Life is all about costs and benefits. They’re everywhere. For instance, you’d like to go on holiday with your spouse for a week. But you know that if you take time off work, you’ll lose money that you could have saved for an even bigger holiday in the future.
Or suppose that you want a high-powered job. The rewards you get in terms of status are offset by the stress you have to endure.
Or suppose that you want to enjoy an ice cream with your family. You can eat it, but if you do it regularly, you’ll gain weight and lose fitness.
What a shame we can’t have our cakes and eat them too!
Nowhere is the phenomenon of costs and benefits more apparent than in the world of work. When it comes to earning money, sacrifice is the name of the game. For the vast majority of people, the effort you put in is equal to the reward you get out. We can’t all be multi-millionaire actors, business tycoons, and authors. Somebody has to do the grunt work, dedicating their time to delivering real products and services to customers.
Following Your Passions
Motivational speakers like to implore people to follow their passions. Why they do this is obvious: everybody would like a career that ties in with their interests. It’s a natural human need to want to combine your work with something you love.
The great thing about the modern economy is that there are opportunities to do this. If you love photography, you can become a professional photographer. If you love writing, then there are thousands of businesses who need your writing skills. And if you are somebody who loves to cook, then restaurants will always need chefs.
Following your passions is possible. But it’s also fraught with difficulty. Let’s take the example of a writer. Okay, sure, you could dedicate your writing talents to producing content for hair salons and dog grooming parlors. But when you imagined yourself as a writer, did you think that that would be how you spent your days? Unlikely.
Similarly, if you love cooking, did you see yourself flipping burgers in a sleazy diner? Again, unlikely. Following your passion is great if things work out. But for the majority of people, it ’doesn’t. We all know budding authors who make ends meet by working as baristas.
The Problem With Passion Industries
The core problem with passion industries, like acting, writing, and even entrepreneurship, is that the chances of success are minimal. There are millions of people gunning for victory in these areas who we never see and never hear about. Thousands of actors never get their lucky break. Tens of thousands of entrepreneurs go out of business before anybody even hears about them. It’s a travesty of epic proportions, but also a fact of life.
Motivational speakers don’t seem to understand this aspect of pursuing one’s passions. Most people fail. What’s more, for many, it doesn’t matter how hard they work. A chance meeting here or a lucky break there is all that matters – not whether they are particularly skilled.
The world is full of hidden geniuses working quietly behind the scenes, trying to grab the attention of agents. But probabilities being what they are, almost all of them will fade away into nothingness.
Is Following The Money Any Better?
Following your passions is likely to result in failure, even if the rewards for success are enormous. (If he hadn’t blown all his money, Johnny Depp would be worth over $500 million). Success is also vanishingly rare. A few actors make it; the bulk do not.
The same is not true, for instance, in medicine. One person with a degree in nursing is likely to earn pretty much the same as another. There aren’t legions of nurses floating around working at coffee shops to pursue their passion for nursing – if you get the right education, an income is practically guaranteed.
Following the money isn’t about going all out to get a job in a passion industry. It’s about compromising on those passions and going into sectors where you’re much more likely to earn an average wage. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Here’s a list of boring jobs that pay well that the economy needs:
- Accountants
- Surveyors
- Management consultants
- Business analysts
- Cisco engineers
- Data scientists
- Programmers
Do you notice anything about these professions? The people in them all pretty much earn the same. You don’t often see accountants or Cisco engineers out on the streets, guitar in hand, asking people for money. Their jobs give them sufficient income to run their lives in a dignified manner.
The top accountants might earn six figures. The worst accountants might make five. No accountants are earning eight figures – like some pop stars or actors – because their work isn’t scalable. An accountant’s pay is roughly proportional to the time spent on client work. One accountant can’t service the needs of fifty customers at once.
You Have A Choice: Passion Versus Money
So whether you follow your passions or the money is essentially a choice. After having read this criticism, you’re in a better position to make that choice. You can follow your passions and hope that you’re one of the 0.1 percent, which makes it. Or you can follow the money and be one of the 80 percent who does okay.
It’s up to you what you want to do, but don’t go into a passion industry, thinking that success is just around the corner. It’s not. And only a fool would think otherwise. If you decide to play the game, you go in with a mentality which says that success is a bonus. You’re doing it for the music, the art, the creativity, and the love. You’re not doing it for the fame, the adoration of fans, or even the gratification of success. Be dispassionate about your passions. See them for what they are. Observe the statistics. Failure is almost certainly guaranteed.