Don't follow your passion. More specifically, stop following self help advice. That's probably where this came from in the first place. Whoever pushed that idea probably sold lots of books, so somebody was successful from it.
Success is a big word which lacks information. What is success? I doubt enough people can agree on what success is for anyone to talk about it to a wide audience. For many, success is relative to others, but that's worthless because that perspective puts too much focus on the others (even if it's just a little, it's too much).
As Chris Rock said, Bill Gates would kill himself if he had Opera's money. I could feel down because I'm not where I want to be, but then I walk past homeless people on the street and realize I could be in a much worse situation. And the capable homless person might have a homeless friend who just broke a leg and can't walk. Your situation can always get worse until you're dead, in which case you don't care anymore.
We're all just trying to survive in the jungle. Even if it doesn't feel bad for us, it's still someone else's horror show. In the jungle we just have to assess our surroundings and use what we can to keep improving our situation. But we'll still always be in the jungle.
As Bear Grylls says, keep moving. Success is in the small wins that you can rack up every day by the handfulls. It's making a little progress. It's sharpening a stick. It's setting up a shelter. It's building a trap. Just keep moving. Even the failures are wins as those failures carry information.
That's probably not very helpful either. I would make a terrible self help person. ;)
> Even the failures are wins as those failures carry information.
> That's probably not very helpful either.
Probably the most helpful advice a normal person can get. The ability to reflect on and learn from your mistakes is essentially the only foolproof method for improving yourself.
> As Chris Rock said, Bill Gates would kill himself if he had Opera's money.
No he wouldn't. He's said before that once you can afford the most expensive burger, all the extra money doesn't do much more for you.
And even if he went bankrupt tomorrow, he could earn the average annual wage in one or two speaker's fees. Gates isn't going to be left hurting for money.
You need to be passionate about what you're doing, if you want to be truly great. That doesn't necessarily mean change what you're doing, it could mean just change the way you view it.
A passionless life is just a slow march towards death.
Passion is a bunch of factors (including your hormonal responses) conspiring to better explore the evolutionary mutation/branch that is YOU.
Yes, putting energy and "passion" into your unique abilities may enable you to reach your potential. And perhaps ultimately decide whether this particular mutation was worthwhile, in the long run.
But if you think "purpose" has some mystical meaning, and judge your existence on achieving it... Passion has evolved only as means to an end, and is not worth glorifying. Not any more than you'd glorify "hunger" or "pain" or "pride".
It's an optimization technique in the rat race called "evolution".
Success is a big word which lacks information .. Even the failures are wins as those failures carry information.
Exactly. This is why "self-help" books don't work. You're listening to someone else's path which has no application to yours. Yes, certain motives may be similar but the method and journey are always unique. Make your own path and never stop moving. Life teaches better than any book.
I dunno, there's a lot of wisdom in books. The bigger issue as I see it is essentially that talk is cheap, and getting results takes action. The problem is when you read a self-help book you get a little dopamine boost which makes it feel like you're making progress when you aren't (at least not yet, not until you put the information into practice). I think a lot of people get stuck on these little micro-dopamine hits and never get beyond that.
I used to dismiss and mock self-help advice and books. Certainly there's lots of crap out there, but someone I care about has actually been helped by a few. Not all are created equal, not all are authored by people that wants to cheat people with low self-esteem, some people actually care and has the knowledge to do it.
Yes, certain motives may be similar but the method and journey are always unique
This has nothing to do with "conversing" and everything to do with advice-driven self-help books which use vague terms to supersede wisdom similar to astrology.
Most of these books also fall short on defining success. Is success money? Is success happiness? People can have lot of money but not be happy or healthy. Is that success?
I don't think I've heard anyone say you will succeed by following your passion... I've always heard you're more likely to be happy if you do. I think that's an important distinction, especially if you define success as making a lot of money.
I don't think this is an accurate distinction. I know a number of people who are living in penury right now due to chasing this boomer fallacy.
People tend to downplay the requirement of a minimal level of material success for happiness, because the alternative is admitting that society isn't set up to profit from, not help us achieve, our hopes and dreams. It's part of the bootstrap fallacy, essentially - you just need to want something enough, and everything will fall in place.
Material success only matters for happiness to the degree that it alleviates wants/needs. Truthfully, if you don't buy into all the things society says you should want, you can live on a startlingly small sum of money, and be genuinely happy.
The brutal trap is people who chase wealth as a proxy for social status; as you become more successful your peer group tends to change, so you never get ahead of the curve.
I think that both schools of thought are wrong in this case and would like to propose alternatives. Number 1, it doesn't matter whether you want to call it following your passion or not, hard work and applying yourself are the most important things here.
