Myths and Realities “do What You Love”
One of the issues that is constantly discussed in books and articles about choosing a career is the idea of ”doing what you love.” Should a person “follow their passion” as the best guide in their career? Or does it make sense to choose a career based on income and ability?
This post was originally published on The Simple Dollar .
Each path has its own pros and cons. Pursuing your passion means that you will generally spend a significant portion of your work day doing what you really enjoy doing. However, these positions often have low average wages (although high performing employees often receive high awards).
On the other hand, choosing a career based on average income and your personal ability will lead you to high-income jobs and a career ladder that you are naturally suited for, but ultimately you will not be able to enjoy your job or your career. generally.
My own life has been full of contradictions between these two paths.
When I first went to college, I studied what I had been passionate about my entire life: biology. In high school, I really enjoyed three classes – math, English and biology – and felt that the job I could do with a biology degree would be incredibly enjoyable. I wasn’t particularly worried about the salary.
As I actually made my way towards my degree, I found an excellent mentor who inspired me to combine my passion for biology with computer science, which somewhat affected my interest in mathematics.
This led to the fact that right after graduation I got a job that I really liked, and I would still work if it still existed. I was tasked with organizing data for a group of researchers so that researchers from similar disciplines can easily exchange data with each other. It was an incredibly enjoyable job and I found it very rewarding. The salary was good, but not high, but I liked the job so much that I did not mind. I solved interesting problems every single day and felt that my work was actually helping others solve interesting problems.
Unfortunately, the contract for this initial job had expired, but I had advance notice of the end of the job, so I spent some time preparing for the next stage of my career, developing the necessary skills and obtaining certificates . I didn’t like it, but I had a vision of continuing the work that I love.
At that time, I had a long-term full-time job that paid very well and outwardly was very similar to what I had done before. Great, right? Well, it turns out that the job actually involved a lot of bureaucracy and maintenance, and didn’t solve any interesting problems.
In short, it went from being something I loved to something I was afraid of.
From that moment on, I began to spend my free time pursuing my other great passion – writing. Remember when I mentioned that English was one of my favorite subjects in high school? In my free time, I started writing. I started several blogs. I have drafted several novels, including a novel called Rings of Saturn, which I actually sent out to publishers and received positive reviews (it was a story about two very competitive brothers in an era, shortly in the future, when we started developing different parts of the solar system for resources).
What happened? One of the blogs went viral – in fact, The Simple Dollar is the successor to that very website right now . The Simple Dollar started out as an exercise in writing my own experience trying to turn our finance ship, and it eventually morphed into a website with a million monthly visitors, with traffic and moderation requirements far beyond my personal capacity that I can. manage in your spare time.
So I started working full time on board. Eventually, I started hiring moderation and server management tasks to keep focusing on what I liked (writing), but over time it became more than I wanted, so I sold the ownership of the site and signed up to do just that. what I liked was the writing.
Today you can easily say that I “do what I love” writing for The Simple Dollar. I write almost every day and I love it. I have great conversations with readers – I get tons of Facebook posts with great questions and ideas every single day. I have a flexible schedule that allows me to work from home and be there every day when my children return from school. I earn quite well (perhaps due to the fact that my tastes are quite simple). It’s not exactly what I’ve always dreamed of doing – I’ve always had a vision of “writers” who would write conferences, write novels, and the like – but it’s a pretty good way to do what I love to do.
Having gone through both sides of the question, I can say without a doubt that there are great advantages in doing what you love, as well as great advantages in focusing on salary and skills. There are also many myths about both directions. Here are seven truths that I have discovered on this subject first hand over the years, and I want to share them with anyone who is trying to figure out whether to follow their passions or follow their money.
Truth # 1: You can do what you love and make a decent living doing it
Never, never, never let anyone tell you that you cannot do what you love and earn a decent income for a living. You can; I did it like many other people.
So why isn’t everyone doing it?
The main reason is that this is not a guaranteed path at all. A job that allows you to do what you love and pays well usually has a very high qualification threshold, and there are usually not many such positions. Often times you have to “do your job” through entrepreneurship or self-employment to do what you love, which means figuring out how to get someone to pay you for what you want to do, which is difficult in every respect. situations and very difficult when your area of interest is not widely profitable or popular.
When you choose a high-paying career , there are usually tons of job openings. It’s much easier to find a job that puts money in your pocket just with a little work.
Another reason is that it takes “toughness” and a work ethic. A person may be very fond of writing about personal finance, but how about writing about personal finance for several hours a day, every single day, for many years? Even assuming you still love it after all this (which is a question we’ll discuss later), do you have a work ethic to really stick with it in order to stand out enough to make a decent living? Many don’t.
