said, “The important point is to not just follow your passion but something larger than yourself.”

Once this was clear to Jobs, he went back to technology and computing — both of which contained elements of drudgery that he hated. In fact, before his brief stint of doing only what he loved, Jobs had already been fired from a technology start-up for lack of motivation.

But once he had figured out that personal computers could change the world, he wanted to be part of that transformation. That became his purpose. “It ain’t just about you and your damn passion,” Jobs would tell Isaacson years later. After Jobs found his purpose, he poured all of his passion into it. That makes sense.

When I think about it, I am passionate about the biosciences because that is what some very fine teachers at college initiated me into. I am beginning to get passionate about running. I am passionate about writing and would go batty if I couldn’t write.

But here’s the thing. Writing is the only one of those passions that I am willing to invest effort in. It’s one thing to be passionate about the biosciences; I could never actually do the time in the labs. It felt like drudgery. In the same vein, while I enjoy running, I don’t think I will ever run as effortlessly as friends who have dedicated years to the discipline.

In much the same way, every other person I meet claims they are passionate about writing and wants to write a book. I know they won’t. I’ve been writing for over 20 years. And I know the drudgery involved in writing a book. I do it because I find purpose in writing.

Passion is fleeting. Purpose takes time to discover, and even more time to build on. How am I to tell my daughter that? “Don’t just follow your passion.” Maybe it’ll work if I quote Jobs right.

This article was originally published by in the print edition of Hindustan Times on November 15, 2020.