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Chapter 1: What is the significance of pursuing passion versus practicality?
Hey, guys, Mark here with a quick housekeeping note. So Solve just got nominated for a Webby Award for the best indie podcast. And for those of you who don't know, the Webby Awards are kind of like they're like the Oscars of the Internet. They are technically very prestigious and, quote unquote, a big deal. But then again, I'm the guy who wrote the book. I'm not giving a fuck.
Either way, it would be cool to win. I wouldn't complain. I mean, honestly, who would complain about winning an award? So if you want to vote for your favorite podcast and your favorite shithead who talks in your ear for hours and hours a month, you can go to webbyawards.com and look for Best Indie Podcast, or we have the link to vote in the show notes. Much, much appreciated. No pressure.
It takes like 15 seconds. Very easy. And hopefully we'll win so my ego can survive for another year. A recent Gallup poll found that nearly 60% of US workers are either disengaged or actively dislike their job. They're checked out mentally. They are completely absent emotionally. They are simply going through the motions.
On the contrary, surveys also find that nearly 70% of Americans experience financial stress on a regular basis, and just under 50% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. So today, Drew and I are going to butt heads. We're going to look at the question, when considering your career, should you pursue passion or should you be practical? Should you do something because you love it?
As the cliche goes, if you love what you do, then you'll never work a day in your life. Or should you be practical, get paid, and then use the extra money and free time to go do what you enjoy instead? My name is Mark Manson. I am three-time number one New York Times bestselling author. And don't you forget it, this is my co-host, producer, longtime lead researcher, Drew Burney.
And today on the Solve podcast, we are going to look at one of the most fundamental questions that people confront in their life day to day. Should I pursue something for the love of it or should I be practical? I probably get emailed some variation of this question at least once a week. Yeah, if not more. For a decade now.
And it generally comes from young people too, but even a lot of older folks, people stuck in dead-end jobs, people wondering if they should change their career, a lot of people wondering if it's too late. We're going to get into a lot of different nuances and sides of this question. It's A bit of a complicated question. I think there's a lot of individual variation.
There's a lot of context dependence. The science says quite a bit about both of these decisions. There's good reasons to pursue each of these two decisions. There's also good reasons to not pursue each of these two decisions. And Drew and I are each going to take up the flag on one side of the debate. So me, I'm going to argue that you should be passionate.
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Chapter 2: What are the statistics on worker engagement and financial stress?
that you should pursue what you love, that you should very much index on emotional satisfaction when determining what you want to dedicate your career and your life to. And Drew is going to take the flip side of the equation. He's going to argue that people should be more practical.
The voice of reason.
the voice of reason. Okay. Yes. I will be the emotional head case in this episode. And, you know, last episode we did a debate and we, the roles were reversed. We argued whether, uh, romantic love was overrated or not. I are, I was the stone hearted, cold bastard who argued that love was very much overrated.
Uh, and you defended it like, uh, like a knight defending the, uh, his virgin bride's chastity.
Yeah.
Okay. Well, that makes perfect sense to me.
Something you're very used to. That's right. I'm sure. So those of you who missed the Love is on Trial episode back in February, the way this works is that Drew and I each take one side of the argument. In this case, I take the proposition, which is that one should follow their passion when deciding their career path.
And Drew takes the opposition, which is people should be more practical and reconsider. We go for four rounds total. Each of us presents two arguments. And the other one can counter-argue each of those arguments. So it will open up with me. I'll give the first argument. Drew will rebuttal. And then Drew will open with his first argument. And then I will give a rebuttal.
And we will go back and forth like that for four full rounds. And then we will try to – at the end of the episode, we will try to synthesize both of our arguments into – one cohesive takeaway for the audience of like, okay, how do we make sense of all of this contradictory information and what can you actually do and how do you apply that into your day-to-day life?
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Chapter 3: How do personal stories illustrate the debate between passion and practicality?
her keyboard, writing this novel about a young wizard named Harry. And all she had money for was literally one cup of coffee each day. She was barely eating because she was so broke. Yet she showed up and wrote every single day. And the result, of course, is Harry Potter. And what's striking about this story, there's two things I think that stand out.
One is I think there's kind of almost a therapeutic case that you could make Which I actually is beyond the bounds of this argument for this episode.
But I would argue that when everything else in your life is going wrong and is a disaster, if you do have something that you're deeply passionate about, that can be something that can kind of tether you back to reality and keep you going on a day-to-day basis. So I think that's one very important facet of this.
