“Don’t follow your passion, but always bring it with you.”
–Mike Rowe

Every motivational speaker, successful entrepreneur and teacher will tell you, “follow your passion and success will come”. While this is optimistic advice and I believe in it, there are some downfalls to this message.

The first issue I have with it involves economic viability. We are told that if you follow your passion and work hard then financial success will come. This is not always the case. I may love collecting stamps and have more passion for it than anything else but no matter what I do, I will probably not make any money doing it. Economic fruition is what separates a hobby from a career.

The second issue is that it encourages a myopic viewpoint of life. If you are one of the people lucky enough to discover your passion, you are supposed to follow that till the end of your life. After all, if you want to be successful at it, you must devote your life to it. However, I believe that people can have multiple passions. If you come across one that may never bear any financial fruit, instead of trying other things to see if they are passionate about them, people will simply trudge ahead with their existing hobby in hopes that money will come out of nowhere. This leaves a large amount of other achievements that someone could have realized if they tried other things.

The third issue is that passion is only one element needed to turn your love for something into a profitable career path. If I love making down comforters, I may be great at it, in fact I may be the best in the world at it, but if I am based out of Argentina where the weather normally doesn’t call for a down comforter and I am trying to sell to the locals there, business might be poor. There is a plethora of factors that go into success and to say that working hard at your passion will lead you there is a very elementary viewpoint. This also leaves people feeling like failures because they followed their passion and it is not realizing a profitable return for them.

The final issue I see with this view is that it creates anxiety for most people that have not yet found their “passion”. We watch the pianist, completely in flow, hammering away at the ivory keys, lost in her own world. We listen to interviews of tech CEOs that are overly animated and maniac about their product/business. We watch the hockey player that spends every waking moment practicing on his competitive ability. We see these things and sigh longingly for the day that we will discover our own passion and be that invigorated with life. We drone on from day to day, unenthused and sluggish, waiting for that element of passion to fall into our laps. As if we will be walking home from work and pass a bar having a paint night, pop in on a whim and discover our long-lost passion for painting. Then! Then we have found our passion and we can pursue it with all the tenacity within ourselves.

This approach to life is the saddest of all. Mike Rowe made a statement that has stuck with me, “don’t follow your passion, take it with you”. So many of us are stuck in this perpetual state of anxiety and frustration that we have not yet discovered the thing that we are most passionate about in life. I believe that we shouldn’t follow our passion, we should take it with is in everything that we do. Be passionate about doing your taxes. Be passionate about cleaning your bathroom. Be passionate about your work, whatever that is. Every moment in life offers a unique opportunity to be appreciated for all its glory. Don’t miss it by being miserable. Be passionate.