Dollars & Sense

"For money or passion?"

I saw someone tweeting about this the other day and quietly inside me, I immediately shouted out, PASSION! It looked that easy a question to answer that I didn’t put in much thought into answering it. But when I really did give it some thought, it wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be.

Passion was an easy choice because you do what you like; naturally you would like what you do. The danger that revolves around passion is that over time, you’ll lose steam and it slowly starts becoming a chore. When that happens, you would start losing interest in it and end up treating it like work – something we would all definitely like to avoid.

A friend of mine once said, "Why not give other things a chance? If you hate it, then you can always go back to fulfilling your passion."

I reflected and couldn’t decide on whether to agree or to disagree with that statement. He has a point in saying that maybe perhaps there are some other things worth fulfilling first before pursuing your passion. But if we were to keep with that mentality, then won’t we end up never fulfilling our passion? Why do we want to go about doing something which we don’t like doing just for the sake of discovery, when we know that there is something we like doing which is staring us right in our face?

I supposed once money comes into the picture then the choice could be pretty much clearer in terms of which route we should be taking. Passion requires a lot of effort and hard work to make it sustain our standard of living. For most of us, passion is more of a hobby. For a few lucky ones, passion became their careers. At the end of the day, what is our motivation? What is it exactly that drives us? Dollars, or our common sense? Go figure.