Follow your passion is a bad advice, here’s why
There is the classic advice of
"do what you love and you never have to work a day in your life"
" Do what you love. And you never have to worry about money"
"follow your passion"
all that kind of advice that has successfully induce many people to go astray and not being able to achieve what they want to achieve.
1
First of all, I think it’s important to emphasize that we need to question the advice that we are given.
The last generation advice of go to school, get good grades, find a job. And you are set for the rest of your life is obsolete in today’s economy.
The popular advice doesn’t make it right, or just make it applicable to us.
We need to question why and really think about whether this is true for us or whether we want to believe it to be true or not.
2
Why the advice "Follow your passion" is a bad idea.
When you look at relationship, would you marry someone who you feel passionate about?
Is that the one that they can live the rest of their life with?
Usually passion is just a chemistry at the beginning of the relationship directed by emotions .
Such passion will fade unless it is carefully and intentionally maintained, through consistent and planned actions to maintain the relationship.
After that, a relationship will be based on personality match or common future goals that they want to achieve together.
And whether you can withstand the other side of that person all day - weakness or bad habits.
Those are all very important things to consider when we talk about marriage or relationship.
If we just base everything in our life on passion. That would be a disaster and divorce rate will skyrocket.
3
Likewise, the way that you can find meaningful work that you truly enjoy is usually not by following your passion, but having some extent of interest that push you to go through the first step, and second step.
And then you kinda need to persist to continue to further learn and acquire skill in that field towards developing your expertise and professionalism.
And you persist the rather boring and painful process until you are good at it.
The more you are good at it, the more positive feedback you receive, the more passionate you become.
So being passionate is not the condition to get started . But it is the end result.
To tell people to follow their passion is the put cart before the horse.
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Because the next question would be, "how do I find my passion?"
There are billions of content on how to find the passion.
because the advice of following your passion put the world into an anxiety of finding "what is my passion?"
It's just like when I can't find my passion, I can't do anything.
I can't achieve anything because I haven't found my passion.
And it also become an excuse of not taking actions and an excuse for procrastinating .
5
And there are also cases where people find their passion is playing the music. But they are not very good at playing the music.
Or they found that the passion is sleeping, but they can’t make money through sleeping.
Or they the passion is playing video games, but it’s simply not realistic to play video games for the rest of life which is not healthy physically and financially.
There must be something that is added to the passion element.
For example, we are passionate about playing video games.
And so we utilize this passion into learning more about the video games industry and eventually find a career and developing video games.
Or we start a company to develop video games.
Following the Profit Formula of input output and monetization plus passion. That can be a great formula to live a good life and successful life.
But if we're just following passion alone. It is going to guide our lives to poverty and misery.
6
Yes, it is true that you can do what you love. And when you do what you love, you are more likely to enjoy the work process. And therefore more likely to be consistent in doing the work. And more likely to create a better work.
But there is also a trap (price) there.
When you enjoy so much about what you do, you are essentially creating a job for yourself that will trap you 24/7,
because you love doing it so much. You would spend the weekend working on it as well.
And you would sacrifice your rest time your entertainment your personal time for doing what you love.
Because you enjoy the process so much. And this would be something that can consume your life.
And one day you may wake up and realize that this person that you’ve built for yourself is what is called "your passion" .
You will want to break out and then, your passion will become your misery.
This is not uncommon to see people who make the passion into the job. And at the beginning they were all happy and feel like they found the dream job of their lives. But after a while, maybe a few years, they can’t wait to get out of it immediately.
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So all in all, ad long as we are interested to a certain extent, that would be sufficient to take this actions to learn and first initial stop to get started.
We don’t necessarily need to feel passionate in order to get started.
When we become good at it, passion will come.
Before that, there must be something that is added to the passion (interest) element so that we can get through the process to attain expertise.
Without the profit formula (input output monetisation) support, passion will turn into misery.
Yours,
Connie
