Passion Paves Career by Harjeet Khanduja

As we graduate from school, the pressure of having a successful career starts influencing all our decisions. Whether it be the selection of a university or deciding a course, the chase to success never stops! Is this the right way of choosing a career? Is there any other way to go about it? Definitely, there is! Read this blog on how passion paves career and find out!

Meet Harjeet Khanduja 

Harjeet Khanduja is an international speaker, author, poet, pioneer, HR leader, inventor and a famous influencer. He is also an esteemed alumnus of IIT Roorkee and INSEAD Paris. He has been awarded various awards like HR Leadership Recognition, Pride of Nation Award, HR Personality of the Year, LinkedIn Power Profile, Global Learning Accolades and conferred the titles of a Global Digital Ambassador, ranked in the lists of Top 100 HR Minds and Top 50 HR Tech Leaders. Currently working as the Vice President – HR at Jio, Harjeet has also published a book which is called “Nothing About Business” He is also a renowned Hindi poet who writes satire poetry on societal issues and appears on SAB TV. As a TEDx speaker, Khanduja has elaborated on how passion paves career by exploring a wide range of interactive and social subjects which includes HR, Management, Innovation, Economics and Entrepreneurship. 

Passion Paves Career

In Harjeet Khanduja’s TEDx Talk on Passion Paves Career held in the Oakridge International School, he talks about the importance of passion and hobbies which helps in fuelling an individual’s career to the students of the school. He starts on a hearty note regarding how he encourages people to pursue your hobbies along with your careers and with a PowerPoint presentation with popular film references related to pursuing hobbies. Here are the key takeaways from Khanduja’s inspirational words:

1. Hobbies bring you happiness
2. If someone wants you to do something, then that is not your hobby. If it is your hobby, then you should be actively participating in it. 

Harjeet emphasises on the fact that if an individual is on social media the whole day along with mindless TV watching then, that is not a hobby. He uses various movie references like Wall-E and Minions to make these points more interesting for the audience. People are supposed to do what they love which also gives them the motivation to achieve things in that specific field. If they do the things that they don’t necessarily love, then they will not have that fire to do things. 

Must Read – Best Answers to “What are your Hobbies?”

How to Pave Your Career with Your Passions?

Khanduja talks about 3 approaches through which you can pursue your passion:

1. Pursuing your Passion Without Looking Back

The prime example of this is Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Mahendra Singh Dhoni was previously working with the Indian Railways. After a while, he left his Railways Job and joined as a Cricketer because that was his dream. He pursued his dream without thinking back and he won the World Cup for India. Harjeet Khanduja emphasises that if you love what you do then you have a greater chance of pursuing your passion and succeeding in it. 

2. Completing your Commitment and Pursuing Your Passion

There is a second approach to pursuing your dreams is to study well and make money and then pursue your hobby when you are financially sound. This example is best demonstrated by Chetan Bhagat. An alumnus of IIM-A pursued his management degree, Bhagat worked for a while before he started writing books. He is a bestselling author currently because he followed his passion. 

3. Managing Your Career and Passion Together

Harjeet also talks about a third approach that is helpful if you want to follow your hobbies and dreams and make a career out of it. The third approach is to manage both your professional life and your hobbies or other important tasks that you have and prioritize them equally. 

The best example for this is Warren Buffett who is the richest man on this planet. Buffett made money through doing business in real estate and making a huge profit out of it but, he is also a ukulele player and has his own television slot for his musical performances. Buffett has managed his business along with his hobbies due to which he gets money and happiness together. 

Advantages of Pursuing a Hobby

The prime fact is that hobbies make you better at work and that having a hobby is very productive to individuals and makes them more creative and happy. These reports come from the official research of University Of California and State University of San Francisco. Hobbies bring different perspectives to different individuals. They help an individual get to know their different strengths and weaknesses. It also helps you network with people who have the same hobbies as you which in turn helps to build better connections. 

There is proven research which says that if you follow something for 10,000 times then you become an expert in that exact same skill set. If this process happens with passion and you practice your skills with passion again and again then what happens is you can apply the same skills without any help or manual. According to our anatomy, we have a full size and left brain. Our right brain helps you when you are working and when you’re pursuing your hobby, then you use another part of your brain. If you only take your designation in your career then you are nothing beyond the designation but if you pursue a hobby you become more than a designation. You become a personality. Thus, it is very important to facilitate better personality development. 

How Pursuing a Hobby Reduces Stress Levels?

In his Passion Paves Career TEDx Talk, Khanduja also tells us that you will have stress when you work in corporate companies you get subjected to a lot of it. But, if you pursue a hobby then you will have balanced stress levels. It is a proven theory, that the people who have gone through breast surgery after cancer, they recovered well if they were pursuing a hobby. He says that when he feels stress from the work in his professional field then he starts playing a video game and when he plays a video game then his stress goes away. 

Harjeet also shares an anecdote about his childhood as he tells us that his father used to motivate him to write something and that’s when he started composing poems. He talks about how he started doing a lot of programs and became Hasya Samrat. He started reciting poems on TV and multiple TV shows. Harjeet was also called by the World Hindi foundation in the US and Canada and they gave him an award for his contribution to poetry.  

He wrote poems around different social issues and also took part in recitals. This is when his life changed as he emerged as the most influential major personality of 2018. His profile on LinkedIn was also accoladed as a LinkedIn Power Profile and was awarded the 2018 Leadership Award. Steve Jobs learnt calligraphy and he pursued calligraphy as one of his hobbies. Concluding the talk, he leaves us with the idea of how a successful entrepreneur like Steve Jobs pursued his Calligraphy as one of his hobbies thus exploring different interests can actually change your life!

This was all about Harjeet Khanduja’s inspirational TEDx Talk on how Passion Paves Career by Harjeet Khanduja. Do you have a unique hobby or interest that changed your life too? Tell us in the comments below! For more such informative and motivational content, keep watching this space at Leverage Edu! You can also follow us at LinkedIn, Youtube, Facebook, Quora and Instagram!