Should I Choose Passion or Duty?

This video explores the dilemma between choosing a career based on passion versus duty. It argues that pursuing what we love, despite the risks, may lead to greater fulfillment and mastery than settling for a safe but uninspiring path. The video encourages viewers to consider the true meaning of safety and the potential costs of ignoring their passions.

When it comes to deciding what to do with our lives, we are frequently presented with what looks like a very painful choice: the passionate path versus the safe path. The latter involves the slow mastery of a dependable profession. We will be bored, but we know we'll never be fired. Meanwhile, the former is a high-wire act in which we fantasize about generating an income from what we deeply love, and yet we constantly fear penury and humiliation. The choice can feel acute, but it may be less so than it seems once we properly explore the concept of safety. We are never properly safe so long as we are doing something we hate or are pursuing out of cowardice. In the deeply competitive conditions of modernity, our backup career, the one we adopt out of fear, will be someone else's central ambition. Our plan B will be someone else's plan A, which places us at an immediate disadvantage in terms of the energy and focus we are able to muster. The safe choice might ruin us. By contrast, what we love is what we are obsessed by anyway. We'd do it for free, which decisively increases our chances of mastery while reducing the price of failure. A decade of mixed results on a passion project is inherently less onerous than unspectacular returns for a whole career in a hateful field. It is, in the end, not very safe to use the one life we have, forcing ourselves to do what we know from the outset we won't enjoy, simply in order to keep living. This isn't safety; it's masochism. We may all have to spend our first two decades suffering through the education system, but at some point, we are allowed to leave school. At some point, we need to have a shot at answering what life could be about beyond obedience and timidity. It's not very common to have a passion; most of us don't. Yet if we are blessed enough to have one, we are risking far more than we should by failing to heed its call. For more from the School of Life, you can subscribe to our channel and take a look at our range of products on our website.