I came across this video of Mike Judge from “Dirty Jobs” talking about how people make mistakes by following their dreams and passions even when they dont have the talents for them or those dreams are just unrealistic.
He says follow opportunity, not dreams. But to still bring your passions along because they are often useful.
What do you all think?
Mike Rowe, Mike judge was from Beavis and butt head.
I agree, making your passion into a living, even if it works, doesn’t always make you happy. You end up having to channel your passion in ways that satisfy your customers. That takes the enjoyment out of it…
However educated people have many other benefits. They are healthier, they vote more, they go to jail less, etc. I’m not sure to what degree the issue is cause or effect though. Nonetheless, education for its own sake, even if it doesn’t lead to a career, can still be a good thing.
I agree. In today’s society, people get fed a diet of cherry-picked examples of success stories of people who followed their dreams - the NBA superstars, the Zuckerbergs, the Bill Gates’, the J.K. Rowlings, etc. We don’t hear about all those other examples of people who foolishly went into debt to found a start-up company that goes broke and leaves them in debt for life. We don’t hear about the 999 people who auditioned for a role in a movie and didn’t get it, only about that one successful actor/actress who did get the role.
But all of those 1000 had to follow their dreams to get the 0.1% chance; no one who didn’t even made the first cut. So the winner’s pep-talk of “follow your dreams” isn’t wrong. And out of the 1000, there may be 100 who make a passable though not stellar living, with the benefit of it being through something they enjoy. But it should really be “follow your dreams, but the bigger your dreams, the more you need a back-up plan”.
“Follow your dreams” is such a vague statement I’m not sure what to make of it. What I do know, though, are these things:
Most people who are working lousy jobs aren’t there because they followed their dreams. They’re there either because they didn’t get the chance, or they didn’t take the chance when it was presented to them.
Almost everything I regret in my life is something I DIDN’T do. I regret nothing I DID do.
My honest perception is that people generally don’t follow their dreams. They do the lazy thing and take the easy way. They go to the local school and do whatever job seems safest to get and keep.
If you do elect to teach a little higher -** and I’m not sure why that necessarily means you can’t have a decent job** - and fail, oh well, you tried. I took a shot at being a standup comic. I didn’t make a career of it, which is the usual fate of standup comics, but I tried, and I’m glad I did. Apart from the fact it was fun to try, I won’t die thinking “I wonder if.”
Now, I know some people blow their savings on ill-advised businesses and such, but, really, I suspect the number of people who will go their whole lives being quietly miserable because they never really tried to be what they wanted to be is orders of magnitude higher than the people who will die miserable they had one business failure.
Some of the best advice I ever got from my dad (a career engineer) when I told him I wanted to be an architect (showing him my high school technical drawings), “Son, you should study Computer Science.”
He was right.
I tried to pass on similar pragmatic advice to my kids, but so far they aren’t having any of it.
The problem with this is that people don’t generally know what the opportunity cost is. The guy who blew his savings and debt etc. on a failed business knows it. But the guy who spent years of his life that he could have used to establish a foundation for the future doesn’t know what he could have been.
So you take a guy who spent his early years trying to become an athlete or actor or writer or whatever. After this peters out he ends up at some dead end unskilled job. He doesn’t necessarily know if he might have been a successful architect/lawyer/whatever had he not spent all that time in a futile effort.
So yeah, the guy might look back and be happy that he “at least gave it a shot”, but that’s because he doesn’t know what he lost out on, and doesn’t associate his unhappy career with his giving it that shot.
If everyone followed opportunities, then we’d get hammered with a million applicants for ‘chemist’ this year, then a million applicants for ‘architect’ the next year, etc. Everyone would study for and apply to the job that had the most word-on-the-street of having great opportunities.
Humans already understand the idea that money is good, and jobs which are undersupplied will have a raised salary to try and attract people.
If you go for what you want, that spreads everyone out among a wide variety of interests. Once they start looking for jobs, they’ll be forced into the opportunities closest to their interest, taking a personal choice on how far off it is versus how much the salary is.
You can list any ideal, and it can be given or followed unadvisedly or poorly.
I’ve always been ambivalent about this advice.
On one hand, I think it is better for someone to aim high and land wherever circumstances would have them land than to aim to low and never get to test their wings. Not only does the latter situation often lead to regret and resentment, but it deprives an individual of the opportunity to use their talents to the best of their ability. Like, perhaps an aspiring artist doesn’t have the skill of a master–someone who would be able to support themselves financially by producing artwork. But maybe they have enough talent to teach others. If they are told that it is wasteful to pursue the dream of an art degree so they decide to major in accounting instead, society loses a fabulous art instructor to gain a mediocre accoutant. That’s not a good thing.
But on the other hand, I think it’s kind of crazy to rest your career on a dream. Dreams are optional. They are luxuries. Food and shelter are not. I think a lot of people feel like a failure when their realities don’t match up with their dreams, and I can’t help but think it’s because we have this crazy expectation that everyone must constantly love what they do to be healthy and fulfilled. “Do what you love” is great general advice. If you love to paint and sculpt, do it. But do you have to make a career out of it? No. Can you be just as happy doing something else for a living? Sure.
I think it depends on what you want and what type of person you are.
If what you really want is a house and kids and quiet in your rural hometown, then yeah, trying to become a rockstar isn’t the right path for you. It’s probably smart to take the safe road to get to the things you really value.
