Follow Your Passion!
Don't Listen to the Naysayers - They are Wrong
Recently, it’s become a trend to shoot down the age-old platitude to follow your passion. I get it, it’s a counter-culture, headline grabbing, click-baiting bandwagon that many have hopped on to stay relevant.
I refuse to jump on that bandwagon because it is a freight train that can take you to the emptiest of all places deep inside your soul. In fact, it will lead you to another lesser known mantra:
Most people die at 25, only to be buried when they are 75.
- Ben Franklin
Following a career that is hyper-optimized to generate cash may bring material conveniences to your reality, but never forget that it is a means and not an end.
And what is the end you ask? Fast forward to the end itself, to your death bed in the future and ask the same question: it is for you to understand the answer, not for me to tell you.
Now that doesn’t mean you should quit your job in the next hour and apply to join Manchester United or the Los Angeles Lakers even if you are 50 years old and are 150cm tall. Of course not - but you would be surprised to learn that this one of the lines of reasoning people use to justify why following your passion is a bad idea. Pretty stupid, right?
Before we continue we need to go over a brief history of how we got to where we are. The bandwagon started a few years ago, spurned by the corporate world taking the original mantra and leveraging it as a tool to juice productivity among its employee. Well well, surprise surprise.
How many of these signs have we seen in cafeteria walls, entrance halls, and meeting rooms?
Predictably, the cringe factor eventually seeped in and people began to question the purpose and authenticity of all the platitudes plastered on the walls. So people started writing about how it’s a bad idea - particularly all these coaches and consultants who make $$$ peddling their “innovative” and “counter-culture” wares to corporate HR departments. You know who these people are, because you’ve had to attend some training program where you were forced to sit and learn about them. Agile, growth mindset, design thinking, wow this list can keep going on and on.
Sidestory: When I had to go to all these “Agile” training courses as part of corporate development, the coaches and trainers would preach about how this is the way startups and entrepreneurs succeeded. I co-founded startups in Silicon Valley and worked in co-working spaces with many other founders there. Do you know how many times I heard the word “Agile” there over the span of four years? Zero.
Let me break down the main reasons why people want to make you believe following your passion will ruin your life:
You may not be good what you are passionate about
You will limit your career opportunities
You may lose your passion when it becomes a “job”
Employers may try to take advantage of you
Your passion may change
Basically, these are the five main lines of reasoning from which variations emerge from that we see online.
All five of them are misguided.
Passion and livelihood (or making $) are two separate things. They can remain completely separated from each other, overlap in varying degrees, and even completely overlap altogether:
The problem comes in the way these states are set into place, especially if they are forced because of some external factor and not from within yourself.
There is no rule in life saying that you must have an all-green 100% overlap between the two. Nor is there some rule saying that having them completely separate from each other is death. Any inclination towards these outside pressures coming into your mind should be thrown out to the garbage bin.
What you need to do is find the configuration that works for you, and trust me, the configuration changes over time - and that’s perfectly normal.
I know many people who have kept them completely separate, had their “job” fund their passion, and after carefully building, planning, and de−risking their passion for many years, drop their “job” and have a fully converged passion and livelihood. I see it all the time, such as the case of someone who was an IT professional with a passion for landscaping, who after decades used the IT job to fund a landscaping business which once proven to be sustainable, replaced the IT job. Similar stories of accountants who then owned a restaurant or a cafe later in life.
The key here is careful planning and de-risking, which takes time, persistence, and patience. Similar to how one shouldn’t just drop everything on a whim to do a startup, one shouldn’t do the same to chase a passion. That’s just being stupid.
Many people conflate a crappy job with why they hate their life after chasing their passion. They find a job that has a huge overlap with their passion, and when their job sucks, they blame the act of going after their passion as the culprit.
No, it’s the job that sucks. Whether it be your boss, coworkers, or company culture - that’s what sucks and what they are making you feel and do. Drop the job, not the passion.
If you embarked on a startup or small business to follow your passion and you’re suffering - that’s normal. Being an entrepreneur is hard. Don’t blame it on following your passion. If you tell me that you've been a successful serial entrepreneur with multiple large exits and then you decided to suddenly follow your passion for the first time and that’s the reason why life sucks, I’d like to have coffee with you. I don’t mind buying, because you don’t exist.
If your passion changes, and that means you may need to change careers, that’s perfectly ok as well. The sad truth is that most people believe they can’t change careers - which is why they think if you follow you passion and build your career on it, you are screwed if your passion changes (and it can). Well, I have news for you - changing careers, while requiring hard work - is absolutely possible. Heck I did five times and talk about the methods and techniques I used over here.
Finally, do be careful to not confuse your passion with ego. You see, passion is something that inherently is fulfilling in and of itself. You feel full, satisfied, and complete by doing something you are passionate about. However, if you find the reason why you are “passionate” about something is because it charges your ego up and that’s the reason why you want to do it, back off - that’s not your passion, that’s your ego.
Let me give you an example. If I’m good at playing basketball and I like it because I can dunk over people’s heads and make them stare in awe at me, that might be your ego. Conversely, if I suck at basketball and get dunked on all the time but I still keep playing as much as I can because it’s so much fun, then that might be your passion. Now, usually people don’t get good at anything without putting down some serious effort, so the system tends to work itself out - but there are edge cases where people are gifted with short-cuts (being born really tall or athletic, smart, etc.) and that’s where the conflation - and danger - seeps in.
Watch my video about this topic here for more insights:
Don’t drop your passion - that may lead you to an empty pathway that will haunt you later on in life when it’s too late.
Instead, follow your passion, but follow it smartly, and don’t conflate challenges on your path that may discourage you. Bookmark this post and come back to it whenever you are in doubt.
I know I will.