The other important facet of this is just the absolute persistence and resilience that comes as a natural byproduct of caring very, very deeply about what you work on. I think you could argue that if she – didn't care about the novel that she was writing, there's no way she would have sustained that work ethic through that period. She would have given up at multiple places.
She would have probably gone and found something else to do. She probably would have tried to pay her bills. Instead, she had something that was very deeply moving to her and kept her steady and persistent throughout this entire period. And of course, this turns up in the research itself.
Research on motivation finds that people who are intrinsically motivated to do the work that they're doing, they tend to do it for longer periods of time, they tend to work harder, they tend to deal with setbacks better, and they tend to be more successful. So it's passion is – it's funny.
Way early in my career, I used to give a talk sometimes and the title of the talk was Passion is Practical, which is kind of ironic given this episode. And that was always my argument. As I said, if you find something that you deeply care about, even if it makes less money, you're going to do a better job at it. You're going to work longer at it. You're going to deal with setbacks better.
You're going to come up with more solutions. You're going to stick with it much more consistently. over time is going to eventually result in more success. The other thing that I'll add to this is that we opened up the top of the show with the fact that 60% of US workers feel disengaged from whatever they're doing. They don't see any meaning in it.
Um, they're basically going through the motions. If you look at the, like the definition of the word passion, its root actually comes from Latin and means to suffer. And for much of the first millennia, it was used as interchangeably with the word suffering. It wasn't until the medieval period that it started to represent something that, uh,
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of financial stability on pursuing passion?
I'm actually not going to make the, um, the, the, the monetary, the money stability argument just yet. Okay. I actually want to step back just a minute and look at another famous example of someone who was also very passionate and very successful and it didn't turn out so great for them, which is Kurt Cobain. All right. Now Nirvana is like in my top 10. Yeah. Okay.
Kirk Cobain was notoriously a pain in the ass to work with. Okay. But a machine. People talked about him like in the rehearsal studio. Like he would have these marathon 18-hour sessions sometimes, right? Like just wouldn't quit.
A lot of the producers that worked for him just – they said he was very, very difficult to work with and they probably wouldn't do it again if they had the choice, right? When he took his own life, he left a suicide note. And one of the lines he wrote in it was, I don't have the passion anymore. And so remember it's better to the burnout than to fade away. That was a famous line.
They actually stole it from Neil Young, a Neil Young song, but still, uh, The passion part though. I don't have the passion anymore.
Yeah.
What happens when you fuse your identity so much with your passion that that's what – like that's the only logical endpoint for you at that point, right? Yes, J.K. Rowling, she like definitely got through a lot of hardship, more hardship than most people would ever face. She got through that, came out the other side of a jillionaire too at the same time.
Right.
Sure. And we'll talk about a little bit about selection bias or the survivorship bias and stuff like that. But really what I want to focus on is like how much of your identity gets swept up in a passion or how much it can. Okay. Now there is a little bit of nuance here too, because psychologists distinguish between harmonious passion and obsessive passion.
Okay.
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Chapter 5: How does passion change over time?
It shifts. It changes shape. It changes intensity. It is – and it is something that as you go through your work life, it can – it is something that you can almost – mold around what is available to you. So as an argument for pursuing that adjacent position, I actually have a really great example of this is that Jane Goodall originally took a secretarial job around animal researchers.
not because she wanted to be the world's preeminent primatologist, not because she particularly cared about monkeys, she just really liked exotic African animals. She thought they were really cool and really interesting, and so she took a secretarial job adjacent to that.
It was through her exposure in that job to all the different things that researchers were doing that she became incredibly interested in what was going on around her.
And then the real breakthrough is when she started observing chimpanzees frequently and started noticing that chimpanzees, very similar to humans, seemed to have their own personalities and character traits and different proclivities and whatnot. She would eventually go on and become the world's preeminent primatologist, a legend in her field. But that was never the plan at the outset.
It was she just put herself in the vicinity of something she thought was pretty cool and was very interesting and she enjoyed thinking about. In many cases, you were referring to earlier like people who don't know what they're passionate about. I think that is probably the practical solution for most people is – What do you think is cool? What do you think is interesting?
What do you like to spend your time thinking about? Awesome. Like find a job that gives you more opportunities to think about that thing or be around that thing than most other jobs.
