Find The Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Weekdays And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life

The Onion just published a post that satirizes the desire to chase one's passion while being stuck doing something else for a living.

I've re-written a portion of it from the other side as an experiment, just to see how much greener the grass really is.

Turns out it doesn't read all that differently. See if you can spot the differences.

I have always been a big proponent of following your heart and doing exactly what you want to do. It sounds so simple, right? But there are people who spend years — decades, even — trying to find a true sense of purpose for themselves. My advice? Just find the thing you enjoy doing more than anything else, your one true passion, figure out how you can make a living from it and do it for the rest of your life, every day and even on nights and weekends, because making money from your passion is hard work. When you’re exhausted and cranky and just want to go to bed, you go back and work some more, because that's what it takes to keep your head above water.

It could be anything — music, writing, drawing, acting, teaching — it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that once you know what you want to do, you dive in a full 100 percent and set aside a small amount of your time for the luxury of self-pity because you know that without luck it’s unlikely to give you a steady income, allow you to buy a house, afford decent healthcare and send your kids to college.

Is there any other way to live?

I can’t stress this enough: Do what you love... in between family commitments, and commitments that tend to pop up and take immediate precedence over doing the thing you love, and things you may not enjoy but have to get good at so you can continue do what you love. Because the bottom line is that life is short, and you owe it to yourself to spend the majority of it giving yourself wholly and completely to something you absolutely love, doing what you feel you were put on this earth to do.

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