Following Your Passion Is Not a Privilege

A lot of people who claim to be realistic always advise people to ignore advice that is telling them to follow their passions but this is also the worst advice anyone can ever give to someone.

I know this because I was once the type that didn’t believe in following my passions. I was a sucker for convention and most of my friends were as well. Following my passion seemed irresponsible and inconsiderate and I thought the best way to not be these things is to follow the already given path.

I quickly realized that following convention rather than passions and expecting everyone to do so was the most unrealistic thing ever. This unrealistic expectation reminded me of a quote that is falsely attributed to Albert Einstein.

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”

Whoever said this has a truth that is always ignored. Mark Cuban is one of the people who have been known to advise people against following their passions calling this advice one of the greatest lies.

Following Passion or Following Strength

Mark advises people to follow their strengths rather than following their passions. Something gets me wondering, however… You can build strength in areas that you are passionate about but can you build passion in your areas of strength?

People who are passionate about something are always filled with great enthusiasm. This avails them with a massive amount of energy to channel into things they care about. They will normally be willing to go an extra step to make their product perfect. Passion also makes them curious and willing to explore the unknown domains of things they care about. They may not have that area as their strength but in the end, they can turn it into one.

Focussing on your strength on the other hand is also good but that is if you know what your strengths are. Many of us doubt ourselves much more than we can care to admit and our strengths if known might not offer a clear course of action for us. If you are good at many things, there is a tendency to try to do all of them simply because you can do them.

My friends have told me that art and music come naturally to me meaning these are my strengths. But whenever I draw or compose music, it leaves me feeling really tired and uninspired. Art and music depress my energy levels a lot but they are my strengths because they come naturally to me. Something that doesn’t come naturally to me but is rather very passionate about is engineering and computer science.

I can sit for several hours thinking about complex algorithms and how to write them. When I write an algorithm perfectly, I delete the entire thing and try to write it again or I open up Microsoft word and use it as my IDE to re-write that code from memory. Many times I get them wrong and it frustrates me but I keep getting back up and trying again something that I do not do when I compose a song or paint a portrait I don’t really like.

I am a civil engineer and that too gets me pumped when I have to calculate things like designs for steel structures. When I do these things that I am passionate about, at the end of the day I find myself filled with energy but that is not the same when I do things that come easy to me.

My strengths drain my energy but my passions fill me with more of it. I have found that I have increasingly become better at analytical problem-solving thanks to programming. This is an acquired strength of mine rather than a natural one.

I have over 200 songs composed and people have told me to release them but becoming a musician would probably mean that I would have to resort to something to bring my energy levels back to normal all the time and that scares me.

I think there is a need to monitor what drains your energy and what doesn’t. Passion and strength are both equally good if you commit to showing up every day. But things that depress your energy levels have to be a very small part of your life and if you somehow manage to make them you’re normal, then you risk more than just your happiness.

Why Following Your Passion Is Not Irresponsible

Simply put, you must prioritize yourself. I do not mean that you become selfish and self-centered but I mean that you must make sure you do what’s good for you.

Many people think that you cannot have passion for working a 9–5 but that is just not true. There are many people who love their jobs so much that they would never see themselves leaving. For those people, that is where their passion lies.

There are those who also have no business being in a 9–5. When these people find themselves in such jobs, they not only lack the enthusiasm to do their job right but they also project their frustrations upon other people.

People don’t need handouts neither do they just need money. They may think they do which is why they take the jobs to meet their basic needs. But once that is done, there are other needs that need to be taken care of as well if they are to fill fulfilled.

People need a purpose for example to feel like they are working towards and contributing towards something important. This desire never stops and following it leads to different levels of self-actualization. Ignoring this puts a lot of stress on your being and a feeling of emptiness that you can never fulfill with money or other areas you think are responsible and realistic.

Jeff Bezos(Founder of Amazon) calls this regret minimization.

The idea being that at your death bed you do not want to have a lot of regret for not trying to do things that you wanted to do and settled for less. This is one of the factors that drove him to quit his well-paying job at D.E. Shaw to start amazon.

I doubt that he was a good salesman. But he was passionate about the vision of making his business work.

Following your passion is not irresponsible. What is irresponsible is neglecting your own internal guidance system to make a worthwhile contribution to society just because you are rooted in delusions of being realistic and responsible.

Following Your Passion Isn’t A Smooth Sail

Unless you are faking passion because you think that it is your way to fast riches, no one ever thinks that passion is easy.

Take fine artists for example. They still go into art even though a lot of people still believe that there is no money to be made in art. This means that these people anticipate a lot of hardships that they know they will have to deal with on their journey.

People who think that following their passions is easy are the wrong test group for what passion really is.

There is nothing easy about the hero’s journey which is what following your passion is really like. It is filled with doubt, conflict, and problem-solving the entire time and no one ever guarantees that you will actually ever make it to the end and if you do the only guarantee is that you will never be the same.

It is common to nowadays confuse shiny object fever with passion. I have seen YouTubers who aren’t passionate about making money online yet they keep faking passion and posting those videos on youtube because they have higher CPMs and RPMs.

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One of the hardest decisions you will ever make is to truly follow your passion. Let’s not try to think that we all do. The call to go for your passion is subtle. And in a world where a lot of shiny stuff is trying to capture our attention, it is even harder to identify what we are or what we aren’t passionate about.

Thinking that you are passionate about something doesn’t guarantee that you are. We have tools at our disposal to find out and follow what we are passionate about and they all sum up to feeling good and energized about the contributions we are making in the world. Following your internal guidance system can help you realize what those contributions are.

Passion is likely not going to be one thing alone because your actualization requires a more holistic view of the world you leave in. Curiosity will lead you into different fields of passion to contribute to the overall passion.

Your passion is not rooted in materialistic desires like money or the desire to impress your crush and so on. These may be motivating factors to push you out of your comfort zone but passion is free of these perversions because, with it, you are being led to your own actualization.

Your natural strengths will only guide you along the way. I look at them as the tools I need on my journey to realizing my passion. People and resources will be available to you if they are needed in your journey. Whether it is money you seek, through your passion, you will make more than you need all while building and improving your character.

The limits that society puts on you through expectations and systems do not define you. They are regulations or support systems that may serve you but if you realize that they no longer serve you, it’s up to you to find what does because the bigger picture is not to find bread money but rather to improve and expand the nature of your being.

Following your passion is therefore not a privilege but your responsibility to yourself and everyone or everything that will benefit from your journey.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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