Follow Your Passion or Be Responsible?

“But we get gas out of the ground and heat people’s houses with it!”

This is what my manager said to me one day when I was working for a major oil company in Houston, TX.  We were discussing my eventual resignation and he was trying to convince me to stay.  I was 23 years old at the time.  I was idealistic but more importantly, I was miserable and had been miserable damn near my whole life.  At that time (2006) I told him I was unhappy and looking for more meaningful work.  He sort of smirked and told me the statement above.  It’s a true statement but he knew that nobody that worked in that office was really deeply connected to that part of the process.  I worked with a lot of good people and that manager that I had is still one of the best boss’s I ever worked for, but this was Texas and the Oil industry.  My perception was that money was the primary objective and that’s not a bad thing, it’s just not what drove me. 

Interestingly, my manager had played college football and one of my mentors had been a golfer in college and could have had a professional career.  I’d be in their offices individually at times talking about potential trajectories for my career as an engineer.  I remember one day being in my manager’s office and he pulled out an old binder that contained engineering projects he had worked on while in college.  I faked like I was interested but when he turned to grab the binder my eyes rolled hard.  I’m surprised he didn’t feel it, lol.  We would talk about different potential future roles and how much money I could make but none of it interested me.  But, when he would mention his time playing football, my eyes would light up.  Same thing when my mentor mentioned his golf career. That was a clue that I didn’t catch at the time.

I had spent a lot of time in school working extremely hard to gain a career in engineering.  That effort was driven by the belief that choosing a financially lucrative career was the only way to be happy and be respected in life.  Ironically, it made me unhappy and I’ve found that I’ve earned a lot more respect than I ever could have imagined by walking away from engineering.  However, I know that the money I relinquished by leaving engineering could have created lots of opportunities and solved lots of problems.  I don’t regret my choice.  Every decision has trade-offs.

Ever since I left the engineering career field I have been trying to find work that I enjoy.  Specifically, getting paid to do something that, at a minimum, I find interesting in some way.  This hasn’t been easy to do.  I would say primarily, it’s been difficult because my interests are primarily in philosophy, human psychology, and how I can use my communication skills to encourage people.  I also have a deep desire to be my own boss.  How do you make a thriving business out of encouraging people to adopt a philosophy that asks them to do hard things?  I still haven’t fully figured that out yet.  I’ve got some clues but the puzzle isn’t anywhere near complete.  10 plus years of trying to figure that out has caused me to think deeply about why we work and what work is.

Some of it is obvious.  We need money to pay bills and buy food.  We have certain aspirations and money helps us reach those goals:  money for education, money for gym memberships, money for a trip to visit family/friends, money for life in old age, etc. 

Some of it is not as obvious.  Working makes you feel like a contributing member of society.  Working gives us something to do with our time.  Working can give you a sense of purpose.  

Purpose.  That’s the one that I’ve been working towards.  I’ve mentioned being a security guard several times.  I know it’s necessary in many ways in order for businesses and organizations to maintain a calm environment for their employees and customers.  However, I don’t find it rewarding, challenging, or interesting in any way.  I made the choice to pursue the job precisely because it was easy.  My assumption was that an easy job pairs well with trying to build a small business because the job feeds me while my brain power remains available for the business.  I still feel this line of thinking is a logical approach, so I press on.

That being said, I have friends who have more conventional careers:  software developers, pharmacists, lawyers, doctors, police officers, firefighters, etc.  I envy them sometimes because they make good money and they have a respected vocation.  In my head I think, “They don’t have to explain themselves to anyone.  They don’t have to explain why they have an engineering degree but work as a security guard.”  There’s a big part of me that wishes I could just be an employee and be satisfied with that.  Go to work from 8-5, Monday through Friday, and be content with it.  But I’m not.  So I keep trying to solve the problem of creating a viable business.

Work might be the most complex of the 4 fundamental areas of modern life (health, personal finance, relationships, and work).  I think it’s complex because we all have different motivations for why we work and those motivations change with time.  It’s important because we spend so much time working.  If you’re a full time employee working 40 hours a week, that’s about half of your waking hours, 5 days a week.  Not to mention the time spent preparing for work and calming down after work.  Not to mention long commute times if you have them.  An 8 hour day can easily turn into 10 hours or more depending on individual circumstances.  What we spend time on matters, so the work we do matters.  But how do we get to something we enjoy?

