Should you follow your passion?
Many people want to know if they should follow their passion. There is no easy answer, but I believe you should. I am reading a book right now called So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport.
The whole point of the book is that you should not follow your dream. Following your dream is something that was created by society a long time ago and is a lie.
His contention is that you should just be good at what you do for a living and find people that you like to work with.
That’s extremely hard to do if you aren’t passionate about what you do. I think you should find something that you like to do and find a way to make money. You shouldn’t just find what you like to do and never think about money. I do recommend reading that book to find the many examples of people that follow their passion and fail.
You need to think about money. You have to pay your bills. This doesn’t mean you can’t make money doing what you love or finding other means of making money. I
I believe that if you combine your passion with the desire to make money, you will eventually be successful.
There is a trend in self-help to take the contrarian view, so just make sure you aware of that. Everyone used to say that you should follow your passion, so everyone is going to start saying you shouldn’t.
What alternative is there?
If you don’t follow your passion or something that you like to do, what will you do? Sit in a job that you hate and just learn to live with it. That will be counter productive because you will most likely develop tons of bad habits in order to cope with that job. Most people that hate their jobs hate them because their work is boring or they work with toxic people. It’s hard to cope with that in a healthy way.
You would need to be a buddhist monk and meditate hours in your off-time in order to be cope with a terrible job.
You could also really explore what bothers you about your life and your job and just figure out if you are creating the issue. Sometimes we create our own problems and don’t even see that we are causing them. Are you starting fight with your boss? Are you just fed up with work even though it is good. Sometimes it’s ok to take it easy at work. You don’t have to be passionate about your job or career 100% of the time. Maybe you are just going through a down period.
Problems with following your passion
If you try to find your passion by finding the right career, you might end up switching jobs a lot.
If you have to switch jobs a lot, you’ll find yourself starting over at lower salaries.
You might not save enough for retirement.
If you follow your passion by yourself, you might run out of money trying to monetize your passion.
Follow your 2nd or 3rd biggest passions
Another thing that I’ve been thinking about recently is that you don’t have to follow your biggest passion as your career. You can follow your passion that is the easiest to monetize.
You also might want to keep your biggest passion as the activity you only engage in your off-time so that it doesn’t get associated with money problems.
What if you don’t have any passions?
If you don’t have any passions, then you might be disconnected from yourself. You should spend some time quietly and meditate. You need to connect with yourself and figure out what your like to do. If you still don’t have anything, then stay in your current job and increase the number of experiences in your life. Engage in many experiences until you find out what you like. Once you find out what you like, try to understand the ways to make money in that field and see if you’d like any of them.
There are also many business models and revenue streams. The field you might be interested in might not have a revenue model that is possible. For example, people might not be taking donations or utilizing affiliate links in your given field online. Think of all the possibilities of making revenue in your field before giving up.
