Once upon a time, there is popular advice to follow your passion professionally. “Do what you love, and you will never have to work for a day” or something like that. Now, there is a trend saying, “don’t follow your passion, follow the money.” Or even, “following your passion is wrong!”
So, the question is to follow or not to follow? My answer? It’s both.
For me, the most significant misunderstanding here is a failure to understand that there is no single unifying formula in social sciences.
Human tends to romanticize a single answer for every problem. However, it’s just our laziness talking. People also have another weird tendency of dichotomy on different opinions.
Even if you can find a single formula, the variables of our relevant social aspect are too much to be quantified and too many to consider. For example, let’s say there is a young man named Goat. Yes, he has a weird name. Don’t judge him by his name, please!
Goat is a great writer, and he’s graduated from an English Literature major. There is also a young woman, Horse, who’s an English Literature student. Will Horse become a great writer too just because she has the same formal education as Goat?
I think a sane person will answer “no.” Why? Because there are so many hidden variables that lead Goat to become a great writer.
Hypothetically, if we can clone a baby (to make them biologically identical) and make those two babies walk the same path, every decision even the smallest one (from education, friends, parents, even clothing), will they have the same job?
Let’s get back to the ‘passion’ before Goat and Horse have a baby.
One of the arguments from the people who’s against following our passion is that most people don’t even know their love. How come we pursue something that we don’t know? I agree with this, actually, but there is no deadline for finding your passion.
Since I am a practical person, I think the bottom line of the debate is this: “what is the relevance of following our passion for our happiness?”
For me, to be happy, I just need to fulfill two kinds of needs: emotional and financial.
If you follow the money with your job, make sure it has enough money to buy your emotional needs. Yes, I think it’s possible to buy your emotional needs. You can even buy love if you know the tricks.
On the other side, if you follow your passion for your job, make sure it has enough money to fulfill your financial needs. Don’t be a burden for everyone around you.
Another workaround is to do your paying job as good as possible, while also being productive about your passion.
My passion is writing about these kinds of ‘crazy random’ things or what I called ‘playing with life.’
However, since I’ve tried this before and I can’t make enough money to live from this, I have to work for another company.
I will try to write this kind of writing in my spare time and who knows if I could get lucky.
Even if I don’t get lucky, I’m not afraid to lose my current job since I do it wholeheartedly.
Finally, I believe following your passion and following the money are not mutually exclusive.
You could either use the money to purchase your passion or use passion to get money. Better yet, you could pursue them both if you want…
