When Should You Follow Your Passion?

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Is it wise to follow your passion in life? 

Some people say “yes.” Some people say “no.” I say, “it depends on where you are in life!”

There’s no question that, at some point in your life at least, you will want to pursue your passion. The answer as to “when?” varies widely based on what your passion is, your financial situation and trajectory, and the relationship of your passion to the economy.

Offering highly generalized life advice is always tricky, so take this all with a grain of salt. 

For some people, life as a starving artist or an austere spiritual devotee can be a completely legitimate way of life and can offer everything necessary for a fulfilling life. For most, though, a fulfilling life will involve balancing financial necessity with everything else you care about and want to do. So, answering the question about whether you should pursue your passion requires a lot of nuanced information and analysis. 

That being said, there are 3 general phases in any journey towards optimal living.

1. When you are figuring out what you want to do.

2. When you are working towards being able to do what you want to do.

3. When you are actually doing what you want to do.

The question is not so much “what do I want to do?” but rather “what do I feel compelled to do?” You see, “wanting” is just too unreliable of a measure for such a serious situation. We may want a lot of things in life, right?—many that are completely bad for us—but we feel compelled rarely and only in special situations and moments.

Much of the challenge of life is in figuring out how to tell the difference between what you think you want and what you actually want. 

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How can you know though?

The worst possible idea is to go through life completely ignoring the question. You’re almost guaranteed to confine yourself to a life of misery, frustration, and regret. If there’s one thing you have to do in this life, it is to reckon with yourself. That entails getting real about what you actually want and what you feel compelled to do. 

The mistake that most people make is believing you can only be happy in Phase 3 but that’s not true at all. In fact, in our world very few people ever make it to Phase 3, so it’s absolutely crazy to believe that you can only be happy there. No, you can and should learn how to be happy in all 3 Phases. More on this later.

In my view, optimal living is about finding your vocation. I’m not in the camp of those who think that the ideal life is one of leisure. I also don’t believe in work for work’s sake. No, I believe that work is necessary but it has to be work that is meaningful and psychologically invigorating, work that allows you to express the true nature of yourself in the service of the greater good.

To be sure, finding your vocation can be a difficult process. Where do you even start? How can you ever know what you’re supposed to do in this life? This is where passion comes in. Sometimes it’s obvious what to do. For those drawn to service-oriented endeavors like teaching or medicine or those who are exceptionally gifted with music or athletics, passion often turns directly into an economically viable vocation. For many though, the connection is not as clear and passion functions more like a clue. 

I’ll give you an example from real life. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been passionate about reading. Over the years, I’ve read thousands of books and countless more essays, poems, plays, and articles. Even now, I spend several hours a day reading, 7 days a week, no matter what. While there’s value in reading for reading’s sake, it wasn’t until I started writing Profit+ that I realized the true nature of this passion:

My love for reading was a calling to be a writer. Ultimately, I wasn’t just reading to enjoy myself or learn new things—though I did just that—I was reading to prepare myself to be a writer.  

As is often the case in life, things make a lot more sense when you are looking backward. But interestingly, I had gotten to this point in my life in my mid-30’s where I had a phenomenally disciplined reading practice. I would read 50-60 books a year and spend hours taking notes and writing elaborate summaries, which I would then file away in my computer and share with precisely no one! I still loved the reading, of course, but something about this process was making me feel empty and I kept wondering to myself “what’s the point of all this?”  

Almost the moment I hit send on my first Profit+ issue it all made sense. The emptiness I was feeling was a product of my not following through all the way on this calling. For me, it wasn’t enough to just read; I had to write and share with others.

The lesson here is that to find your vocation, you have to engage with and experiment with your passions, handling your obligations to life along the way, until you figure it all out. 

In the ideal life arc, you figure out exactly what you want to do as soon as possible, ideally before you ever start working. That way, you waste as little time as possible in life and can engage in your life’s work, more or less, from start to finish. But let’s be honest: this almost never happens! Occasionally, you’ll run across that lucky soul who seems to have everything figured out and is busy doing exactly what they were born to do. But for the rest of us, there’s compromise and mistakes along the way.

What I’ve noticed is that many people start their journeys in roughly the right direction. They will actually pay attention to themselves and follow through on some passion or interest they have while still in school or early in their career. But, while they take some proactive steps towards the optimal life, they don’t quite get it right. Out of necessity or mistake, they compromise and don’t do precisely what they really feel compelled to do. Then some crisis comes along in midlife that makes them see more clearly what they should actually be doing. This moment in life is beyond important—making the right choice here is existential to your happiness and sense of fulfillment in later life. Anyway, this is what Carl Jung obsessed about. For anyone interested in a deep dive into this phenomenon, I highly recommend “A Life of Meaning” by James Hollis.

The good news is this: wherever you are on this journey, there are ways to be happy! 

In Phase 1, being happy is all about learning how to not lie to yourself and building up your mental capacity for proactive action. In Phase 2, it’s about having bold goals and building the grit and discipline to diligently work toward them. And if you are lucky enough to make it to Phase 3, you will give your all in service to your vocation and happiness will simply and inevitably ensue.

As always, thank you all so much for being here and for supporting this labor of love. Without you, there is no Profit+. Wherever you are on the journey of life, I wish you the absolute best.

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