“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
Steve Jobs
I love Steve Jobs and his legacy with Apple, but I absolutely hate this lasting piece of advice from him that continues to be circulated.
If you’ve seen my Instagram videos on “pursue your passion”, you likely know by now that I’m not a big fan. In the past, I’ve noted that the pursue your passion rhetoric makes people think that the road to success will be easy, it makes people disregard other areas that they could be interested in, and it is often the entrepreneurs in the top percentages of household income levels who are able to weather the storms of pursuing their passion.
These are just a handful of reasons why it’s critically bad advice to follow. If you’re considering becoming an independent or freelancer as a way to “pursue your passion”, please reconsider.
My discouraging people against pursuing their passion has frequently been met with agreement by some, annoyance by others, and outright outrage by a select few. When I reposted my very first pursue your passion video a few months ago, I was surprised to see how many people were angered by what I thought was a practical message: instead of pursuing your passion, pursue knowledge and opportunities that you can monetize since you’ll be able to enjoy your passion in other financially stable ways.
Based off those responses, there clearly needs to be more discussion and understanding as to why the whole pursue your passion rhetoric has led many people astray and up a [financially unstable] creek.
Not All Passions Pay. Most Businesses Fail Because of Money.
Before I even get to the fact that not all passions can sustain a living, let’s be clear that not everyone even has a passion and most people’s passion changes multiple times over their lifetime. One Deloitte study found that only 13 percent of the US workforce is passionate about their jobs. This makes sense when combined with research that shows that while 84 percent of people identified having a passion in their lives, 96 percent of those passions were for hobbies like dance, hockey, and reading. Passions are largely recreational and often fleeting. Attempting to build a solid career out of what you do for fun when you feel like it may not be the best decision.
Moreover, not all passions are monetizable. I know your best friend’s sister’s college roommate’s cousin quit her job four months ago and is now making $100,000 a day selling colored sand, but those types of obscure entrepreneurial rags to riches tales are few and far between. More often, a successful business is established by fulfilling a solid market need with high demand for the product or service.
Passion alone does not pay the bills. I often receive DMs with people saying they forced themselves to be successful by jumping in without a parachute, and I let them know I’m happy for their success or I wish them well on their road to passion profitability. However, the few success stories we all hear are a biased sample. Those passion pursuers who risked it all and became a success are happy to tell their rags to riches tales. Those passion pursuers who lost it all and are living in their mom’s basement are going to be very quiet.
It’s probably not the work itself that you’re passionate about.
The history of work shows us that it’s not always been the case that we assign value only to work we’re passionate about. Human societies have evolved beyond the early hunter-gatherers when we could only focus on the all-encompassing work of finding food and surviving. We’ve gone past the time when work was seen as undignified and only done by slaves, servants, and serfs. We’ve moved beyond when farm work and toiling in the soil was revered as being next to godliness. More recently, we have moved on from the industrial revolution stage, when mass production required most workers to be cogs in a wheel that repeat the same monotonous action over again to produce whatever product was required.
It’s only now during the 20th century rise of technology and knowledge work that the idea of pursuing your passion is taking center stage. With most people having a roof over their heads, minimal fear of disease or starvation, and generally having high standards of living, we look around and try to make ourselves stand out from the masses through small but important ways. Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety makes the point that we all want to seem successful in the eyes of our peers, but with the ubiquitous nature of social media, everyone from our high school friends to Silicon Valley billionaires are perceived to be our peers. Now being able to see what millionaires and billionaires are doing naturally makes you wonder: if tech bros are becoming wealthy only from doing work they’re passionate about, a la Steve Jobs’ quote, then why can’t I?
To bring this point home, NYU Stern School of Business marketing professor Scott Galloway notes that successful people don’t pursue passion, but instead pursue the things they are good at and focus on making it 10,000x better. “What they were passionate about was being great at something, and then the accoutrements of being great at something — the recognition from colleagues, the money, the status will make you passionate about whatever it is,” Galloway says.
In a nutshell, it’s not the actual work itself wealthy people may be passionate about. It’s the status that comes with the wealth. As a friend of mine once said “What if I’m just passionate about making money?”
The Majority of Financially Successful People Have Multiple Streams of Income From an Array of Interests and Endeavors
“People often come to NYU and say, ‘Follow your passion’ — which is total bulls—, especially because the individual telling you to follow your passion usually became magnificently wealthy selling software as a service for the scheduling of health care maintenance workers. And I refuse to believe that that was his or her passion.” -Scott Galloway
The wealthy will not say that they are passionate about everything they do. They’re not. They like what they do enough, but more likely saw it as a way to become rich and gain social status. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Instead of telling people to pursue their passion, let’s begin encouraging people across all socio-economic strata to hone in on their skills and amplify them. The basic steps: Try lots of different things –> Uncover what you’re good at –> Discover what pays –> Do what you’re good at in a financially lucrative way at scale.
All this to say, don’t forget passion completely, but do pursue knowledge and opportunities you can monetize. I’m sure you’d be happy making tons of money from something you like a moderate amount, then spending all your additional time (and money!) on what you’re truly passionate about in a relaxed, pressure-free manner.
It’s okay to make money from something you are merely tepid about.
It’s okay to keep your passion as your hobby.
It’s okay to not pursue your passion.