Many people have personal passions, but they do not have the inner “stamina” required to do it every single day, until they hone their skills and personal assets to perfection. Many, many people begin to pursue their passion, but do not have the “determination” to see it through until they can earn a decent living from it, which is rarely instantaneous and usually requires hours of commitment at low wages.
By my estimates, I spent several thousand hours trying to make money from writing before I made more than a penny. I have tried to write carefully edited and carefully composed works of fiction and documentary of all kinds. I also tried to write memoirs and train of thought. Eventually I realized that I had a talent for a special taste for half memoir articles, half advice that I could write quickly and relatively well — the kind of things you’re reading right now. Is the writing great, like what you find in The New Yorker ? No, and I do not claim that this is so. Is it serious, clear, helpful and does it always contain new topics and thoughts? This is what I’m aiming for. It took a long time to find this niche and a long time to figure out how to do it well, and during the process it didn’t make a lot of money.
You can do what you love. It just doesn’t offer easy entry points like many career paths.
Truth # 2: No Job Is 100 Percent Do What You Love
I love my job right now. I spend most of my day reading, researching and writing, and I enjoy all of that. I can be flexible in spending time with my children. It’s great.
This does not mean that everything is perfect. Sometimes I get really worried about the timing. Before the trip, I need to write everything before leaving. I have to do interviews with the media, some of which I like, some end up in an awkward political or social direction, which makes me hang up and pretend it never happened. Sometimes I have to deal with word limits, although I have almost unlimited freedom in terms of the topics and ideas that I express. I’ve read A LOT of emails, many of which I love, but many of them are either frustrating or disappointing. Self-employed taxes are at times disappointing to say the least. Writing congestion can be a nightmare.
There is no job that is 100% “doing what you love”.
Let me repeat this.
There is no job that is 100% “doing what you love”.
The world’s most famous writer still deals with agents, publishers and the like. Models and movie stars are often unable to leave their homes without being approached by photographers, the media and overzealous fans. Jobs, self-employment, and microbusiness all require taxes, paperwork, conference calling, and negotiation.
When you choose to “do what you love,” you are actually saying that you are choosing a job that spends a portion of your time — ideally a significant portion of your time — on doing what you love to do. You will never find a job that is just what you love to do, and if you stick to that goal, you will always be disappointed.
What I “love to do” is to write without deadlines or pressure, so if I face a writer’s block or my muse just isn’t there, it doesn’t really matter. Such work does not really exist unless you have already achieved financial independence or have no other source of income, at which point it looks more like a hobby than a “job.”
Whatever you do, there are tasks that you will not enjoy. There is pressure that will put pressure on you. There are deadlines and contractual obligations.
So what’s the point? I tend to view these “unpleasant” things as my real job. In the days when writing was fun and free, I did it for free. I get paid for the time when it is difficult, or when I go through an interview, draw up paperwork, documentation or other things that are not enjoyable. After all, an ideal job is one that pays reasonably well with the least amount of time spent doing things you don’t want to do. “The job you love” is almost always accompanied by a thread.
Truth # 3: the best way to start doing what you love is with a side gig
The two jobs that I liked the most in my life started with part-time jobs.
When I was in college, I worked for a professor, solving problems that I solved in my first “real” job. It was secondary to my studies rather than my full-time work, but I worked so long and so hard in this job that the professor ended up strongly recommending me for a “real” job, doing similar things after graduation.
At that time, my ongoing commitment was to study, which honestly prepared me for another career. My part-time job worked for this professor. It turned out that I enjoyed working on the side gig and ended up doing this on a full-time basis for many years.
Later in my professional life, I spent my free time writing and creating Simple Dollar. It was a side event to my ongoing job, which I discussed above, not my ongoing focus, but I worked so long and so hard on The Simple Dollar that it ended up being a pretty good success, just enough to make it became my full time job.
My regular job as Plain Dollar grew was a completely different job, but I loved (and still love) writing for Plain Dollar.
In both cases, I spent all my time on one thing, and some of my free time was devoted to “side work”. The side concert in both cases was what I was most passionate about – solving some very interesting problems in the first case and writing in the second case. My constant efforts were centered around something that either brought me a solid income or made me do it, but they were not as interesting to me as the side gigs.
Together, these two experiences taught me something very valuable: It makes a lot of sense to pursue passion as a side job. There are two important reasons for this.
Truth # 4: you will probably lose a lot at first
When I was in college, I tried part-time jobs in various fields. Some of them were clearly part-time jobs to make money, but some were jobs with professors who were in areas that interested me. I worked in a plant pathology laboratory. I worked as a kind of understudy for an IT specialist. I did tech support for the convention. These things were interesting, but none of them impressed me – and at least a couple of these things I did not do well at all. It wasn’t until I started working for the previously mentioned professor that I actually found something that amazed me.
