Best piece of advice I every received from a poster:
http://despair.com/potential.htmlSo, I've really hated my day job for years (ER nurse). It just paid too darn well. And, I've tried a whole bunch of things as possibilities to change careers: theology, philosophy, world religions, painting, sculpting, computer graphics, animation, furniture design, interior architecture, visual effects, video editing... And by trying, I mean, researching the hell out of it, taking formal training or actively studying on my own for more than a year.
Why did I do these things? Because I believed the "Do what you love, and money will follow" mantra. Problem: I wasn't making money doing what I loved, and therefore I had to keep doing what I hated for money, which was being a nurse. I was not willing to do the starving artist/philosopher thing for too long.
Solution: I found something that I like reasonably well, allows me to be creative and think widely and that has a potential to make a decent amount of cash, with potentially a huge financial upside: programming and starting my own business.
The chief problem with the "Do what you love and the money will follow" mantra, is that it essentially paints the career problem and money problem as a binary issue. Either do what you love, or do what you hate. There are many choices in between those things that have varying degrees of financial outcomes.
Another thought: If you do what you love, and feel continually pressured for cash, there is a lot of pressure to compromise yourself and your loves for money. Some handle that better than others. For example, there are a lot of people who start out wanting to be musicians, painters, artists or writers who try to do it for money. The problem comes when the rent is continuously due, and you're broke. You're then stuck with being a writer/painter/musician and needing to make cash. Do you write/paint/compose for purely commercial projects (like an ad agency), or do you only write/paint/compose what you love?
Finally: Speaking from experience, spend some time in LA, and you'll come to the conclusion that there are more people who are trying to chase their dreams and be actors/directors/filmmakers than the market will bear. This leads to a huge culture of abusing the people trying to get their break in those industries. After years of work and studing 3D modeling, animation and image compositing, I finally got offered an entry level job at Sony Pictures Imageworks (Big film VFX house in LA). Salary: $20 an hour, minimum of 60 hours per week if not 80 to 100, and you get laid off after the current movie finishes production in 4 months. You're then unemployed until the next round of FX films start post-production. Why did workers tolerate this? Because there were many more people vying for those jobs than there were positions available.