Don’t follow your passion when it comes to a career. Careers were not meant for you to be passionate about. They were meant for you to generally like and enjoy. However, they were never so that you can be passionate about it and love your job. It’s just a way for you to earn a living.
Finance is my absolute passion. However, even though I am in finance for my career, I would not say I am passionate about my job. I generally like it but that doesn’t mean that I am in love with it and am passionate about it. You will never be passionate working to help someone else achieve their goals.
That’s just not how it works. You will only be passionate when you create and work on projects that you want to work on. Therefore, what should you choose as a career? Choose a job that you generally enjoy and doesn’t make you miserable and want to pull your hair out every day.
A job that you are good at and people will be willing to pay good money for. I earn a salary of ~$130,000 even though I’m not passionate about my job. I’m good at it and I generally like it, but I will never say that I followed my passion. You have so much hours to work with after your day job is over.
Save your passion for those times. The weekends, the 5-9, and holidays. However, if you’re thinking about a career. don’t follow your passion. Follow the money and work on your passion projects on the side. One day, your passion projects will outpace your 9-5 salary and then you can follow your passions.
Passion is a luxury, not a necessity in your life.
Why is “Follow Your Passion” Everywhere?
It’s people like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates who peddle the idea of “following your passion” to students and to people all over the country. They are so obscenely vocal at it that it became a cliche of sorts. That sounds great. Who doesn’t want to follow doing what they love? Sign me up, right?
Did Bill Gates and Warren Buffett really follow their “passions”? Or did they follow the money that they happened to be passionate about? They make billions of dollars per year. Doesn’t that scream they followed the money? There are very few passions in life that pay billions of dollars per year.
They happened to be in multiple passion businesses that pay billions of dollars per year. They don’t understand the luxury and privilege they had in pursuing their “passion”. If they failed, they had many options available to them. The vast majority of us do not have that luxury. If we fail, we have to declare bankruptcy.
Or any number of a negative thing we have to go through. Don’t follow your passion. Passion as a career is a luxury that only the very few have access to. When you have a large cushion to play with, then it can be sound advice. However, the vast majority of us do not have any cushion to work with.
It’s a very feel good advice. It’s actually a logical fallacy because it’s a god word. If you go against the advice, you are a dream killer, it makes you the devil going against god. I’m here to tell the truth. Don’t follow your passion as a job. Follow your passion on the side on the weekends or on your downtime.
In the meantime, you have bills to pay.
Don’t Follow Your Passion: Reasons Why
One passion you should follow is to SMACK that social share button and sharing to your favorite social media! It takes me much time to put out content for you so if you could share the article, I would appreciate it.
So now, let’s get into the concrete reasons why you shouldn’t follow your passion.
1) Your Happiness Doesn’t Come From Your Job
There is no one who will say that they are happy because of their job. They will say they are happy because of their family, self actualization, or any other meaningful personal reasons. Your happiness doesn’t come from your career, it comes from other outside factors that come besides moving up in the corporate ladder.
Don’t follow your passion because your happiness won’t come from your job, anyway. I am personally happy when I can help someone out and lift others up. One of my friends got laid off. I recently interviewed for a job and got rejected. Instead of being bitter, I sent my interviewer the best recommendation email I could write.
He got the job. I was happy for him. It’s not a feeling that I’ve ever had from my job, ever. The level of happiness that I experienced didn’t come from working a job, it came from another source. That’s why I place my employer’s interests and needs high up in the short term.
But I know I will break that bond as soon as I’m financially independent.
2) Careers Serve the Company’s Interests
Companies do not care about you. The number one thing they care about the most is themselves. Which isn’t a bad thing. You don’t care about companies, the number one person who you care about the most in the relationship is you. However, there comes the catch-22 in the relationship.
As a result, by definition, you career will be the help your company’s interests and needs. Don’t follow your passion for a career because your career is not for you. It’s for the company. You will never be passionate about helping someone else become successful. You will be passionate when you are helping yourself become successful.
Careers are helping someone else’s dreams come true, how can you possibly be passionate about that? You need to be building your own ideal self and dreams. I know that one day, I’m going to start my own company and secure my and my family’s future one day. That will bring me joy, not my job.