Likewise, in my spare time later in my career, I tried a variety of side performances that seemed to fit my hobbies. I started computer consulting. I started several blogs, including the parent one. I played online poker (actually I was good at it, but then the legality of it was questioned, and I did not want to build a career on it). Most of these things have failed – I would call online poker a semi-success along with a parenting blog. However, there was no real success until The Simple Dollar took off.
I have failed countless side appearances in my life, far more than I have ever succeeded. And this is completely normal. I would even call it normal.
The point is, if I completely dropped all caution and followed any of these passions all the time, in most of these situations, it would be a complete failure. I would try my best to put food on the table or keep a roof over my head. I would perhaps settle for half-successes, keep promoting them mediocre and never really succeed.
Leaving them as part-time side appearances gave me the opportunity to fail and move on to other performances. This gave me the opportunity to try different approaches, learn from failures and apply those lessons in the next follow-up gig.
Truth # 5: Train for a High Paying Career First You May Enjoy a Little To Support Side Jobs
Of course, here in the real world, most of us have people to support. We need to keep food on the table, clothes on our backs, and a roof over our heads, both for ourselves and probably for others – children, spouses, parents, and possibly others. The vast majority of people also do not have a source of income from their parents that they could count on.
If you belong to this group of people, which means that you have no income or wealth to count on if something falls apart, it makes sense to prepare for a high-paying career that you might enjoy somewhat. rather than focus solely on “doing what you love.” Save “do what you love” for side appearances.
There are many reasons for this. First, if you have a well-paid main career, you can financially support just about any side gig you might want to work in. For example, you might want to become a software engineer to support your side gig as an additional novelist. You might want to become a lawyer to support your side project as a board game designer. You may want to become an actuary to support your parallel poetry recital.
This allows you to explore this side gig without first having to make money from it. Your goal is solely to gain experience and learn the craft as you don’t have to put food on the table (yet) to do so.
Better yet, you can fail over and over again. You can try experimental approaches and take risks, and if that doesn’t work, you won’t be putting yourself and your family out on the street. Instead, you will simply gain valuable experience and ideas for your next try.
If you are smart about calculating your income, you can plan ahead for retirement or partial retirement much earlier than the average person, which will then allow you to do side jobs on a full-time basis.
Truth # 6: What really pushes is usually different from what you originally envisioned
If you had told me 15 years ago that I will spend a significant part of his adult life to articles about personal finance, I would never, never would have believed you.
I could believe you if you just said I was a writer, but if you added “personal finance” I would think it was a farce. Writer? Sounds cool. Personal finance writer? To me? Ha! It’s funny how things work out sometimes.
It was the same when I was in college. I’ve written tons of computer code to solve some very interesting problems, and I’ve been doing it professionally for several years now. If I had described all this to myself at a younger age, I would not have believed that I would have done so. Writing software? Maybe. The solution to similar problems? Not a single chance. Again, it’s funny how things turn out sometimes.
The number one key to doing what you love is to open up your horizons as much as possible and try many things, even if they seem completely strange or completely different from what you dreamed of.
Sometimes you will find that exactly what you have always dreamed of, such as being a science fiction or fantasy writer, does not work out the way you dreamed. However, if you stick to the parts you like – like the writing routine and the pleasure of touching people’s lives – and try different points of view on those parts – like writing about personal finances in a very humane manner – you can sometimes be successful. that you could never dream of, that allows you to do what you love in a completely different way.
Truth # 7: You Can Stop Loving What You Love, So Keep Trying New Side Gigs
Even now, although I do what I love as my regular job, I dabble in side appearances based on my various hobbies and interests. I do this to make some money and research deeply what I like and I have found success here and there in the things I have tried.
However, the real reason I keep dabbling is because there is always the risk that I will fall out of love with writing for The Simple Dollar, and when that happens, my current job will become unbearable. When you spend a significant portion of your waking time doing something that makes you feel unhappy, then your entire life will experience an unhealthy dose of that feeling.
I am still writing science fiction and I am also into fantasy. I have written mobile apps. I’ve worked on podcasts and YouTube channels. I’ve done all of these as side appearances ever since I started The Simple Dollar.
Have any of them been unconditional successes? No. Have they allowed me to pursue what I am passionate about, discover how deep that passion is, and learn about new approaches for the future? Absolutely.
Never stop chatting. Never stop trying new things. Even if you think you have found the very best, never stop experimenting and digging into areas that you really like and really care about.
Final thoughts
In fact, you can “do what you love,” but betting on it from day one may not be the best approach. Instead, take a more measured approach – give yourself a foundation to stand on and allow you to fail without devastating your life. You can pull yourself together, learn from failure, and move on to try new things and new approaches.
Sometimes, if everything falls into place just right, you can do what you love, particularly financial security. This is the best route I have found to get there.
Myths and Reality “Do what you love” | Simple dollar