Do not follow your passion!

Recently, I was browsing youtube and I happened to watch this amazing speech by this Silicon Valley VC that I really admire - Ben Horowitz where he talks to a graduating class on the why following your passion is not a smart thing to do.

To give you a brief background on Ben, he is one of those battle hardened guys who survived the dot com crash successfully as a CEO and currently heads a VC firm named a16z. If you had a chance to read his book "Hard thing about Hard things" or his blog(bookmark it!) you would know that he uses a lot of realism in a counter-idealism manner to make his point and not following your passion is one of those ideas! Rather he asks them to follow something they are good at and here is why.

1. When some successful guy comes to you and says that he is successful because he loved what he did it is very much possible that because he became successful he started loving what he did and you never know for sure which one is correct.
2. Another problem with following your passion is that it is very hard to prioritise passions like Are you more passionate about math or engineering? Are you more passionate about history or literature? These are quite tough decisions. On the other hand it is quite easy to decide if you are good at Math or Writing.
3. Your passions are not at all permanent! Something that you were passionate about in your 20s might not be same thing that you are passionate about in your 30s.
4. The fourth issue with following your passion is you’re not necessarily good at your passion. Just because you love singing doesn’t mean you should be a professional singer.
5. Finally the most important point is that following your passion is "ME" centric view of the world. When you go through life, what you’ll find is what you take out of the world over time — be it money, cars, home, stuff, accolades — is much less important than what you’ve put into the world. So it is better to follow your contribution. Find the thing that you’re great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better and that is the thing to follow.

After the video was over I gave a good thought on what was one thing that I was good at and I found that I am good at scavenging data, investigations, research, architecture, I am good at intuitively solving problems(FYI I am INTJ-A) When I look at the data I can get into the minuscule details easily and at the same time form a broad view of the problem/solution from the data. My mind would trip over if you ask me point blank questions like what is the square of 203 but at the same time I can understand complex Math intuitively and from an implementation perspective and hence I have found my solace in Data Science. I hope after reading this you forget your passion for a moment and give a thought on what you're really good at!