Don't "Follow Your Passion"
Following "your passion" is America's biggest lie. Don't waste your life chasing a fairytale that society says exists, but was never actually obtainable.
Everyone says the catchphrase verbatim. It's like a broken record. Friends, family, people on social media--are all shouting it from the rooftops. "Follow your passion!" they say. On the surface, it makes perfect sense--why chase something that you don't love? But the truth under that outer shell is that "follow your passion" is a lie that rarely works out for anybody.
There is a narrow balance between pursuing something that you're interested in and thinking with your head. Certainly, you do not want your occupation to bore you. No one wants that. However, it's critical that you chase something that the market finds valuable, otherwise you may find yourself unemployed and left behind.
At the end of the day, we all need to be able to pay our bills, and hopefully, have a little bit leftover for the future. But how can you do that if no one is buying what you're selling?
There's no sexy slogan like "follow your passion" when it comes to chasing after a valuable skill set you can sell in the market. But, you may be surprised that you may just find your passion, or at least something you're interested in, by choosing the path the markets encourage.
I fell into the "follow your passion" mantra for the first few years of my life right out of high school. It didn't pan out well at all, as I hopped from industry to industry and from job to job in search of "my passion." It eventually led me to college, where I also jumped from discipline to discipline in search of the same.
After a few of those road bumps in my academic journey--and thousands of dollars of additional student debt--I finally landed in finance because it was a near guaranteed way to the middle class and I had to make a decision, otherwise risk not graduating. I had no other reason than that for my final major switch at the time.
But, something interesting happened. Halfway through that educational journey, I discovered that I really loved what I was studying. That fire continued to kindle inside of me when I first began work at a startup.
What I quickly found was that my work in finance consisted, and continues to consist, of challenging work, problems to solve, and the ability to make operationally critically decisions that may help guide the trajectory of a growing startup. Those are all attributes I love, and as my journey unfolded, finance just seemed to encompass all of those attributes. It may have not been my "passion" at first, but it is now.
All that to say--how much more time could we save if we put the "sexy" slogans and catchphrases on the sidelines, and just follow what makes sense? What could have happened if I followed that perspective years earlier? Would I have come across more opportunity? Saved thousands of dollars in student loans? Maybe I would be further along in my career?
Any single person will take a very different path than the other, but how great would the world change if we shelved quite possibly the biggest piece of stress in our lives: "follow your passion"? Instead of trying to answer that very big question that often boils down to questioning the meaning of our lives--our purpose--the world may become a whole lot more beautiful to live in if we instead follow the path of practical sense.
It's not sexy, but it will get us a lot further in life than the endless pursuit of meaning has.