Secondly, as it pertains to what you refer to as the bootstrap fallacy, this is beyond important for wealth creation. You have to have a low time preference in order to accumulate the capital needed to invest in whatever business you're in. You have got to be 'froogle' so to speak.
All in all, all these debates are borderline useless unless hard work and frugality are employed.
I think whether or not it is an accurate distinction depends upon the person and the situation.
The author of the post being discussed here actually had two separate goals in tandem (one to follow their passion and two to find business/monetary success as a startup), though they only really explicitly acknowledged the passion aspect.
If you seek both of these goals (following your passion and finding financial success) simultaneously you are likely to come up short on the financial success end, but that doesn't mean following your passion is always bad advice, to assume so implicitly assumes that one's only goal in life should be to be financially well-off, which is certainly not a universal belief.
There are people out there who follow their passion with eyes wide open to the fact that this decision is likely to mean they will not amass much money doing so, and I think that's perfectly fine and should be commended in many cases. Following your passion only becomes an issue when you do it blindly without thinking and end up making bad decisions like going into massive student debt, etc. There are lots of people out there who have followed their passion in a realistic manner and are living the modest life they want to live.
The actual message shouldn't be to never follow your passion, but to be realistic about the trade-off that usually has to be made between following your passion and being financially successful, and then this realism has to be applied to big life decisions.
No, not when it leads you to start your own business, which then fails, leaving you penniless and living on the street.
Following your passion may have a better chance of leading you to happiness than following something that you hate, but that's about it. It's not a guarantee of anything. If everyone followed their passion, then society would probably collapse due to massive unemployment and necessary jobs never getting done (like cleaning up trash). How many people really get up every day to go to work because they're passionate about their job? Not many.
Tons of people say to "follow your passion" but in the context of the startup world, you can be passionate about something you suck at, and it'll fail, which will make you very...unhappy. Passion is a nice to have but not a pre-requisite for success.
Passion is fuel. To say you need more than passion to be successful is like saying you need more than gasoline to get to your destination. You need a car. But to then turn and say I don't need passion because I have a job is like saying I don't need gasoline because I have a car. Hence so many workers feel out of passion and out of gas at their jobs.
The main problem with the passion debate is it's often made more about daily motivation and the meaning of life which are mainly concerns of employees, not entrepreneurs (many of whom became entrepreneurs by overcoming those concerns). And the reason why there is so much despair and disappointment in the workplace giving rise to all this passion-talk is because there is simply more boring work than fun work. Most jobs are boring, and if you couldn't find a fun job, you're probably stuck at a boring one. It's just a numbers game.
Of course passion can be harmful if not used properly, just as gasoline will blind you if you pour it in your eyes or set it on fire. But when used properly, passion is one of the few unfair advantages because it cannot be bought or obtained at will. Most everything else, even experience, are technicalities, and can be bought from the standpoint of an employer. Passion is non-technical.
Very well put. As a contractor, there have been some jobs I've worked that have sucked the absolute life out of me. They've made me question whether it was a good choice to follow my passion of programming into a career.
However, just as easily, there are jobs where I am excited to go to work and am able to embrace the fact that I am having fun while doing so.
No doubt there are more boring jobs than fun ones though.
As entrepreneurs and employers it's part of our jobs to make the jobs we create as fun as possible... but at the end of the day if the work itself is boring, there is not much we can add to make it fun. So we offer money, and it works. In fact it works so well, it practically makes the world go round. And hence the modern 1st world epidemic of boredom.
Hiding your light and floating with the tide (because you were too afraid to "fail") can be a sure path to even more systematic failure, also. As the King of Fun himself so presciently put it for us, just as he was setting out on his path:
And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.
I think there needs to be more compassion towards those who are floating in order to muster enough energy to swim.
I'm snug as a bug in a rug right now, and about as "floating" as one can get, but my husband and I are saving money and paying down debt like gangbusters so we can buy a farm in 7-10ish years and leave this lifestyle behind us.
I've had some repeated discussions about this, whether to swim or float. I've so far defended the swimmers, but I'm not myself sure of what anyone should do.
Hiding the light might be a way to failure. But showing it might doesn't seem to be a guarantee of success either, specially if the light ain't that bright. And this is where the bottom line is for most people: "would I rather be rich and bored, or poor but living the dream?"
First, how do you define success? Is it making a lot of money? Is it being happy doing what you do? For me it is to eliminate the need of working for someone else 8h a day and invest my time completely into myself and the things I want to do. And for that, passion is something that drives you to this success. But even more so: You need to work your ass off - and that is the hard part.
To go home after a long work day and STILL work on your own ideas, on your own business or similar. And if it fails and you crash, you continue with the next idea and push yourself up. Maybe you gave up your job to pursue your idea and it fails? Find a new job, get money, get up and keep trying. That's why you need passion - to keep you going and bear with the stress.