3) Very Few Passions Pay the Bills
You can’t pay your rent with passion. You have to pay rent with cold, hard, cash. Very few passions earn enough money to pay the bills. Professional tennis players only earn a couple hundred dollars, if they’re not good enough. That only pays food bills for one week.
Don’t follow your passion because being poor will not make you happy. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and poverty gave me misery. It’s not all about the money but that doesn’t mean money isn’t important. Very few passions earn enough money to pay the bills and/or achieve financial progress.
Your landlord doesn’t care whether you are happy, passionate, joyful, or sad. All they care about is did the money hit their accounts in accordance with the lease. Everyone has bills to pay eventually, might as well be in a job that helps pay bills off so you can have a roof over your head and food on the table.
4) Competition is Fierce
What you are passionate about and what you can achieve are two totally different things. How many people go on American Idol who gets eliminated? The majority. And the ones who even compete on American Idol are good at what they do in the first place. Your passion will make you good. However, it may not make you good enough.
Passion is a necessary component to being good at something but it’s not the only component that will let you outshine others. No matter how good you are, there’s always someone better than you. The globalization made competition so fierce. Just because you follow your passion, doesn’t mean you’ll become successful.
For every one success story, there are millions of failure stories that don’t get highlighted. Don’t follow your passion because it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be good enough. There are so many people who are putting in 25 hours per day of work in order to take someone else’s spot. Passion can’t beat work ethic like that.
5) Hypocrisy from the Ones Who Tell You To Follow Your Passion
Most of the ones who tell you to follow your passion are the ones who are rich. Then that begs the question, did they really follow their passion or did they follow the money? Passion is a rich person’s want. If Bill Gates failed at Microsoft, he could’ve always went back to his parents place with food and running water.
His parents were pretty well off, too. Of course he followed his passion. What downside does he have? For the vast majority of us, if we fail at our passion, there’s no security blanket. We don’t have running water or food to put on the table. Some of us might even have to declare bankruptcy.
There’s nothing wrong with putting in the effort and hard work for a decade or so before jumping into your passion. Yes, you might not have won the birth lottery by being born to rich parents. However, you can always make the most of what you have. It’s your adaptability that will differentiate you between success and failure.
Don’t Follow Your Passion: What to do Instead
So then are you dead in the water? No! There are many other options at your disposal to take advantage of.
1) Follow the Money
Don’t follow your passion, follow the money. Don’t follow the money to the point where it makes you miserable. However, follow the money to the extent you generally like what you do. My job pays ~$130,000 and I recently received a job offer that will increase that pay even more.
I am grateful and blessed to be in this position right now. Not many mid-20 year olds can make what I make, let alone make six figures. I am almost done putting in the work and saying, “yes sir, may I have another sir?!”. Financial independence is within my reach and I fully intend on capitalizing on it in the next 2 years.
This isn’t because I followed my passions, it’s because I followed the money. Many people will shame you and say that it’s not a good reason to pursue a job or a career with. It’s an excellent reason as long as you do it within reason. Don’t let other people shame you. Pick a path that works best for you.
2) Follow Your Passion on the Side
You don’t just have the 8 – 9 hours of work you put in for your employer. You have many more hours beyond that. There’s evenings, nights, and weekends. Build something on the side that you’re passionate about. I’m very passionate about building this blog on the weekends.
It’s a ton of fun and it brings me happiness and joy to fire up the laptop and start writing blog posts for readers to read. Sure, I would rather spend my weekends catching up on the latest Netflix show. However, I want to build something that I’m passionate about, which is educating others on personal finance.
Weekends are a great time to relax. They are also a great time for you to build something meaningful that will give you a sense of purpose in life. I am also passionate about my fitness and so I work out the most during the weekends than on the weekdays. Don’t follow your passion except on your free time.
3) Follow Your Marketable Skills
The last thing to follow instead of passion is your marketable skills. What are you good at that people will pay their hard earned money for? Everyone’s good at something, it’s up to you to figure out what your marketable and profitable skills are. It is going to take some time to brainstorm and experiment.
People are willing to pay top dollar if you are good at what you do. Even then, you can easily sell your labor such as cleaning services for a couple of hours per week. Your marketable skills are what matters in that’s going to make you successful. You don’t have to be the best at it, either.
