“Follow Your Passion”
Or, don’t?
I feel like when I was a kid I had it drilled into me that I needed to figure out what I really enjoyed doing, and then to pursue a career in that. Because as we all know “find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”, right?
Firstly, it’s ridiculously stressful as a kid to have all of this pressure on you to “find your passion”. How are you supposed to figure out what you love doing when the only fun shit you get to do at school (play sports, play instruments, dance, act etc) gets shot down because “only the top percent of people actually make a career in that”.
And arguably more importantly: life isn’t an inspirational Instagram post, is it? Unfortunately you don’t get paid for enjoying your job, you get paid for being good at it.
I’m ripping this from Scott Galloway who says this fairly regularly in interviews and in speeches, but we need to flip the advice we give kids. It’s not about finding your passion, it’s about finding something that you’re good at which you can make a living doing, and then work really fucking hard to become great at it.
And once you’ve made a living and a career out of something, you’ll probably find that you may not love it, but you certainly won’t mind it.
I worry that kids have these unrealistic expectations of thinking they need to be in the 0.1% of people who actually get to find a job that they not only love, but they get paid well for. Assume you are not Steven Spielberg or Lionel Messi.
I hear stories about people who went to my school back home who are in their late twenties or sometimes in their thirties, still living at home with their parents because they refuse to just take any old job that they don’t want to do, they’re waiting to find a way of monetising their passion. It’s actually pretty sad.
I feel like the student me of 10 years ago would probably take the absolute opposite view on this. In fact, I could probably scroll back on this very blog and find posts articulating the opposite points, however we live in a capitalist society, and unfortunately it’s never been better to have lots of money and it’s never been worse to not have money.
I’m not saying that money is the be all and end all, of course it isn’t. But economic inequality gets worse by the way and it’s so much easier to follow your passions later in life when you have the financial security to be confident that you’ll have housing, food and health insurance.
I’m treating this phase of my life like a race to financial independence, to the day where I don’t have to work 9–5 if I don’t want to. That’s when I’ll go volunteer at a charity and make the world a better place, for now I have to stare at spreadsheets and attend meetings, even if this isn’t the passion I was told to follow as a kid.
8th May 2022
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