“You need to find something that you can do fast, that makes you happy, and that people will pay you for.”
It’s one of the great dilemmas in life, in business, and in raising kids: Should you follow your passion if you want to be successful?
- Absolute necessity, said Steve Jobs. (“You’ve got to find what you love. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.”)
- Heck no, says Mark Cuban. (“Follow your passion? No. Follow your effort. No one quits anything they’re good at.”)
- Um, maybe? says Tom Brady.
- Maybe, but it’s more complicated than that, reports Harvard Business School. (They’d rather you find your “purpose.”)
- Actually, yes: your passion, but only if you’re really good at it, says another study.
It’s a fun debate to have, I suppose, right up there with, “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
But recently, I interviewed a successful first-time entrepreneur — first time at roughly age 50, mind you — who articulated a fresh take on the question that caught me in my tracks.
Meet John Donohue, who spent 22 years working as an editor at the New Yorker magazine before being laid off in 20TK. After a year of “reflection and discovery and despair,” as he put it, “not necessarily in that order,” he got a new day job working in non-profit development.
He also launched a side hustle that turned into a real, full-time niche business, called All the Restaurants; Donohue draws and sells limited-edition prints of big city restaurants, primarily in his home of New York City. As that business grew and grew — and as he wound up leaving his new day job to run it full-time — he said he realized “the secret to life,” that he’d want to share with his kids.
It’s a new take on the old debate, and it goes like this: “You need to find something that you can do fast, that makes you happy, and that people will pay you for.”
Let’s break it down. I think there are four parts, even though it’s organized into three.
First, “you need to find something that you can do …”
There are a lot of things out there in the world that are worth doing, but there are probably only a limited number of things that any of us can do well — which is to say that we can do them well enough to make them worth doing.
Second, ” … fast …”
Donohue said it takes him perhaps 20 minutes to do each drawing, coupled with a few hours to add colour and make a print. Then, he can sell 365 prints of each piece of artwork. I think we can unpack this word, “fast” several ways, but it basically has to do with taking that thing you’re good at, and make sure you can do it at scale.
Third, ” … that makes you happy …”
In this context, to me anyway, “happy” seems like a more mellow and perhaps better substitute for “passion.” It also suggests that there might be more than one thing you might find; that seems a bit less pressure-packed than suggesting someone has to find their one, true, passion.
Finally, ” … and that people will pay you for.”
Maybe you don’t need money. Maybe you’re independently wealthy and your kids will never have to work a day in their lives. Lucky them; they can major in Elizabethan poetry at college. But for most of us, profitability is a pretty important piece of the puzzle. It’s not the only piece, but it’s equally important to all the others.
Look, as a business owner perhaps you’ve already figured out the perfect intersection between passion, purpose and profitability. But many entrepreneurs I talk to also want to give good advice to the people they mentor, and for that matter to their own kids.
Work on the idea yourself, and come up with your own answer. But if you want your kids to be successful (and who doesn’t?), it sounds like a good mantra to get them thinking about.
Feature Image Credit: Getty Images