Alexandra Botez is not the best chess player alive. Arguably, Magnus Carlsen is. However, she was on track to pull in half a million dollars streaming her chess videos in 2020. That doesn’t sound like a bad paycheck to me. Don’t follow your passion but follow your marketable skills. Someone’s willing to pay top dollar for it, even if you’re not the best.
Don’t Follow Your Passion: Be Sensible
The problem is passions don’t pay the bills. Many people have to get a job they’re not passionate about because they have bills to pay. I wanted to be a professional tennis player. However, I started too late at age 10. Many top professional tennis players started when they were 5 years old. I didn’t.
I knew that my passion would only get me so far in life. Therefore, I didn’t follow my dreams of being a professional tennis player because I knew I wasn’t good enough. That was the right choice for me and I’m so glad that I didn’t take that route. Don’t follow your passion.
Follow any number of a different things that you can follow that will construct your life for the better. Be realistic and sensible with your decision. Life isn’t this glamours thing that Disney tries to sell on. Life is wonderful, but it’s not obscenely wonderful as some fairytales have us believe.
Overoptimism is the best way to set yourself up for failure and depression. Cautious optimism is the best way to approach life because it actually takes into account the possibility of failure. There are many additional options instead of just following your passions. it’s a logical fallacy and a “god” word.
It’s emotionally manipulative because it makes so many people feel good to follow their passions. They’re doing what they love, after all. However, that good feeling might come at the cost of long term success and happiness. Don’t realize this too late. Otherwise, people are going to be so ahead of you that it’s not even going to be funny.
I agree that following your passion is generally a losing game. But I have a different take in that if you follow a career you can become excellent at, world class at, unlike you and I would ever be world class at tennis, but in my case chemical engineering. I knew I had an end of the bell curve ability at solving mathematical and logical puzzles and enjoyed chemistry and physics. So I followed the money by picking the job that had the highest pay for a four year graduate of all degrees back then. But because the job used my innate skills I very early on became an elite engineer making my company hundreds of millions of dollars. And because my abilities and results were world class I received a lot of affirmation and rewards from my employer. And that in itself creates passion, not unlike a world class soccer or pro basketball player. Those superstars, along with superstars in every career, don’t retire early and don’t see their jobs as just OK. They are passionate about their careers. So rather than follow passion, you can create passion if you can become a top performer at a market valued position. At least I did, I loved going in most Monday mornings because it was another chance to be the best my company had ever seen. That did fade over time as I promoted into higher paying positions that were mostly management and less technical but still, being in charge of a billion dollar enterprise had a lot of passionate feels to it. So I mostly agree with you but do believe you can, if you are lucky enough to become one of the very best at what you do, create passion around your career and go way past just feeling pretty good about it. I think the Gates and Musk’s and Buffet’s created passion by being the best in the world at what they did. I doubt they had tremendous passion at the very start of things, it grew as they became awesome performers. On the other hand there is a price to pay to become a highest level performer and that is more focus on work and less on family and hobbies. And that price shows up often in the broken relationships people like Bezos and Gates and Jobs endured. In my case my wife and I are celebrating our 44th wedding anniversary today so I avoided the landmines by backing off the intensity of my work commitment over time.
Steveark, happy anniversary to you and your wonderful wife! That is a great thing to celebrate. Admire your assessment of how your passion was created over time, by seeing the value you were adding to your company’s bottom-line. A pro athlete’s career lasts just a few years, and ends before the athlete is ready. Your career had decades of results, and you wisely balanced with your personal aspirations. Thanks for the share!
Steve always has some insightful comments!
Steve, that was a great and thorough comment, as always! I definitely do agree that passion stems from mastery, there’s no doubt about that.
One question, would you have still chosen to stay with the career if the rewards were not there? I definitely do think you should NEVER choose a career you will be miserable at, no matter how much the money.
However, I definitely would choose a career that pays well that I can tolerate rather than a career that pays OK but I am passionate about. When I first started a career, I was excited because I could finally work in financial services, a job that I was very passionate about. However, I actually lived paycheck to paycheck because they paid so little and it made me miserable every two weeks.
It was only when I started getting paid more that I really started to feel better about the job and stop feeling so miserable. I felt like I had breathing room and started to enjoy every aspect of the job.