Don’t Follow Your Passion | Hacker News Reader

Don’t Follow Your Passion

unicornfree.com

40 pointsthekguy12 comments

"You decide to open up a café to follow your passion for coffee. Turns out that you hate running a café." This reminds me of E-Myth, where the woman starts a pie-making business because she's passionate about baking pies, and ends up hating the whole damn thing. I have friends who are dying to start their own café because they love coffee and the café atmosphere. But I don't think they've thought it all the way through to fixing the busted sink in the bathroom or the vendor that's a dick all the time. As a life coach, I actually totally see your point, Amy! - investigate your passion with your eyes fuckin wide open and don't be oblivious to all the actual un-passion-related work involved!

> As a life coach

Not Off-Topic but what's that like? I have a friend who has a stable job and really has gotten more and more into making a difference with his coaching clients.

This is similar to the core message of the e-myth, which declared that starting a business didn't make you an entrepreneur if you were really a technician who had one entrepreneurial thought.

I know myself (I'm a business coach) that I meet many business owners who started a business for one reason - often technical ability, a desire for more money or control, and sometimes passion - and only later realise they need to develop business skills.

And if loving your job and turning it into a business is hard, then loving a hobby and turning it into a business is an order of magnitude harder again ... hard, but possible.

Didn't like it until the end 'Practice open-eyed passion' that statement made the rest make sense.

I think you have to have passion, but most people do not realize what they are really passionate about.

Thanks for the post.

Hahaha. This is an utter crock. The most successful people I know are all passionate about what they do. It's why they do it. Yes a given subject may be hard work, but if you _don't_ have the passion to keep you going, and put up with the shit, then you're doomed to failure. If you are passionate, more likely _not to notice the shit_. I have seen a lot more failures of people because they do what they do - 'because' rather than any desire for doing something for it's own sake.

There is more to the post than just one reading of its title. You seem to be arguing with the proposal "Do things you are not passionate about." That isn't remotely what the article is saying.

Wow, wrong again. The article is total BS and the title is nothing more than link bait. Every successful startup founder I know list a passion for the domain as one of their keys to success.

Basically what this article boils down to IMHO is "when shit gets hard just run, or better yet just dont do it because it might get hard"

And as for the 6 solutions she proposes... well those are dumb to. If people focus on how much work a startup is then they are much more likely to talk themselves out of it. I rather follow the advice of people like Steve Blank (customer development) and PG - How to start a startup (http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html)

Maybe we should take another piece of advice from this lady that obviously knows nothing about successful products and just forget passion to "Follow the Money" as she put it.

No, d3x, you are mistaken about what the article says. You are arguing that passion is important. The article doesn't dispute that. It is categorically not saying that you should do things you aren't passionate about. It's saying that there are many business possibilities related to any given "passion," and the first one that comes to mind is just the most obvious one, not necessarily the best one or the one most closely aligned with what you're passionate about.

> Maybe we should take another piece of advice from this lady that obviously knows nothing about successful products

Amy actually has a number of successful products to her name. See http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products/

WOW, I fundamentally disagree with everything stated here. I would explain but I have to get back to following my passion.

Feel free to not comment next time you don't feel like saying anything.

Actually I did comment; my comment was that I disagree with this article. I'm sorry that you didn't pick up on that. In the future you should take your own advice and only comment if you have some actual value to add to the conversation e.g.: I agree because... or I disagree because. I was unable to comment at the time because I was working on my startup. My comment conveyed my opinion of the article and yours has done nothing more than show you are petty person that makes irrelevant comments that are not even relevant to the topic at hand. Since you are obviously dense I will explain: The topic at hand is the article but you did nothing more than comment on me so next time try and focus on the article at hand.

I don't see how my comment on the lack of substance to yours was any more "petty" than your flippant dismissal of Amy's article. If you disagree with the article, a good response would either be to explain how it was wrong and offer an alternative view or to ignore it. But just saying "I disagree" is about as relevant to the OP as saying "I like pizza." Neither is a commentary on the article — they're both statements of your personal feelings.

Anyway, that's the last I'll say about this. I just wanted to make it clear that I didn't mean to personally attack you — and I'm sorry if it sounded that way — just your comment's lack of content.

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