People argue a lot about whether you should “follow your passion.”

The problem is that the question cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. Sometimes following your interests is exactly the right thing to do. Sometimes it is not. The border between the two is complicated enough that the only useful answer is to trace it carefully.

When someone asks whether you should follow your passion, there is always an invisible phrase attached to the question: instead of what?

If everything else were equal, of course you would choose the work that interests you most. Why would you spend your life doing something less interesting if there were no tradeoff? The question only matters because everything else is not equal. You may have to choose between what fascinates you and what pays well, or between what feels exciting now and what gives you more options later.

So the real question is not whether passion is good. It is when passion should be trusted.

If Your Main Goal Is Money

If your main goal is to make money, then following your strongest interest is often not the most reliable strategy.

People usually pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. The market rewards usefulness to others, not private enthusiasm by itself. You may love something deeply, but if few people are willing to pay for it, or if too many people want to do the same thing, your passion may not translate into income.

There are obvious exceptions.

If you love football and are good enough to play professionally, you can make a great deal of money doing exactly what you love. But the odds are difficult because many people love football too. The more popular the passion, the more crowded the competition.

This does not mean you should never try. It depends on your ability, your tolerance for competition, and how hard you are willing to work. But it does mean that passion alone is not enough. In crowded fields, many people are passionate. Something else has to separate you.

The Advantage of Strange Tastes

Your odds improve when your interests are unusual.

The best situation is to like something that pays well and that not many other people genuinely enjoy. This combination is rare, but when it appears, it can be powerful.

Bill Gates is a good example. He did not merely love programming, which many people do. He seemed to love the specific act of building software for customers and running a software company. That is a much stranger taste. It is also an extremely valuable one.

Some people even have a genuine intellectual interest in making money. This is not the same as greed. They are not simply hungry for wealth. They are fascinated by mispricing, leverage, strategy, and opportunity. When they see an imbalance, they cannot help wanting to understand it and act on it. Money becomes a kind of puzzle.

In cases like these, following an interest can lead directly to wealth because the interest itself points toward something the market values.

The Strange Case of Getting Very Rich

There is one edge case where the advice reverses almost completely.

If you want to make a moderate amount of money, you often cannot afford to work only on what interests you most. But if you want to make an enormous amount of money, the kind measured in hundreds of millions or billions, following your strongest interests can become useful again.

The reason is startups.

The way to make truly large amounts of money is usually to build something that becomes much bigger than anyone expected. And one of the best ways to discover such ideas is to work on things you find genuinely interesting.

Many of the largest technology companies began as projects the founders were doing because they wanted them to exist. Apple, Google, and Facebook all began in this spirit. The founders were not merely sitting down to ask, “What is the most efficient way to make money?” They were pulled toward something interesting.

This pattern is common because the best startup ideas are often strange at first. If you are consciously looking for money, you may reject them too early. They look too small, too weird, too unlike an existing business. But if you are young, technically able, and guided by curiosity, your instincts about what would be interesting to build may be unusually well aligned with what the world will later need.

So there is a strange curve here.

If you do not need to make much money, you can follow your interests. If you want to become moderately rich, you often cannot. But if you want to become extremely rich, and you are the right kind of person in the right kind of field, following your interests may again be the best path.

When You Do Not Know What You Want

Most people are not choosing between perfect clarity and perfect clarity.

They are unsure. They want money, but not only money. They are more drawn to some kinds of work than others, but no single attraction dominates. They may admire several paths, fear several costs, and lack enough experience to know what any of them would actually feel like.

When you cannot decide between following your interests and pursuing financial reward, the problem is usually not that the two options are perfectly balanced. It is usually that you do not know enough.

You are likely ignorant in three ways at once.

You do not yet know what will make you happy. You do not really know what the different kinds of work are like from the inside. And you do not know how good you could become at them.

This ignorance is understandable. These things are hard to predict. The trouble is that almost no one tells you that this is the real problem. Ambitious young people are told to go to college, which may be good advice as far as it goes. But they are rarely taught how to figure out what kind of work to do, or how long that process can take.

How to Learn What to Work On

When you face uncertainty, the answer is to gather more information.

The best way to do that is usually to try working on things that interest you. Not just thinking about them. Not merely reading about them. Actually doing some version of the work.