But pursuing a dream is possible in most cases, if you have the basic level of talent, gumption and organizational skills required. But you have to be willing to give up a lot- you may not have money, you may have to move far from your loved ones, and you may need to spend massive amounts of time investing in training. And you may go down a lot of false paths-- very few people would actually like to be a rock star, but many find along the way that they enjoy records sales or event production or sound engineering.
The trick is to know yourself enough to know what you really want and what you’re actually willing to risk to get it.
Agree. It’s a great disservice to children, my area of professional focus for a time, to tell them that they can be whatever they want, even the president, if they just work hard, which is effectively the same as “follow your dreams.” It’s preparing them for a life of disappointment that they did not earn, but were given by us. It is not preparing them to be resilient, nor is it focusing them on being proud of their own achievements within their own environment. It closes off infinitely more options than it opens up.
Instead, those that tell children this are just preparing them to be miserable until they achieve their dream, if they ever do, and then to realize that the happiness they gain from achieving this dream is only transitory. What is better is recognizing children’s legitimate passions, instead of just their momentary, reflexive whims, and aiding them in engaging with these passions in a manner whereby they can progressively improve in them if they so choose. In addition, help them recognize what their “dreams” actually are and what are just whims.
True, however, “Follow your dreams” life coaches often give unrealistic expectations of success - making people envision a, say, 30-70% chance of success, when in fact, in the movie audition example, the chances of getting that role might be 0.1% success. I think that many high school athletes “know” that their odds of getting to the NBA are lottery-low odds, but this talk about “Michael Jordan did it and so can you” is setting up many of them for disappointment.
Also, in the movie-audition example, there was very little cost involved - nothing to lose, really, by auditioning for a role - but if your dream is to found a new tech startup company but you aren’t really suited for business, then “pursuing your dream” could leave you shattered financially and in other ways, for decades. And if your dream is to be a doctor, but you aren’t suited for the profession, then you could waste years and many thousands of dollars in medical school.
So you’re implicitly saying that most people who follow their dreams are successful in their endevours? Wow.
Well, I envy you for that. I regret plenty of things I DID and DIDN’T do.
I’ve made a fuckload of mistakes.
I understand why I did those things and my regret is in most cases essentially “I wish I knew then what I know now”. But sure, there are many memories I have that make me reflexively grimace or facepalm.
I would put it slightly differently.
Almost everyone I know has a dream, including me, that they talk about from time to time but don’t seem to make any real progress.
I think there are various psychological reasons why people kid themselves about whether they really are going to make a serious go of realizing their dreams.
And a lot of self-help stuff that we consume tends to pander to such psychology: “You can succees in your every wiish, you just need to follow these simple steps”. Pretending that that’s true, and keeping that thought in the back of your mind, can feel better than either trying to actually do it or throwing the claim out as false.
*“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” * Sidney J. Harris (whoever that is)
I followed my dreams and I have a great job! I’m a Locker Tester at the local high school (well, actually, I think it’s more like a college; anyway, it’s some kind of educational institution). I go around and test to see if the lockers can be opened. It’s a real adventure, because I never know where the lockers I need to test are, so every workday I have to spend most of the day looking for the lockers I need to test. My boss is my old elementary school math teacher! Or maybe she’s my grandmother, I’m not sure. Actually, I think she may be Angela Merkel!
(The official work uniform is kind of a bummer, though, since it doesn’t include pants. Fortunately, no one seems to pay any attention to that, although it is kind of embarrassing. Also, I think there may be something in the food and water at the cafeteria there, because my teeth have all gotten loose since I started the job.)
Dream big. Dream far and wide. Definitely follow your dreams, to the extent that you can afford them. If you need to risk more than you have then get someone else to pay the bill. If you can’t find someone to do that then your dream sucks so dream about something else.
Always follow opportunity. That’s how you can afford to dream.
I followed my dreams. It works sometime. Sometimes you really can show up in Bangkok with $1000 in your pocket and make a go of it. Anything beat West Fucking Texas.
(Of course, that was after I’d previously spent a couple years in Thailand in Peace Corps and so knew my way around, but hey, even that was following my dreams too. Just don’t end up like that no-talent artist in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, who ended up committing suicide. Give it a go but know if it’s really not going to work out.)
It’s a challenging one, because on one hand the Homer Simpson approach of “You can’t win so don’t try” is both unhelpful and untrue - but on the other hand, I think the “You can acheive anything!” stuff needs to be tempered with a dose of realism.
Are you a 120kg asthmatic with the reflexes of a stoned wombat? Then guess what, you’re never going to be an astronaut. You’re incredibly socially awkward with a stammer and perpetual derpy face? Sorry, you’re not going to get to be the Prime Minister.
Some things absolutely can be accomplished with goal setting, hard work, a dose of luck (both the kind one creates with work and the kind that comes from the great cosmic RNG) and the trick is to work out the likelihood of making one’s dreams become reality actually are.
As others have noted - taking a year off work to write the Great [Nationality] Novel might result in the author turning out to be the next Stephen King or JK Rowling, but they might also find out no-one picks up their book (or it doesn’t sell well) and they’re out a year’s experience in their field plus whatever money they spent paying the rent/mortgage/bills/general cost of living while they were doing it.
To some people the trade off or the risk is totally worth it, to others it totally is not; it’s an individual thing that varies person by person.
Ice Hockey player Wayne Gretzky famously noted “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”.
My corrollary to that is “If you’re not likely to hit the target, you’re probably better off saving your ammunition - unless you’ve got some spare.”
nm wrong thread