I had a lemonade stand business that lasted about 6 hours, but it was a damn good business at the time. 
That always helps. Once you have kids, forget about your dreams. You need to work to pay the bills.
The “do what you love” advice is bullshit. If everyone did what they loved, no one would clean shit for a living. When I say “I’d love to be able to quit work”, people always say “what would you do all day”. I’d do the same thing I did when I was unemployed for six months - watch TV, play videogames, drink with my friends until 5:00am, go on vacations, ski, golf, bum around New York City, go to the gym, dabble in art, read, take up various hobbies and interests. Do you know anyone who would pay me to do that? Problem is you don’t make money doing what you love to do. You make money doing what other people would love for you to do.
What about people who love baking cookies and make a business out of it? Well that’s nice but a great way to ruin a perfectly good hobbie is to make a career out of it. Think of what you like to do the most. Now imagine five people who don’t give a shit about it telling you how to do it for ten hours a day for twenty years.
No, the best you can hope for is to find a career compatible with your personality and skills and try to find some daily enjoyment in certain aspects of it. Ideally, it will pay well and not occupy every waking hour so you’ll be able to pursue other interests outside of work.
Now get back to work. You aren’t being paid to believe in the power of your dreams.
I got a homebrewing kit as a gift about 6 years ago. It sat in my garage for about a year until one day I was just bored enough to try to make beer with it. It was awful! So, being the type of person that I am, I had to find out WHY it turned out so bad. I did a ton of reading and research and tried making another brew. That one turned out pretty good. So did the next one. Pretty soon people were telling me “you’re really good at this, you should do this professionally”, but I just laughed them off because it was a hobby.
Fast forward to 3 years ago, I heard about an opportunity to work at a local regional brewery and I was intrigued, even though it meant starting at the bottom and working in the packaging department and doing a lot of cleaning. So I applied and I got the job.
Now, after a stint in the brewhouse as a Staff Brewer, I run our Quality Assurance laboratory and I absolutely love it. I get to play with beer all day. I’ll never get rich at this job, but it pays a decent wage that allows my wife and I to live comfortably.
While it is true that no one owes you a living and you have to work where you can be paid to do it, it’s also true that your life should be an expression of who you are, not what someone with money wants you to be. Whether you succeed or not, you have to try to express who you are in everything you do. This can be very hard, well nigh impossible, but the other alternative is a form of death. If you allow yourself to become nothing more than a burger fryer, programmer, accountant, copy editor or whatever, you’re just a machine, and nobody deserves that fate.
True enough, but the reverse is also true: If everyone gave up their dreams and resigned themselves to drudgery we’d have no authors, no actors, no playwrights, no artists, no crackpot inventors, no risk-taking entrepreneurs, etc.etc.
And what a boring place the world would be.
A dose of realism is a good thing, of course. Dare to dream, but don’t assume that the money will follow. Have a backup plan in case the dream doesn’t come true.
Do you actually have some real world example to contribute, or are you just clearing out the clichè vault?
Some of us are actualy discussing the practicalities of your “follow your dreams” platitudes.
My mother was a middle school science teacher for over 20 years. She was wildly popular and was Louisiana’s Teacher of the Year in 1991 (out of 40,000 or so). What she really wanted to do was speak however. She wanted to teach teachers how to teach. She started giving motivation speeches and teaching seminars at night and on weekends. She retired from teaching at 50 and started a doctorate program so that she would have the credentials to land big time speaking engagments. After she earned her doctorate, she started speaking full-time. Now 56, she has spoken in 49 states and 10 foreign countries. She travels most of the time. I don’t know how much she makes but her published rates are $2000 - $5000 per day.
She did what she loved and the money followed so there is one example.
So what if your an accountant who roleplays on weekends? Or a programmer who has a loving wife and 2 kids who he spends quality time with every day? Or a burger fryer who can charm the pants of almost any girl he meets?
Not everybody defines their life in terms of their job.
Of course not. It’s extremely hard to find work that expresses who you are. But that doesn’t mean you can’t gravitate toward work you like. If you hate accounting, maybe you should look for word that has role-playing aspects to it, like sales and management. With a background in accounting, you have an addtional advantage. If you don’t like programming but enjoy art, get into programming for 3D applications. Point is, try to find work that interests you and gives you a chance for expression. Too often, people think they have to find the perfect job to express themselves, when a lot of the time it’s a matter of gravitating toward the things that interest you, either within a company or by moving from job to job, or by feathering your nest on the job until you transform it into something you like. It’s hard, takes time, involves risk, but what’s the alternative?
What specific set of problems would you like me to address?
I’m a gamer going way back. I started playing D & D back in 1977. I was one of those kids in the 80’s who used to hang out for hours in videogame arcades wasting quarter after quarter.
When I went off to college I got a degree in Electrical Engineering. After graduating I spent five years as a programmer. I like it well enough, but I wanted to do something more creative. At night I worked on writing a novel. I also started designing board games for me and my friends to play.
Finally I decided I wanted a sexier programming job. I went back to graduate school and got a Masters in Computer Science, specializing in graphics. I was hoping that I could get a job doing programming for an animation house. At least that way I’d be closer to the people doing the creative stuff.
I got a job as a graphics programmer with a game company instead. It turned out that all those late nights designing board games and working on my novel had been perfect training for a career as a game designer. After two years as a programmer I switched over to design full time.
Now I work for Sony. I’ve created several hit games, and I’m currently the lead designer on a Playstation 3 title slated for release next year.
I’m definitely doing what I love. My wife laughs at me because when I come home from a long day at the studio I like to unwind by writing interactive fiction.
I never starved pursuing my dreams. But I did put in a lot of work on nights and weekends. Work that, at the time, just seemed like a total waste of time. But in the end it totally paid off.
For starters, the whole point of the thread was “do you have stories about doing what you love with the money following”.
So, do ya? Because the OP seems to be in the easy-to-achieve position of doing what he loves, but he doesn’t quite see the money following.
We were actually talking about the practicalities of trying to have a life while “doing what you love” which to a lot of us meant sitting on the couch, playing golf, and making music.
But, by golly, if I wasn’t inspired by your heartfelt, “follow your dreams, children”. Maybe I’ll just quit my job today, and get started on that great American novel. You think you can help me with my rent check and deferring those college loans for a couple years? Maybe while I’m following my dreams, I could live with Mom and Dad a few more years. That’s contentment.
So, just what career do you have that allows you to express who you are where the money just followed?
I love thinking about things and how they work - physical things, systems - essentially, this is physics, the study of matter.
For almost 25 years I have been more and more exclusively working on the most interesting parts. It feels like playing a game where I try to find combinations of both interesting and “this could be important” to work on, and keep getting better and better at it.
For the last couple years I’ve paid a great deal of attention to thermal science and heat transfer. After poking around SDMB a little, I want to read some of an excellent book I found about Laplace transforms - the discussion starts by saying that, just as the Fourier transform treats everything like it’s composed of sinusoids, the Laplace transform treats everything like it’s composed of sinusoids and exponentials - this makes immense sense, this is why you can substitute G(iw) for G(s) to calculate radii for a Nyquist plot - I could go on - have to agree with the engineer above who said you’d have to love it to do it as it’s too hard otherwise. I think about these things all the time, because I love it.
And I have more money than I ever expected to, and spend it on making people’s lives happier and safer and giving them more potential; and could spend a great deal more on that than I do, but have to be surprised and very thankful for the way it turned out.