Care-Passion-Talent Framework
In an increasingly VUCA world, how do I design a vocation that’s aligned with who I am — and the world around me?
In mainstream educational and career systems, people are often reduced to “human resources” — evaluated through a mechanistic-functional lens. This view positions individuals as tools to fit predefined roles, leading to two artificial and problematic gaps:
A gap between the individual and the mechanistic functions they are expected to perform — either based on imposed norms or economic calculations.
A deeper gap between those mechanistic functions and the organic, interdependent, and continuous nature of real life and the world.
Popular advice to “follow your heart” or “follow the money” often falls short within this framework. Both approaches assume that meaning or sustainability can be found through a simple alignment with emotional impulse or market demand. But neither of these alone is reliable in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world — nor are they adequate when one’s environment itself is rapidly shifting.
🧭 Developing a Compass Beyond Mechanistic Career Models
In response, I developed what I call the Care–Passion–Talent Framework — a self-reflective compass for life and vocation design that supports organic growth and deeper congruence between self and world.
This model was designed to be a more adaptive and embodied alternative to both:
Personality tests that categorize individuals into pre-defined types, and
Pop-culture models like the Ikigai diagram, which overly depend on external reference points like "what the world will pay for" or "what society needs" — factors that may change, or be unknowable to someone still in the process of self-discovery.
🔑 Three Interlocking Dimensions
Each of the three elements in the Care–Passion–Talent Framework plays a unique role in building coherence across motivation, aptitude, and purpose:
Care: What do you deeply care about? What issues, values, causes, or unmet needs stir your sense of meaning? This represents your axiological capacity — your orientation toward purpose, service, and contribution. This would also continuously motivate one to gain a genuine and continually renewed understanding of what the world truly needs — a key to avoiding the mechanistic-functional pitfall also visible in the Ikigai model.
Passion: What do you enjoy doing regardless of outcome? What draws you in for its own sake? This reflects your motivational energy — the intrinsic joy that can sustain effort over time.
Talent: What do you tend to do well, or learn with relative ease? These are your aptitudinal tendencies, including both natural strengths and practiced capacities — often aligned with your multiple intelligences.
🌱 Why This Matters
The Care–Passion–Talent Framework does not prescribe a job or role. Instead, it provides a generative compass for navigating uncertainty and co-creating your own life path. It is particularly powerful in transitional or complex environments — where conventional career advice becomes brittle or disorienting.
By regularly revisiting the interplay between these three elements, individuals can make more aligned decisions, notice when they’re out of sync, and cultivate a dynamic sense of vocation that evolves with the world — rather than collapsing under it.
This model has since informed much of my work in youth workshops, life design labs, and educational innovation — offering a way for people to reclaim authorship of their lives while staying connected to what matters, what moves them, and what they are becoming.
Impact
Applied by most Awakening Lab members, all of whom embarked on self-designed cause-driven careers;
Used in education workshops across Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, this model has guided both youth and adults in finding pathways that go beyond, yet not against, college majors, existing job openings, or market trends, with an internal north star.
Read more
🗞️[in Traditional Chinese] 21-year-old documentary director Adler Yang: If the road to further schooling is a cliff, you still have other options for your future
🗞️[in Traditional Chinese] Adler Yang, who saw the blind spot of Taiwan's education, helps youth to find their "reason to study"
See also
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