Passion

In form four, during course selection, our director of studies stood in front of us and said: choose a course you are passionate about.

I wanted to be a doctor. So did half the room. Medicine had a gravity to it that nothing else on that sheet had.

That was the first time the word passion landed on me with any weight. It was not the last time I heard it. For the next few years I got the counter-advice, usually as a joke, usually from someone older: do not follow your passion, follow the money. Money can buy you a passion later. Passion cannot pay rent.

Both pieces of advice sounded wise. Both are wrong, and I think the second one is only popular because the first one was sold so badly.

The advice assumed a choice most Kenyan students never actually get

Start with the practical problem. "Choose what you are passionate about" assumes the choice is yours to make.

In Kenya it often is not. KUCCPS lets you list six degree choices, and every year thousands of students land somewhere they never wrote down. The placement service has said publicly that this happens most often with medical courses, because demand for those slots is far beyond what the universities can absorb. Of the 244,563 candidates who hit the C+ university entry threshold in the 2024 KCSE, around 194,372 were placed into degree programmes. Roughly 42,000 never logged into the portal at all.

So a system tells a seventeen year old to follow their passion, then hands a large share of them a course selected by cluster points and available capacity. Then, four years later, the same young person is told they wasted their degree because they are not working in their field.

I was one of the redirected ones. I went to Kabarak and did computer science. Nobody in that lecture hall was there because of a burning childhood love for relational databases.

Passion is not discovered. It is manufactured.

Here is where it gets interesting, and where the research is blunter than the career talk ever was.

In 2018, Paul O'Keefe, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton published a study in Psychological Science called "Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing It?" Across five studies they compared two beliefs people hold without noticing: that interests are fixed and waiting to be discovered, or that interests are built over time.

The people who believed passion is a fixed thing to be found were less curious about anything outside what they already liked. They also assumed that once they found the real thing, motivation would be effortless. So when a topic they were interested in got genuinely hard, their interest dropped much faster than it did for people who saw interest as something you cultivate.

The authors put it well. Telling people to find their passion pushes them to put everything in one basket, and then drop the basket the moment it gets heavy.

Read that against Kenyan reality and it stings. We tell a form four student their passion is a fixed destination. They miss the cut-off for that destination. They spend four years assuming they are in the wrong life. Then they graduate into a market where youth unemployment in the 20 to 29 bracket has run above 32 percent, still waiting to feel something they were told would arrive on its own.

I learned this while doing data entry

My first real job was ICT intern at the Kenya Export Promotion and Brand Agency. I segmented networks into VLANs, chased down IP address conflicts, watched a Sophos firewall, and kept an asset inventory in an Excel sheet. Nobody dreams about that at seventeen.

Then I worked as a data admin at CofPak, handling patient records. Entry after entry, accuracy mattered, compliance mattered, and the work never stopped arriving. If passion were a feeling that shows up when you find the right thing, it should not have shown up there.

But something else did. Doing the boring version of the work is how you find out exactly where it is broken. I knew where the data got mangled because I was the one mangling it at 4pm on a Friday. That is where the interest actually started: not in the entering, but in the idea that the entering did not have to exist. I ended up building an automation pipeline at CofPak that took raw data through to a clean dashboard people could actually make decisions from.

The passion did not lead me to the work. The work manufactured the passion. That sequence is backwards from what I was taught, and it is the single most useful thing I know about careers.

Everything since has followed that same shape. Self-hosting n8n on a GCP Compute Engine VM with Docker, Nginx and SSL was not a dream, it was an answer to a problem I had gotten close enough to see. Building a WhatsApp sales agent for a furniture business in Nairobi came from watching how Kenyan customers actually buy, which is on WhatsApp, in fragments, at odd hours.

For recruiters: passion is an evidence trail, not a vibe

Every candidate says they are passionate. It is the cheapest sentence in a cover letter.

The useful version is observable. Passion is what you built when nobody was paying you for it. It is the self-hosted instance, the failed side project, the workflow you rebuilt three times because version one was fragile, the community meetup you organised. Those are artefacts. They can be checked.

This matters more in the current Kenyan market than it used to. In the Federation of Kenya Employers 2023 Skills Needs Survey, 20 percent of the 521 firms surveyed reported vacancies they struggled to fill, and just over half of those employers ended up hiring people below the qualification level they were originally looking for. The credential is not the scarce thing. The person who kept going past the syllabus is.

If you are a hiring manager, stop asking candidates what they are passionate about. Ask what they built without being asked. The answer sorts the room in about ninety seconds.

For SME owners: your passion is being eaten by admin

This is the part most business owners feel and rarely name.

Almost nobody starts a business because they love bookkeeping. You started it because you can make the thing, or sell the thing, or serve the customer better than the person down the road. That is your passion, and it is real.

Then the business grows and the shape of your day quietly changes. Two hours copying WhatsApp orders into a notebook. Reconciling M-Pesa messages against invoices line by line. Answering the same three delivery questions forty times a day. Chasing a customer who asked for a quote last Tuesday and got forgotten.

None of that is why you started. And it is why so many founders describe themselves as tired of a business they used to love. Passion does not usually die dramatically. It gets ground down by repetition.

This is the most practical argument for automation I know, and it has nothing to do with technology being exciting. If you can remove the repetitive layer, you get the founder back. The energy your customers used to feel from you comes back with it.

But passion does not pay bills. True, and beside the point.

The counter-argument deserves a straight answer, not a motivational poster.

Passion does not pay bills. Correct. Nobody has ever transferred money to your account because you cared.

But resentment does not pay bills either, and it is much more expensive than people admit. Work you quietly hate gets your minimum. Minimum effort compounds into a career that stays flat. Ten years of that is not a safe choice, it is just a slow one.

What actually pays is skill that compounds, and skill compounds fastest in the place where you can tolerate the boring parts long enough to get genuinely good. That is the real function of passion. It is not the reward at the end. It is the fuel that gets you through the ugly middle, where the money is eventually made.

There is an old line that the only way to do great work is to love what you do. I would flip it. The fastest way to love your work is to get good enough at it that you can see what it makes possible.

What to do this week

Depending on where you are sitting:

• If you are choosing a course or just got placed somewhere you did not pick: stop auditing the decision. Pick one skill inside that field you can practise this week for free, and go deep enough that it stops being unfamiliar. Interest almost always follows competence, not the other way round.
• If you are early in your career: write down the three tasks in your job that you do not resent. Those are your signal. Then find the version of your work that has more of them in it, and build one thing outside work hours that proves you can do it.
• If you run a business: list the five tasks that eat your week and that you would hand over instantly if you could. Pick the one you repeat most. That is your first automation, and it is usually the cheapest one to build.
• If you are hiring: replace the passion question with a request for a specific thing the candidate built on their own initiative, and ask what broke the first time.

The part I did not see coming

I never became a doctor. But at the third AI Tinkerers meetup in Nairobi, the project that won Best AI Agent Project was mine: a voice agent for the health sector, built with ElevenLabs, Twilio and n8n, handling bookings, tickets and calls the way a clinic actually needs them handled.

The form four version of me would not have recognised the tools. He would have recognised the goal.

The passion was never the course. It was never a thing sitting on a list waiting to be picked correctly. It got built, over years, out of the work I actually had in front of me. That is available to anyone, which is the whole point.

At CustomCX, most of the work we do for Kenyan SMEs comes down to this one thing: removing the repetitive layer of a business so the people in it can go back to the part they were good at in the first place. If you can name the task that is currently eating your week, that is enough to start a conversation.