In relentless pursuit of freedom.
Don’t follow your passion. Not because it’s a bad idea, but because most of the time it’s not possible early in your life.
Instead, arrive at your passion(s) by taking the sculptor approach. Chisel away everything that you don’t love. In a sentence:
Don’t do stuff you hate.
Everything else is fair game.
Follow your passion, or follow your effort? Only go after what you love – your calling – or just knuckle down and get good at something? I sometimes get asked which side of this debate I fall on. I think that’s the wrong question.
It doesn’t matter which side I fall on, or anyone else. It only matters what works for you. Both approaches are true. Who could disagree with trying to do something you love more than all your other options? Who could disagree that working hard and mastering something is more likely to bring you the things you want in life than half-assing it?
These approaches are both valid. They are both good advice.
Take the follow your passion advice. The difficulty is that it’s really, really hard work to find what you love. It’s harder work to be honest about what you find. Harder still to do what it takes to achieve it.
Then take the follow your effort advice. How to choose where to put the effort? How to know when the struggle will yield long-term benefit and when it’s just useless suffering?
Both approaches still leave a lot of work to you. That’s why it doesn’t matter which you pick. When you hear someone giving one of these pieces of advice and you get excited and feel freed, that’s the one for you. If you hear it and think it’s a load of BS, that’s not the one for you. Go with the approach that resonates.