In school growing up we were always fed the idea, “follow your passion”, as a sort of career advice from those we looked up to. This includes parents and teachers because that’s what society says you should do. To the contrary, this approach is rooted in falsehood in my opinion. Following your passion as a career at the beginning of your journey is not a great route for success. In many cases, what was once your passion would eventually become something you resent and that is a sad truth. The best thing to do with your time from a young age is to learn about and spend your time engaging in a wealth building vehicle. These types of activities will take the burden of financial security off your hands, something almost all people spend their whole lives worrying about, and allow you to chase your passion uninterrupted from there on.
The results of chasing your passion
When you look for a career based on “finding your passion”, some very unfortunate occurrences have a high probability of surfacing. Oftentimes, when you find a career based off of that passion you once had, the obligations that are put on you in the constraints of a career diminish your passion considerably if not vaporize it altogether. This is a sad reality that when a passion becomes a job, human nature gravitates from what was once passion into resentment.
The other thing that will likely happen when you chase your passion is that you’ll be broke! Much of the time, it can be very difficult to make a good living off of your passion for a multitude of reasons. As an example we’ll use the following story of the fictional character, Jane.
As a young girl, Jane loved flowers. She would always pick them in her yard in the spring and her memories of doing this are very fond to her. For her house, she would always go to the store every week and buy new flowers as the centerpiece for her dining room set. On the weekends, she spent her time painting still-life pictures of flowers and sipping wine. She loved flowers and was so passionate about them that she decided to quit her job and open a flower shop full-time. Jane was so excited! She worked with a realtor to find a good commercial spot to open up her store and soon enough she did just that. Jane was now the proud owner of Jane’s Flower Shop! She finally did what everyone was always telling her to do and chased her passion! All of her friends and family came to support her the first month and she couldn’t be any happier!
After that first month went by, Jane’s business started to slow down. After all of the passion and support subsided from family and friends, Jane was left with a business she didn’t know how to run. She had no experience in marketing or sales or business accounting or taxes or anything and she didn’t know who to ask for help or where to start. Her bills were also catching up on her since she quit her job and all of the money she was making in revenue from her business (which wasn’t very much) was going back into the business to sustain it’s life (rent, inventory, etc.). Jane’s passion for flowers was now turning into resentment because these flowers were now a constant reminder of the issues that plagued her life rather than her escape from it all. Distraught and out of options, Jane was forced to file for bankruptcy and try and get her old job back. Disgruntled by the experience, Jane would go on to hate flowers, associating them with the debt she now had to pay off from her experiment.
All of this stemmed from Jane following her passion. What I’m going to suggest to you today is not to not follow your passion, but to simply change the order in which your passion is followed. Allow me to elaborate further…
The common issue
In the story of Jane, what was the issue that ultimately led to her downfall? Money and the pressure to make that money from her passion!!! You see, passion is a great vehicle to find much success and do great things in this world, however, doing those things becomes much more difficult when you’re constantly hungry for money and your passion is the main source for it. The need for money dries up passion any chance it can if you let it. This is why, in my opinion, finding a wealth building vehicle to support you before you chase your passion is vital to your sanity! “What are some “wealth building vehicles” and where can I get some?”, you may be asking. Well, they’re out there and a lot simpler than you may think.
Finding a wealth building vehicle
Wealth building vehicles are anything that has a clear path in which you can follow (a blueprint so to speak) that others have used to produce sustainable income passively. This includes but is not limited to real estate, stocks, e-commerce, cryptocurrency and NFTs, and many other vehicles that can be easily found with a quick internet search. For me, my vehicle is real estate. Real estate builds wealth in four primary ways:
- It pays a monthly sum of money in the form of rent called cash flow.
- You benefit off of the appreciation (increase in value of property over time).
- Monthly loan pay down occurs increasing your equity month over month.
- You get the benefit of tax write-offs and depreciation.
Those four factors are the foundation of my financial freedom. Cash flow is being set up to pay my monthly bills and give me financial freedom as I write this while everything else allows me the flexibility and financial security to take more risks and follow my passion without having to compromise my passion for money. This applies to any wealth building vehicle, not just real estate (even though I’m biased and feel real estate has the highest potential). By setting myself up financially with the vehicle of real estate, I can free myself from the worry of making sure the bills are paid and food is on the table so I can focus on my passion of educating people about financial freedom and how their threshold of achievement is virtually limitless in this great country. Not having to worry about the money coming in from this passion will make me exponentially more passionate about it making what I do that much more fulfilling. Coincidentally (or maybe not so much), this actually results in more income from that passion coming in if that passion is something that can be monetized.
The bottom line is this. By following the traditional advice of chasing your passion to land a career and be your primary source of income, you will burn yourself out and that passion will become resentment. If you choose a wealth building vehicle to support yourself financially, you will be much better off contributing to society by following your passion in a more meaningful and humanitarian way rather than trying to leverage that passion to put food on the table. Replace traditional wisdom with this mindset shift and watch your life drastically improve from then on!