What is Work?  What are some fundamentals of Work?

The first question I think we would need to ask is, what is fundamental about work?

To answer this question I think it’s important to look at the definition of the word ‘work’:

Google’s definition –

work

noun – (1) activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result. (2) a task or tasks to be undertaken; something a person or thing has to do.

verb – (1) be engaged in physical or mental activity in order to achieve a result; do work.  (2) (of a machine or system) operate or function, especially properly or effectively.

Notice that this definition makes no mention of money or career.  It’s clear based on the definition that we can work at many things in life but when we desire the result of our work to be money, this will usually mean a job or starting a business.  Work for money is what the focus of this article will be.  Why?  So much of our identity is wrapped up in the work that we do.  Again, so much of our time is spent at work.  I’ve heard it said many times that we’ll spend more time with coworkers than our own families.  

Next, I want to lay out some common characteristics that we hope to achieve in the work we do for money (These are my assumptions):

• We want our jobs to be fruitful in ways that improve our lives overall.
• We want our jobs to help us meet our basic needs (being paid well).
• We want to have good relationships with our coworkers and managers/supervisors.
• We would prefer our jobs not degrade our physical/mental health in any way.
• We want to have a sense of dignity in the jobs that we do.
• We don’t want our jobs to take over our lives.

We need money.  However, how much money we need is a combination of many factors based on individual circumstances and motivations.  Some people really like having a nice car and will take out a loan or lease on a new car every 4-8 years.  That vehicle motivates that person to engage consistently and, hopefully, at a high level of performance, with work.  Someone like myself is not motivated at all by the ability to buy nice things.  I am motivated by the sense that I’m making a meaningful contribution to society, the desire for autonomy, and the feeling of chasing mastery of a skill.  Meaning, Autonomy, and Mastery are components of desirable work that I first read from the author Daniel Pink in his book Drive.  Building a business writing and speaking about self improvement checks those boxes for me.  I don’t know that everyone is driven by these 3 characteristics but I’ve found it to be true for me.  Hopefully, that helps someone else gain some clarity on what motivates them in their own work.  

Of course, the challenge of every business is being able to meet basic needs (making money).  So I work security to keep the lights on. 

Work for Money .vs. Work for Meaning

The benefit I see for most people is the fact that they don’t want to start a business.  Most of us appreciate the safety of a stable, reliable work environment, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  The mistake I think people make in life is denying their own passions and interests for the sake of ‘have to’s’:

• “I have to get a raise!”
• “I have to get a bigger house”
• “I have to get married and start a family now”
• “I have to get that promotion”
• “I have to do this overtime to make this money”

Work is so time consuming for us that it easily becomes the ultimate focus for many people to the detriment of other parts of life.  In my opinion, the interpretation of the American Dream where we have the spouse, house, kids, and all the trappings of material success causes many people to give chase to that vision while losing sight of their own interests in the process.  Maybe people get to a place where they’ve gotten the ‘American Dream’ but they’re still unhappy and have long forgotten what interests them or what they’re passionate about.

Here’s what makes sense to me:  If an activity makes you happy, challenges you, gives you a sense of meaning, and you would do it paid or not, why wouldn’t you spend some time with this activity on a regular basis?  To be very clear, this is not to say that everyone should start a business based on their passions.  It is to say that I think it’s unwise to ignore things that intrinsically interest you.  It would be like being in the oil business and ignoring a huge reserve of oil right underneath your feet.  Being a responsible adult and pursuing your interests/passions in life are not mutually exclusive activities.  This is the reason I also write about health, finances, and relationships… and work.  We all have to do all these things. We work at all these things.  We work for money but we also should make the space in our lives to work for meaning.   