Sure there are lucky people who make the big hit in their first try but for most of us that won't happen.
I am nowhere near successful. I was almost there with my first project but not anymore. But I love what I'm doing and I love coding on interesting concepts and ideas with friends even though it eats a ton of time and pushes stress. If I didn't have passion for it, I would have probably already burned out and given up.
That's the important difference in my opinion: Are you someone who has the will to succeed and willing to keep trying and trying again? Or are you someone who is happy to rely on someone to give you money and hope to get successful through that? (Be it stocks, big paycheck, buyout, etc)
Lets give another perspective on passion. It is one of the perspectives that I have and heared no one else talk about. It's not the only true or right perspective there is, multiple views on passion are quite interesting and/or useful to have. This is just one of them and it should be told more.
Having passion is dangerous. Here are a couple of examples:
1. A couple of years ago, my then GF was at my place during the summer. For the first two weeks I didn't see her -- she was sitting next to me -- because I was completely hooked on a computer graphics final school project. The only thing I saw was my screen and I did the eat, sleep, code thing. I didn't know it was a thing, I had so much passion I just did it. She became very pissed. I didn't care. She became sad. I still didn't care. I was hooked, I was passionate. When I finished. the project I made it all up, but man, passion is dangerous.
2. There was this assignment for security class, it was really hard. I was pretty passionate about the security class, the education was amazing. The final day of the assignment was almost arriving. I decided to stay up and code for 25 hours straight -- well I didn't decide it, it just sort of happened. I couldn't even do simple arithmetic at the end of the day. I felt like shit, almost became ill, but I learned a lot and had a ton of fun. Still is this a healthy way to live? Passion is dangerous.
3. I used to play a lot of video games. Those are also the days that I only knew guys and was only social with fellow gamers. I knew nothing else. I wouldn't play much sports, I would slug through school and I'd always go back to the computer to play more games. I loved it, I was passionate, but the problem is I gave up so much. Passion is dangerous, really.
The thing is: when I feel passionate for an indeterminate amount of time. I really do not give a single f--- about the rest of the world, including the rest of my life. It is like drugs. Passion may be differently experience by people. I've learned that the way I experience passion is akin to addiction and it tends to deregulate my life and smash me of balance. So I try to steer clear from it when I recognize the addictive feeling part that comes with it.
An implicit 2nd perspective / idea that is in here that passion does not have to last a life time. In a lot of cases it lasts for a couple of weeks.
I wish I could summon this on demand. It is dangerous, but not as much as one may think. What I discovered thanks to random sparks of passion and frequent cases of procrastination is that a lot of the "rest of your life" is made of time-consuming bullshit and doesn't really need that much of an attention.
I'm in my end student phase. What needs attention for me is: my program, extracurriculars (e.g. a Buddhism class or random CS classes or doing a board), friends, girlfriend (when I have one) and hobbies (if I have one, really depends), sidejobs (when I have one). I have a general passion towards studying a lot, which my friends and especially my previous GF don't appreciate because I don't see them enough (to which I agree, e.g. friends would be once a month).
I do prefer a more balanced motivation that feels like "ah this is a marathon and I'm going to run it one step at a time."
How is passion different from ADHD hyperfocus and why does this sound more like ADHD hyperfocus? I mean, I'd describe this as passion. It might be that I see passion different from a lot of people or everyone has a different idea when they think about passion. Hence the question and curiosity.
Mainly that you said you have never heard anyone talk about passion in this respect as well as the description of ignoring loved ones. Speaking as someone diagnosed with ADHD, I have intense periods of hyperfocus where I can spend days on a topic to the detriment of my wife. It's possible that this is truly passion but over the last few years I've been able to "average" my hyperfocus so I don't go all in as often and then realize later that it may have been a passing notion that I can't sustain indefinitely.
If you're interested, the topic of hyperfocus comes up very often on the ADHD subreddit.
The true key to success is doing something that other people find difficult/objectionable that you are good at and can enjoy or at least tolerate doing.
The word "passion" applied to personal or professional pursuits is loaded, I'd rather use specific tests, for ex I'm "not passionate" enough about programming since I'm not staying any more at 4am writing code for fun, but I'm "passionate" in the sense that in a lazy afternoon I may be reading somebody's blog about programming or fooling around with a new framework/language.
I'm so glad someone finally understands this and that this article has been written. Starting a business is about creating value for others - that's the essence of it - not indulging your "passions". Passions are for your free time.
I envy people whose passion is useful for others. Most of my passions are totally self-centered and will never produce anything anybody else will be interested in. So following my passion would not make any money.
I would much prefer if my passion was to sell things.
That's the fun though, you need to find a balance. I like video games, movies, and reading. On their own, these passions don't add up to much. Recently though, I've found a good blend - I make video essays on topics I like.
