Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow
I grew up with a nice lifestyle – no college debt, summer house, etc.
That doesn’t ‘just happen’. Somebody has to make it happen.
I started on figuring out my career when I was a tween. I’d read the New York Observer, a salmon colored newspaper covering power players in NYC finance, real estate, media and politics.
I asked my parents for career advice. “Do what you love and the money will follow,” they said.
Well, that’s good for you, I thought. But I’m not trying to shoot the moon. No one else’s parents worked in book publishing. They worked in finance & big law.
I ended up choosing a career that was lucrative but not crushing. And I learned that my parents’ advice was, in fact, true. Not because making money is easy, but because making money is so hard.
When you’re young, school is the best analogy you have for work. In academic environments, a select few can excel without hard work. But work is different. School is a short game & career is a long game. At work, when you pull the mask off of god-given brilliance, you’ll find untold hours of hard work.
In any industry, the people most successful are the ones doing the most work. Like back at school, you’ll encounter very successful professionals who seem like they don’t need to work hard. Don’t believe everything you see. Offstage, they are working very hard.
At work, they give the money to the person doing the best job. Sometimes it’ll seem different to you, but that means you’re not understanding what the job really is.
Delivering the best job is competitive. And you can’t outwork someone when you are working and they are playing. It just isn’t possible. You can have all the discipline & money lust in the world, and it still won’t be enough.
In fairness, words like ‘love’ and ‘play’ are a bit embellished. They call it ‘work’ for a reason, after all. And some of these success stories are actually animated by compulsion.
In my experience, “loving your work” is a gilded shorthand for an insatiable appetite for the work. So my advice to young people asking the questions that I asked is: follow your appetite.
Addendum
While writing this I googled “do what you love and the money will follow.” As it turns out my parents, true publishing professionals, were borrowing the phrase from a 1989 best-seller book title. The phrase originated with someone figuring out how to sell as many books as possible. Follow the money…