Find your passion and you’ll never work a day in your life.
How many times have you heard the statement above? The problem is, it’s easy to say it but much harder to actually do.
The Unrealistic Expectations
The point in time when we’re supposed to find our passion is usually when you’re 17 years old, living with your parents, madly in love with a high school sweetheart. And now you are expected to make a decision on what to do for the rest of your life and hopefully, you are so passionate about it that you never work a day in your life. Absolute bullshit.
Then you also have many helpful people in your life - who have great advice, but arguably they aren’t happy either and they are trying to fulfil their dreams through your life, a type of second chance if I may say so.
The Misleading Advice
The other option is you are sent for an aptitude test at some lady’s house and after painstakingly answering 100’s of questions all the while having something at the back of your head you’re actually “supposed to do” according to your board of advice givers, and you answer the questions “in the right way” to make sure you don’t disappoint.
You go through all of this pain because you KNOW that you HAVE to have a degree behind your name, otherwise you will definitely be a FAILURE.
But if you have spent just a little while in the real world, you soon realise the people living their dreams, changing the world, and who are all-around happy are usually the ones who dropped out of college, who pursued their dreams and took the unbeaten path of not actually studying OR they did study and now they are not doing what they studied to do at all.
So I think it’s incredibly unfair to expect that a 17-year-old should know what they are passionate about and what they want to do for the rest of their life.
My Journey
I studied engineering because I love building things, and I have loved it ever since I was small. At first, it started with breaking things (my mother will testify) and trying to put them back together, but later on, you start realising how things work and how they can be repurposed to make new things or fix things.
So obviously any observer who sees this, would think “ah, you need to become an engineer,” and from a very young age, you start hearing this and very soon you believe this. You spend 12 years at school, studying very hard to get great marks, because you need to get into university to start doing what you’re passionate about. Then you get into university - and you wait and wait to start doing what you’re passionate about while you learn to consume tons of information and regurgitate the theory of what you can do. A lot of hard work, but not a lot of passion, but you console yourself, because once you start working, then it will be practical and you’re gonna do the fun things.
Then you go to your first job (which wasn’t your first choice, you know the one where you would be building rockets and changing the world, but only about 1 in a million engineers get the opportunity to do). And a month or two in you realise - oh shit. When are you going to start doing the awesome things I was promised? All of a sudden you have a boss who just wants you to do your little part in pursuing their dream. Nothing more, nothing less. Take your pay check, go home and come back tomorrow. But please don’t have any ambition or dreams. We don’t want passion here, we want obedience.
The Realisation
Fast forward 4 years and I have:
- Quit my job and burnt those bridges (turns out I’m not very obedient)
- Started my own business (it’s just building things and using tools and resources to get to an end goal)
- Being an online business, every now and again I identified shortcomings in the software available and opportunities where the business can be optimised by building custom solutions.
- So in the last 18 months, I have been teaching myself to program in TypeScript and building software that fixes problems for myself and other people.
- And I believe after 29 years I have discovered what I am passionate about.
In the first year of engineering, we had a programming course for 1 semester where we studied an “old” programming language C++. It’s not the most popular language, but it taught you the fundamentals of programming.
Then we used programming here and there throughout our engineering degree and I used it for a few personal projects (building automatic watering systems for a garden in my residence room).
But if I knew when I was 17 that this is what I would end up wanting to do every single day, would I really have spent 4 years at university studying a degree that in the end I am not using at all?
Yes, it’s true that engineering introduced me to programming and engineering “taught me to think,” another great reason/excuse people use to say why you need to go and study.
But going to university was a painfully slow download of information, where I could have learned what I need to know much faster by using YouTube/Twitter/Podcasts much faster from people IN THE ARENA and not following the advice of bystanders who, not at fault of their own, also really don’t know what advice to actually give you.
My Advice
So what’s my advice? How would I do it differently?
- I wouldn’t tell people that they absolutely HAVE to have a degree, it is simply not true.
- I would encourage you to work in the real world for a while and try a few things before deciding what you want to do. (And yes, that means a gap year or two is fine). And I don’t mean going on a paid holiday around the world. I mean, go get a job, work for someone, do research, try new things, get a service job and get some experience working with people and selling things.
- And if you find yourself somewhere along the line really enjoying something, then figure out how you can continue doing it and also get some monetary reward for doing it and then you truly won’t work another day in your life.
- Not knowing what you are going to do for a few years is much better than not knowing how you are going to continue doing what you are doing for the rest of your life. Re-read that sentence, I’m not sure you understood the weight of that sentence.