How to balance your passion and your day job

Graduation-season career questions mirror challenges faced by experienced professionals: aligning duty with conviction. Duty is the job needed to survive and maintain stability, while conviction is the work someone feels called to do. Many people assume the two are far apart and only rarely coexist. The idea presented is that this separation may be false. A senior marketing and growth leader with decades of brand leadership left major corporate roles because conviction became bigger, not because the work was wrong. The leader viewed duty and gift as running in parallel, with corporate responsibilities developing before conviction fully emerged, creating a catch-up dynamic rather than mutual exclusivity.

"How do we square the incongruence between our duty—the thing we have to do to survive, pay our bills, and keep the lights on—and our conviction—the thing we feel called to do? The job, of course, is our duty. The gift is our conviction. For most of us, the two seem as far apart as east and west, and never the twain shall meet. For only a few lucky ones, their job and their gifts coexist, at least, that's what we've told ourselves."

"But what if that's not the case at all? What if we could have our cake and eat it, too? We invited Najoh Tita-Reid onto the latest episode of the From the Culture podcast to help us explore this tension. She is the former global chief growth officer at Mars Petcare, former global CMO at Logitech, and former VP of marketing at Bayer Consumer Care-a three-decade-plus veteran. Yet despite her incredible resume of leading big brands, she recently walked away from all of it, not because the work was bad but because her conviction was bigger."

"Tita-Reid had been working on her gift right alongside her duty for quite some time before she left the C-suite. She didn't see the two as a mutually exclusive proposition, but more as a game of catch-up. Her corporate duty had been hard at work long before her gift began to manifest."

"If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you aren't having."

Read at Fast Company