As a result, you create surface area for yourself to grow and develop a passion for something rather than necessarily like coming to it with this like preformed passion, which I honestly think is probably pretty rare. Like I think examples like your ex-girlfriend, she's the exception. Like most people don't wake up and know that they want to be something when they're three years old.
and pursue that for the rest of their life. Most people it's things come and go, right?
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Chapter 6: What example illustrates the development of passion?
Like your obsession when you're a teenager is different than your obsession in your twenties. And then you develop a slightly different obsession in your thirties. And then you get really into something else. Like throughout my career, I've watched my passion shift and change quite a bit.
You know, early on, it was very much writing like my ideal career, you know, 10, 12 years ago when you started was writing, I just want to write all day, and I just want all this other stuff to work without me having to think about it. And for many years, you and Philip basically ran the online business, and I just wrote. And that was how my life was.
As I've gotten older and my career has changed and shifted— I found myself kind of thrust, you know, with the, with doing video content and social media being more important and, um, launching this podcast, you know, I've, I've found myself in the middle of like this little media company and I've had to spend a lot more of my time and energy focused on business.
And what I've discovered is that I actually really liked the business side of this career. And it's super interesting to me. And, and in many ways, like, and I still love writing, but it's, it's not as It's not my one and only, right?
Chapter 7: How can you practically develop your passion?
It's not my soulmate that I have to only do that for the rest of my life. So I've definitely felt my passion within my own career shift and evolve over time. And I think that's probably true for most people. And so I think it's just the reasonable way to approach passion isn't to just ditch everything and go all in on your acting aspirations.
It's probably put yourself adjacent to it, put yourself in the vicinity of it. and then let it kind of grow and emerge as a side effect. there's so many more examples of this. I mean, I won't bore the listeners too much, but like Trent Reznor started as an engineer in a recording studio and he played in a eighties band on the side. Yeah.
I remember you showed me these videos. Yeah.
And he worked these long hours in the recording studio and he was always the last to leave. And so it was, he decided some of those nights, like it was him by himself in the recording studio. He's like, well, why don't I just throw a tape on the,
on the machine and record some of my own songs and see what happens and that eventually became his first album like it didn't it wasn't like this like predestined thing that he decided when he was 10 and every every choice he made throughout his life led to it it was just kind of like he was really good in the recording studio and as a side effect of that it made him it made it quite easy for him to record his first album okay yeah
I'm sorry, are you arguing still for passion or pragmatism here? That sounded like one big be pragmatic argument. Be passionate pragmatically. Okay. Let me point something out, I guess.
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Chapter 8: What is the importance of financial stability in pursuing passion?
The Jane Goodall story. You're absolutely right. She got into something. She found her passion through that. She was in a kind of adjacent – she was on the periphery of the field anyway. And then, oh, I like this thing. She was also – she got a leaky foundation grant. That provided her with some stability to be able to kind of play around in this area and figure out what she liked.
Trent Reznor was a sound engineer, worked as a sound engineer while he did this. I'm hearing an argument for pragmatism first is what I'm hearing.
My argument here is that passion is something that can evolve and develop naturally. after you've taken that first step. You don't have to wait for the passion to take that first step. You can take the first step in the direction that you think it's very, very likely the passion is. And then the passion will evolve and develop from there.
So take that first step. and take a pragmatic approach to finding out what area, the specifics of the passion.
The reason I bring this up, too, is something like almost 50% of our waking hours as an adult is spent doing our job. And it's not a difficult argument to say that liking what you do for work is— is a very, very big value add for your life, right? So there is like a very serious sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.
Like a huge part of your subjective wellbeing probably comes from how satisfied you are with your job and your career. My point is, is, you know, we've been kind of dancing around this argument of like, you know, passion is too risky. You have to kind of throw things by the wayside. You got to be willing to like live and be broke, right? you know, financial stability is important.
It's, my point is, is that you can pursue passion in a piecemeal type of way. You don't necessarily have to throw caution to the wind. Like it's that lifelong fulfillment and you can accept like the same way, a lifelong marriage to somebody not every year is a great year. You go through high times and low times and it kind of, the marriage shifts and changes and evolves over time.
I think the same is true with one's passion. And my only point, my argument here is that as long as you are doing something that you feel strongly about and that you care about, you will always find a way to evolve and kind of do that dance with it. Whereas if you're doing something that you hate,
or don't like, or don't care about, and you're in a position, like, let's say Jane Goodall didn't give a shit about monkeys and was just like, just give me my paycheck boss. And then, and then the, the foundation grant comes in or like an opening comes in for like a new research position or whatever. She's not going to jump at that.
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