This will teach you several things at once. You will learn whether the interest survives contact with reality. You will learn whether you have aptitude. You will learn what the work feels like when it is no longer an image in your head but a repeated activity in your day.

Do not wait too long to begin.

Do not wait until the end of college. Do not even wait for the perfect internship. You often do not need an official job doing something in order to begin doing it. If you are interested in writing, write. If you are interested in programming, build. If you are interested in design, make things. If you are interested in business, sell something small.

Figuring out what to work on can take years. The earlier you start collecting real evidence, the better.

Look at the People Around the Work

One useful way to judge a field is to look at the people in it.

You will become more like the people you work with. So ask yourself: do you want to become like them?

This question matters more than it first appears. Different kinds of work attract different kinds of people. If you choose a job mainly because it pays well, you will be surrounded by others who chose it for the same reason. That can make the work feel even emptier than it looked from the outside.

On the other hand, if you choose work you genuinely care about, you are more likely to be surrounded by people who care about it too. Their energy will make the work more alive. Their standards will pull you forward. Their seriousness will make your own interest stronger.

This does not mean every passionate field is good, or every well-paid field is empty. But the character of your colleagues is part of the job. You are not only choosing tasks. You are choosing a human environment.

Stay Upwind

There is another rule for uncertainty: choose paths that preserve future options.

The less certain you are about what you want, the more valuable flexibility becomes. A good choice under uncertainty is one that makes later choices easier rather than harder.

This is what it means to stay upwind.

If you are unsure whether to study math or economics, for example, math may be the upwind choice. It is usually easier to move from math into economics later than to move from economics into math. One direction keeps more doors open.

This principle applies beyond school. Some jobs, skills, and environments give you leverage later. Others narrow you quickly. When you are unsure, choose the path that gives you more information and more future freedom.

Following your interests is useful, but do not confuse interest with drifting. The best path is often one that lets curiosity explore while still increasing your range of motion.

If You Want to Do Great Work

There is one case where the answer becomes much simpler.

If you want to do great work, you should work on what interests you most.

This is not sufficient. Interest alone does not guarantee greatness. You also need ability, discipline, taste, persistence, and luck. But deep interest is necessary.

Great work grows from ambitious curiosity. You cannot fake that. You cannot manufacture it by deciding that a field is prestigious, or profitable, or impressive to others. If the curiosity is not real, you will run out of energy before you get far enough to do anything exceptional.

This explains why advice about following your passion is often biased.

Much of it comes from highly successful people. When you ask someone who has done great work how they did it, they will often say they worked on what interested them most. And for them, this is true.

But that does not make it universal advice. Not everyone wants to do great work. Not everyone is able to. Some people want stability, comfort, family time, or a reliable income more than they want the uncertainty and intensity that great work usually requires.

For those people, the answer may remain complicated.

But if your goal is great work, the complication disappears. The answer is yes.

Final Thoughts

“Follow your passion” is both better and worse advice than people think.

It is bad advice when it is treated as a slogan. It ignores tradeoffs. It ignores markets. It ignores ability, competition, uncertainty, and the difference between enjoying an activity and being able to build a life around it.

But it is good advice when applied carefully.

If you are exploring what to do, your interests are valuable evidence. Try them. Test them. See how they feel in practice. If your tastes are unusual and point toward something valuable, they may be an advantage. If you are trying to discover startup ideas, your curiosity may lead you where calculation would not. And if you want to do great work, genuine interest is not optional.

The real question is not whether passion matters.

It does.

The real question is what kind of life you are trying to build, and whether your passion is strong enough, rare enough, useful enough, and durable enough to carry weight in that life.

Follow your passion when it deserves to be followed.

But first, learn enough to know what that means.

Notes

[1] It is a mistake to assume that all economic inequality must come from unfairness. People have different interests, and some interests produce much more money than others. A world where one person loves enterprise software and another loves studio pottery will naturally produce unequal financial outcomes.

[2] Having trouble choosing between different interests is a separate problem. That is not always caused by ignorance. Sometimes the difficulty is intrinsic, because several paths are genuinely compelling.

[3] People cannot always be taken at their word about whether they are motivated by interest or money. Since it is more prestigious to be driven by passion, people driven mainly by money may claim stronger interest than they really have. A useful test is this: if the work did not pay well, would they take another job and still do it in their spare time?