You may not know what you’re passionate about.  There may be clues from childhood.  You may have to run experiments against various activities.  You may already know what you love doing and now you need to push to make the time and energy for it.  In case it isn’t totally clear, this isn’t about making money.  It’s about knowing yourself well.  In efforts to find the thing, then do the thing, you’ll have to make both practical and perspective adjustments.  I think we all would like to have a measure of interest in the work we do but the reality of the present moment for many of us (including yours truly)  is that we work a job to pay bills.  Nothing more.  What I’m trying to do is make the work I do for money and the work I do for meaning, converge into one thing, being my own business.  This doesn’t need to be you, but ask yourself, “Do I have any activities in my life that I’m passionate about?  That I’m interested in?  That bring me joy, meaning, and challenge?”

Be A Dreamer but Be Realistic

I recognize that the likelihood of starting a successful long term business is highly unlikely.  I think the percentage is approximately 90-95% of small businesses, fail. And that’s not even considering whether the other 5-10% is happy with what they built.  But here’s the deal, society moves forward because lots of people try and a very small percentage succeed.  At what?  Doing something unique, doing something they dreamed of, doing something they happened to stumble upon while trying something else…

Finding the resolve and energy to wake up everyday and be excited about where and who you are (regardless of your circumstances) is a function of both practical conditions and the perspective we cultivate about our life.  It’s become quite common to hear people say, “Don’t chase your passion!” or “It’s a horrible idea to chase your passion!”  I think it’s better to say it this way:  

Being passionate about something does not mean anyone will pay you to do that something and we all need money.  But, not getting paid for a passion you have, is not a reason to not invest time in that thing.  Furthermore, the choice to try to make money with your passions has to be married with the understanding that you are doing a risky thing that involves significant tradeoffs.  You have to be willing to accept both the potential risks and potential rewards.  

When I’m frustrated with being a security guard and not making very much money I often think about where I would be financially if I had stayed an engineer.  Today, I’d be 18 years into my career and no doubt I’d be making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and retirement would be secure.  But, that route also has tradeoffs.  I would have had to force myself to do the work because I was completely uninterested.  Who knows if my overall performance would have commanded a high salary.  I was suicidal before I finally left, so I would have had to do something to medicate myself out of that mindset (I was pretty unhappy and may have lost that battle).  Would I have stayed in good physical shape?  I had gained 30 plus pounds from eating fast food everyday and I wasn’t working out anymore at the height of my depression.  I don’t know if I would have been able to reverse the trend if I stayed.  I probably  would never have become a Green Beret and learned that I was mentally and physically stronger than my life experiences had led me to believe up until that point.  My whole life trajectory would be different.  

With a different mindset in college, I probably could have graduated much less burned out and been able to think through ways to build a personal training business outside of work hours (That was my main idea back in 2005).  The reason I say all this is because we are doing young people and each other a disservice by trying to convince one another that activities that are enjoyable/meaningful but don’t have immediate tangible reward (money), aren’t worth pursuing in a wholehearted manner.  Pursue your dream but be realistic about the likelihood of success and be a responsible adult who manages money well, takes good care of their body, and cultivates healthy relationships.  This can be done.

Final Thoughts

The ability to think hard about the adjustments you might have to make to find purposeful work is probably a luxury of rich democracies like America.  That’s a part of why I think about these things so hard. I live in America and if I’m frustrated with the work I’m doing then there’s plenty of room and opportunity for me to go do something else.  So I push myself to work on building a business but I’m not at all saying that everyone should do the same.

The other reality is that societies have chores that must be done.  Just like a household has garbage that needs to be taken out, yards that need to be cut, dishes that need to be washed, beds that need making, clothes that need washing etc.  I doubt that there’s any of us who feel a ton of meaning in these activities but we certainly appreciate it when they’re done.  The garbage needs to get picked up from the curb, we need someone to respond to 911 calls at 2 am in the morning, you want the local level 1 Trauma hospital to be staffed overnight, and we’re all grateful for the tech professionals that make communication through the internet possible.  A lot of work is about getting ‘chores’ done so we can all enjoy the amenities of modern life.

Sometimes we need a practical change and sometimes we need a perspective change.  Life decisions are usually going to be some combination of both.  Being a responsible adult and chasing your passions don’t have to be mutually exclusive:  You can work to eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly.  You can earn money and live responsibly within your means.  You can cultivate relationships where being physically healthy, financially responsible, and pursuing meaningful activities is encouraged and you can chase your dreams too.  You just have to be careful not to get caught up in someone else’s narrative.