Based on the research studies, almost 90% of the people carves their career for the sake of money, not passion. I am not too surprised by the statistic to be honest. Look around your circle of friends and you can see evidently who works for passion or who works for the sake of bringing food home to the table. Obviously, being an employee makes it harder to work for passion and we will see later how we can possibly integrate passion into our lifestyle. But before we do that, maybe we can take a step back to define what passion is.
What is Passion to me?
In my definition, Passion is about doing something which drives your enthusiasm compelling enough to sustain your action without the need for higher compensation. In other words, you know when you're passionate about something when you are doing things happy.
I was passionate about making my money works and increasing my returns since the age of 12. I will not call them investing at that time because as you will see later, investing is about coming up with a plan and use it on proper asset classes, which is not the case when I was much younger.
I started with collecting limited edition cards and selling to classmates at a higher price. I come up with a calculated risk return plan to bet in sports betting which can yield me higher returns. I devised a permutation and combination strategy to increase the probability of hitting the numbers for a toto system. The bottomline is I put my brain and cells into thinking where I could find an opportunity to increase my returns. which unfortunately did not work well for me at times as you can see now that the house always win because of the system they have put in place. I was ignorant back then, but I was passionate into finding a strategy to make my money works.
Problem with Passion?
The problem with passion, as you can see from my example above, is that the money does not always compensate the amount of effort or passion I have.
Take the workforce for instance, employers pay for skills and efforts, not passion. You can be passionate about being a digital marketing manager, but if you know nuts about how the digital world operates and how you can benefit the company, then you are out of the door the next moment.
Passion vs Money Dilemma?
There are many students in college or university or even as early as the streaming course in Secondary 3 who had dilemmas over the course they should be taking to study. There are a few that follows their passion, but there are many more who are more pragmatic in choosing courses that can lead to finding easier and better paying jobs when they graduate. Accounting and Engineering quickly came to mind. Passion is everything but counts for nothing if you are not able to secure a job in high cost living countries like Singapore.
I was in the same dilemma when I had to choose a major and I chose Accounting at the end for reasons that I was interested in numbers and the prospect for better job opportunities. Having been in the accounting line for at least 7 years now, I must say they are 99% pain and 1% fun. In fact, where work is concerned, there are always the pain-ass factor you will encounter. Having said that, there are plenty of transferable skills I can use to pursue my passion in investing, for example, understanding annual report, financial statements, cash flow statement etc.
For those who are facing the same dilemmas, choose a major or job that closely match your passion and use the skills to drive the activities you are passionate about outside.
We live to realize our dream and we work to drive our passion. Dilemmas are abound. The choice is yours.