I recently made a video on how Kirby Superstar redefined other kirby games. To do that, I had to play some Kirby (video games), analyze it (a bit of critical thinking), write a script (writing), and put together a video (movies).
Of course, doing this isn't as fun as playing a video game or watching a movie, it still takes hard work, but it's a nice blend of things I like and things that other people like. It's going to take a lot of hard work to get even a part-time job out of it, but I'm committed to making a video every single week.
Everybody is "passionate" about some kind of vice or leisure. But you probably have some useful passions buried in there too. It's a waste of braincells to lament how unfair it is that your only passions (drinking & sleeping) are not very marketable skills.
Drinking is a marketable passion - you could become a beer/wine connoisseur, or something like that.
The worse thing that could happen is to discover - like I did - that your passions are in inverse relation with work. I loose positive feelings about programming and start to stress out pretty much immediately when a project starts to feel like an obligation, which makes me 10x less productive at work than on my hobby projects.
The problem with "follow your passion" isn't with techie entrepreneurial types. The problem is the choices inflicted on millions of teenagers and university students by parents who grew up in the anti-scientific 60s and 70s, and who want their children to do arty subjects because they think that to do otherwise is to succumb to the evil capitalist squid, and because they think you still just need to have a degree in any subject from a good university to have a good career in some honorable non-STEM area.
I believe the main driver for "follow your passions" are not anti scientific parents, but scientific parents that regret having wasted their entire life doing something they hated doing like medicine or engineering.
I pursued engineering too, and I love doing certain engineering jobs. But going to work every day IS a drag, and I'm almost never passionate about what I work on for money.
It'd be great if I could work on programming and engineering projects of my own choosing, on things that I think are really interesting. Unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way.
If your kids are smart enough to engineering but aren't drawn to it, and just want to make money, they should pursue medicine or business or finance instead. If you don't care about engineering work, don't go into this field; there's other fields for people who have no passion for their work, and finance is a really big one in the US. You'll make more money, you won't work in a workplace that's a sausagefest, you'll have a much easier and more fun time in college, and you'll get to live in much better cities when you're working.
I don't know. Financial industry is a big bubble in the US right now.
It has been a great ride for those that lived it. But when the bubble pops people are going to handle pitchforks against anything resembling "financial" on its name. Already happened in the 1930s and a little in 2008.
They could study evolutionary biology or particle physics or molecular genetics or like anything in the sciences that has enters a really meaningful intellectual world rather than just being aimed at the private sector. But there are awesome and very honorable things your kids could do with engineering too.
The master skill to develop is discipline. What needs to be done.. needs to be done regardless of how motivated or passionate someone is, or isn't feeling.
There is no easy street, everything is hard, nothing gets easier, you get better at it. There is no arriving and feeling on top of everything if you are always growing. To always be growing you need to make sure the stuff that needs to get done, gets done so you can focus on direction.
In that way, I see it less as passion, and seeing it as no other way to go but forward.
To me, on a personal level success is another word for happiness.
The difference is usually when it comes how others perceive you. People are more liberal at labeling others with success based on various metrics that align with their standards and understanding of success.
Passion may change with the wind and obligations may override passion. IMHO, it's our purpose that keeps most of us going. To me, passion sounds more theoretical than practical :)
Today I read about reinforcement-learning in the wikipedia and The Wealth of Humans: Work and its Absence in the Twenty-first Century. Perhaps both ideas are useful to be successful.
I was going to link to the original comic on picturesforsadchildren.com, but ended up refreshing myself on exactly what happened to John. It's unfortunate that the whole thing ended in such a bizarre way, but hopefully she's happy now: https://killscreen.com/articles/how-disappear-completely-int...
Success is a big word which lacks information. What is success? I doubt enough people can agree on what success is for anyone to talk about it to a wide audience. For many, success is relative to others, but that's worthless because that perspective puts too much focus on the others (even if it's just a little, it's too much).
As Chris Rock said, Bill Gates would kill himself if he had Opera's money. I could feel down because I'm not where I want to be, but then I walk past homeless people on the street and realize I could be in a much worse situation. And the capable homless person might have a homeless friend who just broke a leg and can't walk. Your situation can always get worse until you're dead, in which case you don't care anymore.
We're all just trying to survive in the jungle. Even if it doesn't feel bad for us, it's still someone else's horror show. In the jungle we just have to assess our surroundings and use what we can to keep improving our situation. But we'll still always be in the jungle.
As Bear Grylls says, keep moving. Success is in the small wins that you can rack up every day by the handfulls. It's making a little progress. It's sharpening a stick. It's setting up a shelter. It's building a trap. Just keep moving. Even the failures are wins as those failures carry information.
That's probably not very helpful either. I would make a terrible self help person. ;)