I watched this video once before, and there was a segment in it that struck me as so strange and incomprehensible that I have taken the trouble to transcribe it. It starts at 11:20 and runs through 12:20.
"Follow your passion." We've been talking about it here for the last 36 hours. "Follow your passion" -- what could possibly be wrong with that? It's probably the worst advice I ever got. "Follow your dreams and go broke," right? I mean -- that's all I heard growing up. I didn't know what to do with my life, but I was told that if you follow your passion it's gonna work out. I can give you 30 examples right now. Bob Combs, the pig farmer in Las Vegas, who collects the uneaten scraps of food from the casinos and feeds them to his swine. Why? Because there's so much protein in the stuff we don't eat, his pigs grow at twice the normal speed, and he is one rich pig farmer, and he is good for the environment, and he spends his days doing this incredible service, and he smells like hell but God bless him. He's making a great living. You ask him: did you follow your passion here? He'd laugh at you. The guy's worth -- he just got offered like $60 million for his farm, and turned it down, outside of Vegas. He didn't follow his passion! He stepped back and he watched where everybody was going and he went the other way.
This makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. For starters, it's completely clear to me that Rowe is totally passionate about the work he has been doing for Dirty Jobs! (If that's not clear from this short segment, watch the whole video.) I don't know that in his youth he would have been able to identify this work as his passion, but it seems clear enough to me that he has, as an adult, found it -- if not "the" passion of his life, then certainly "a" passion.
His story about the pig farmer makes no sense to me either. How exactly can we conclude that the pig farmer isn't following his passion? I'd say that the fact that he doesn't want to sell his farm is evidence that it is, in fact, his passion, and the clever way he's found to feed his pigs, to me, supports that conclusion rather than contradicting it. Where is it written that no one could possibly be passionate about pig farming?
And tucked in the middle of all this is the line "'Follow your dreams and go broke,' right?" Again -- where is that written? I've never assumed that following my dreams would lead to penury; quite the contrary.
Rowe is thus an example of a curious phenomenon I've noticed -- people whose passion seems to be telling other people not to follow their passions. (Cal Newport is the other example that comes to mind.)
The only explanation I can come up with is that these people don't really get what a passion is or how to identify it. I suppose that to the extent that there are a lot of people out there who don't get that, telling them not to follow their passions is, for them, sound advice! But I find it rather unsatisfying.
I'd guess the point is that the guy didn't follow his passion to become a pig farmer, but became a pig farmer because it was expedient, and later learned to be passionate about it.
Not that i've actually watched the film or anything, you understand
"Follow your passion." We've been talking about it here for the last 36 hours. "Follow your passion" -- what could possibly be wrong with that? It's probably the worst advice I ever got. "Follow your dreams and go broke," right? I mean -- that's all I heard growing up. I didn't know what to do with my life, but I was told that if you follow your passion it's gonna work out. I can give you 30 examples right now. Bob Combs, the pig farmer in Las Vegas, who collects the uneaten scraps of food from the casinos and feeds them to his swine. Why? Because there's so much protein in the stuff we don't eat, his pigs grow at twice the normal speed, and he is one rich pig farmer, and he is good for the environment, and he spends his days doing this incredible service, and he smells like hell but God bless him. He's making a great living. You ask him: did you follow your passion here? He'd laugh at you. The guy's worth -- he just got offered like $60 million for his farm, and turned it down, outside of Vegas. He didn't follow his passion! He stepped back and he watched where everybody was going and he went the other way.
This makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. For starters, it's completely clear to me that Rowe is totally passionate about the work he has been doing for Dirty Jobs! (If that's not clear from this short segment, watch the whole video.) I don't know that in his youth he would have been able to identify this work as his passion, but it seems clear enough to me that he has, as an adult, found it -- if not "the" passion of his life, then certainly "a" passion.
His story about the pig farmer makes no sense to me either. How exactly can we conclude that the pig farmer isn't following his passion? I'd say that the fact that he doesn't want to sell his farm is evidence that it is, in fact, his passion, and the clever way he's found to feed his pigs, to me, supports that conclusion rather than contradicting it. Where is it written that no one could possibly be passionate about pig farming?
And tucked in the middle of all this is the line "'Follow your dreams and go broke,' right?" Again -- where is that written? I've never assumed that following my dreams would lead to penury; quite the contrary.
Rowe is thus an example of a curious phenomenon I've noticed -- people whose passion seems to be telling other people not to follow their passions. (Cal Newport is the other example that comes to mind.)
The only explanation I can come up with is that these people don't really get what a passion is or how to identify it. I suppose that to the extent that there are a lot of people out there who don't get that, telling them not to follow their passions is, for them, sound advice! But I find it rather unsatisfying.