“Follow your Passion” is Terrible Career Advice

We’ve all heard the career advice during our younger, more idealistic days:

Find something that you’re passionate about and you’ll never work a day in your life.

The sentiment is great. The advice will make you feel good in the short run until of course you try to implement it.

Finding your actual passion requires actual work

If you actually look at the origin of the word “passion”, it comes from the Latin word for “suffer”. That’s actually a very different meaning from our modern-day association to a blissful existence.

The modern-day premise of following your passion almost implies that you will immediately love what you’re doing. In addition, if something truly is your passion, then it should come to you easily.

The reality is that it takes a lot of time and effort to become “passionate” about something. More importantly, becoming passionate at something is highly connected to how good you are at something. That takes a lot of work.

Because we’ve been led to believe that our passion should come relatively easily, as soon as things get difficult in our pursuit, we’re more likely to give up. With a mindset like that, it might actually make it impossible to find your “true passion”.

Turning your passion into work will ruin your passion

One of the most well-meaning, but misguided advice about passion is:

If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing at work, you’re wasting your life.

The implication is that you should leave your “soul-sucking”, albeit steady job to pursue the true thing that you’re passionate about. It’s a romantic idea.

Who hasn’t dreamed of leaving their job, take whatever they’re passionate about, and try to turn it into their single source of income? After all, if you don’t have enough “skin in the game” by going all in, you won’t succeed in the pursuit of your passion. Right?

The problem is that you’ve now turned your passion into a job. With your passion project being your sole source of income, there is now a lot of pressure for it not to fail. Because there’s now stress involved, it’s no longer being done for fun. It’s become something that now keeps you up at night.

Following your passion most likely won’t be profitable… at least not immediately

On a personal level, I’m passionate about visiting new places, learning martial arts and even teaching it. However, just because I’m passionate about traveling, practicing and teaching martial arts, doesn’t mean that I can make a living off of it. At least not immediately.

It can be doable, but again, it will take lots of time and effort for this activity to produce a livable wage. Quitting my day job right now to be a full-time, “professional, traveling martial artist” might not be the best idea just yet. It will take time to develop the skills needed to be successful enough to monetize. In the meantime, I still have bills to pay, groceries to buy, and a wife and (hopefully future kids) to support. Dropping everything to follow my passion would probably be a bit irresponsible.

Develop your passion instead

So does all this mean that pursuing a passion is a futile endeavor? Should we just give up and take the job that requires us to live the rest of our lives in a cubicle listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements? Not exactly.

The problem lies in the fact that the advice given to us when we’re young implies that you must be passionate about your job. That your job is what will give your life the fulfillment and sense of accomplishment that you need while at the same time allowing you to buy groceries and pay your rent and heating bill. Why should that be? Why can’t your job just be a method to make enough money to pay for the bare necessities, while outside of working hours, you are developing what you’re really passionate about?

Why not separate the two?

The day job can certainly give you that sense of accomplishment, but it can mainly function as the method for acquiring the resources you need to both pay your bills and develop your real passion.

By passion development, I’m talking about finding a hobby or activity that you can become better at over time by hours of practice. It would be the pursuit of mastery of this activity that will help bring you that sense of accomplishment that you might not necessarily get from your job.

Side-hustling: Monetizing your passions

Of course, if you do manage to find a way to monetize your passion, more power to you. What I would suggest though, boring as it may be, is to start small. I wouldn’t recommend leaving your day job just yet. Again, leaving a day job with a steady paycheck in favor of following a passion project will not only put financial stress on yourself and your family, but will essentially kill whatever love you have for that project.

The smart play to begin monetizing that passion is by creating a side-hustle. This prevents you from throwing yourself head first into something that may or may not fail. Because you’re forced to do this at a smaller scale you won’t feel the constant pressure to grow the business that you would have if you were doing this full time. Instead, it gives you the time to actually develop the passion and get better at what you’re doing. This allows you to play around with your ideas, test strategies and see what works with minimal impact if you fail. All while marginally adding extra income.

So is there still a way for me to follow my passion?

For most of us, that day may never come, but if you’re lucky, it is possible to get to a point where you’re free to follow your passion and do it full time as a business. There are two criteria:

First, you’re now making enough money off it that you no longer have a need for the revenue from your day job. Second, more and more of your time is required and your day job is actually getting in the way of the project’s growth.

If and only if you are able those two criteria, then you can make the gradual shift from the day-job employee to the passion-project entrepreneur.