Sloppily Passionate

To be opinionated about something is to be passionate about something.

And when you are opinionated and passionate about something, you are good at it. No! You are great at it! Or will be. Eventually.

You ask any company and they will say they want to hire the best, but in their message they don’t want opinionated people, they don’t want someone having opinions and expressing them passionately because that means that person may not be in alignment with the company’s direction.

To say “be good, but don’t be opinionated” is disingenuous and mutually exclusive.

To say “We don’t want people who have strong opinions that they express publically” is to say “we don’t want to hire great people.”

There are a few companies that will embrace opinionated people, and they will hire the greats.

There are companies that pay lip service to permitting opinionated people, and they will, for a while, be able to hire the greats who will eventually leave.

But many companies, they don’t want opinion, they don’t want passion, and they don’t get even the merely good. They get whatever sloppy seconds nobody else wanted because the person didn’t have any passion.