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"Follow Your Passion" is Terrible Advice

A very famous quote, which the internet people like a lot. The idea is to focus on your passion. Doing what you love sounds nice, doesn’t it? You spend your “work” hours doing fun stuff, enjoying life, and get a massive paycheck at the end of every month. That’s the dream career for most of us; getting privileges with no real input or hard work.

Well, I disagree.

When people say, “Follow your passion”, half of them do not understand what they are talking about, and the other half don’t even follow this advice in their own lives.

Before you drop roasts in the comments, let me vindicate my opinion.

First, we must ask ourselves “What is passion?”

Passion means different things for different people and there are as many perspectives on what passion is as there are people on this planet.

But the Urban Dictionary defines passion as “Ambition that is materialized into action to as much heart, mind, and body into something as is possible.”

Isn’t this too vague? You don’t have an objective way of looking at passion, dictionaries don’t help here. Answer the following question honestly:

How many of you know what passion means to you and what your true passion is?

An average human spends almost 40-60 years working and earning to sustain themselves and others dependent on them. Most of them don’t really follow their passion, and yet they are doing just fine. 
I’m sure even Elon Musk’s passion wasn’t sleeping in a factory and working 90+ hours a week.
The problem is passion, in the real world, is non-existent. There isn’t a thing called ‘Passion’.


Let me paint you a picture, you have been taking dance lessons since you were a kid, you were exceptional at dancing, you have what people call "dancer legs” and whenever you go out clubbing, you set the stage on fire. I’m assuming your “passion” would be dance in this case.

Let’s take another scenario into consideration, you are 17, and you love to write. You write on Wattpad and also have a blog on the internet. You got A+ on all your English tests, and your friends call you the Shakespeare of the group. Here, your “passion” is likely to be writing, isn’t it?

What I am trying to get at, is that people call anything they are good at, “passion”

Doing what you love is one thing, but people only enjoy the reward attached to it. If you are a coder, you enjoy it when your app works without bugs, but you probably hate the sleepless nights you had to spend debugging thousands of lines of code.

Nobody loves hard work. We work because we enjoy the reward that comes after we put the work in.

That is how our brains are wired. We enjoy rewards and form our activities around them.

And even if passion was a real thing, how do people expect that finding your passion is an easy task, especially when you are a teenager. 

There are 40-year-olds who still don’t know what to do with their lives, but we somehow expect 16-year-old teenagers, who drink Tide Pods for a dare on the internet, to figure what their passion is.

If you wanted to find your “true passion” you would have to try every career path first and then choose one. That’s unrealistic. Therefore, when you decide on what your passion is, you do so with only half the picture painted to you.

Now that I have presented my perspective on why passion is BS; I’d like to offer a solution.

Follow your skills. Look for things you are naturally good at. If you put more effort into that, you’ll be better off. And as a teenager, if you don’t feel there’s anything, you’re good at (which happens to a lot of us), aim for stability. Don’t become a singer just because you love to sing in the shower.

If you’re not exceptionally good at whatever you do, you’ll stay mediocre for the rest of your life.
Figure out what you’re good at. Cause you’ll enjoy the rewards that come with it, and there’s a good chance there’s where your interests will be.

So, instead of quoting famous people on the internet, work on improving your skills so you have a future where you can do what you love-enjoy life.

Cerca Trova people!

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