What To Choose: Passion Or Money ?

Have you ever asked your children: Do you want the main dish or the dessert?

What has eating to do with the “ passion or money “ topic? The example serves well to show the complete absurdum of asking people to choose between two so different things as passion or money.

Going back to the eating example, at least smaller children would for sure prefer the dessert, while adult people understand that your feeding must be based on something else than only unhealthy and sweet desserts.

The dessert is a kind of reward after finishing the complete meal. In the same manner, passion is something driven by an inner conviction and love for something, and you are prepared to sacrifice a lot to reach the goal of your passion.

Doing all correctly, money will not seldom be an automatic result of a well-executed action based on passion.

Take a look at any of the most successful and famous entrepreneurs of today. For sure they were not after the money, but their goal was something else. Once the project initiated, the money started to flow in as a dessert at the end of a dinner.

Steve Jobs was even fired from the company he founded because the board of directors representing the shareholders was after the money in first place. After Jobs had left the company, Apple went through some dramatic and turbulent years and not until the value of the Apple share was close to nothing, the money chasers understood that the company was built on something else not expressible in money. Jobs came back to continue his project based on a vision and a passion. The passion based mission continued and today Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world.

Will all people who follow their passion be rich? Of course not! But rarely a money focused activity will produce passionate actors. So, the question will then be:

Which comes first the chicken or the egg?

Passion induces action and money can be one of the results

Will then every passionate person succeed in the sense of earning money? No, it won’t happen automatically. In fact, the majority of passionate entrepreneurs they fail several times on their way towards their goal, and the ones who can fall and rise again is limited to a small group of people.

The main reason to never reach the target, fail and never come back again, are the following:

Lack of a true commitment – Even if you are passionate to do something, you need a true and sincere commitment to do what it takes. Otherwise, it will be a high-risk project that probably will die when hitting the first or second hurdle.
No specified concept – If you like running (as I do) it doesn’t mean that you are going to make a living on your running passion as a runner. At my age (64) it’s a physical impossibility to compete with the Africans on a marathon run. But there are so many other angels of my running passion, such as coaching, promoting training manuals, selling outfits for running, and so on.
Lack of strategy – A real passion can easily let the emotions take over, and you’ll just go ahead with pure motivation as the leading star. If your passion moves into an activity that will produce money at the end, you must have a clear strategy; a business plan worked out in detail.
Bad advice – A successful entrepreneur must have a network of professional people. The tricky thing, though, is to know who is a good and who is a bad adviser. In the digital marketing business, which is another passion of mine, there is so much garbage on the web and as new to the industry, it’s easy to fall into the trap of the wrong advisers offering all these “shiny” unrealistic services.
No efficient handling of money – All project and businesses will cost money to get started. You must have a financial plan before starting and if you don’t like that work, outsource it to somebody you trust and who knows the subject.

We who belong to the baby boomer generation were indoctrinated from an early age that we should choose a career that had a good future, meaning a relatively good probability to high income. The new generations view it in another way, and there is an apparent switch in the tendency on how to choose a career.

Among passion or money, passion attracts the most and leads to the rest

Money is no longer equal to happiness but a result of doing correctly what you are happy (passionate) to do.

Why should you choose passion if the money is essential to make a living?

You will do a better work if it is based on passion. If you ever go to sleep on Sunday night, being sad it’s Monday tomorrow; it ‘s probably a sign of lacking passion.
There is a quote going like this: “Money comes, money goes”, meaning that it’s just a result of something. Your passion, whatever it can be, can never go away. Happiness in life is about creating something sustainable you can be proud of.
With a passion-based work you can easily relate to what you are doing and as a consequence come up with more and better ideas. It’s like a wheel, the more you push it, the faster it will go. People with a typical 9-5 job, checking the time every 5 minutes the last hour of the working shift, do you think they are happy about what they are doing? Would you like to spend 2/3 of your life that way?
Time isn’t an important part of your work. Of course, you need to fulfill deadlines according to the plan, but with a passion-based work, you can easily work 10 or 15 hours a day without noticing it. It’s not about the time, but the passion for doing what you do and that is real happiness.
No obstacles will stop you to achieve success. Passion can move mountains.
The fulfillment when you reach your goal is priceless, and at this point in your life or career, it rather seems to be a ridiculous question if somebody ask you: