Passion Vs. Profit: Which Would You Rather?
The Amplified Impact Podcast
May 9th, 2023
I recently received a question from a guy on YouTube asking which is better: earning a million dollars a year from a business that doesn’t add value to the world, or earning a hundred thousand dollars a year from a cool job.
This question only has one answer for me, but it’s going to be different for everyone. For me…it’s to make a ton of money doing something boring because money allows me to buy back my time, and that’s the only value that money has.
So, the more money I make…the more time I can buy back. The misnomer here is that people assume that working a job that you’re not passionate about means that you’ll hate what you do.
I find a lot of passion in the process, even if I’m not passionate about the product I’m selling.
Whether you’re on a mission to earn a million dollars or find your dream job, it’s good to understand the “why” of what you’re doing.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Pick a direction that you think you could be interested in, that you think you could be passionate about and then pursue it and become competent and then become masterful at the thing.” – Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
So the other day I get a question from a guy in the comments on YouTube and he asks which would you rather have? Would you rather make maybe a million dollars a year but you’re selling a product, you’re working in a business that you own but that you don’t necessarily love. Like you’re you’re selling a widget, something that doesn’t really add value to the world in like the sense that you’re making a grand impact or anything like that. Or would you rather make a hundred thousand dollars dollars a year but you get to work like a really cool job. And if I remember correctly, the example that he had used was to be like a human rights investigator or something like that where you travel into different countries of the world and investigate human rights violations or something. I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s not the most exciting thing I could personally think of but that was the thing that he thought of. So it shows where his mind is at, which is in a place of giving and empathy to the world.
Anthony Vicino [00:00:50]:
And I think that’s kind of cool. But to me this question only has one answer but it’s going to be different for everybody. For me it has one answer and I’m going to explain why that is. But before I do a little backstory on this guy, I think he also added for himself he kind of answered this right, by the way, that he had positioned the question in the first place, which was would you rather work a shitty job that you hate but make a ton of money? Or would you rather work a job that you love but you don’t make as much money? Okay, so when phrased in that context, it’s a harder question to answer. I still personally think there’s a right answer that I would personally go for, but I’ll explain why that is. It’s very clear from the way that he had positioned it that he was pro $100,000 job working as the human rights investigator. And he even said as much. He’s like, I’d rather have a job where I get to travel around and have this exciting life and doing what I love rather than this boring thing selling a thing I don’t necessarily like.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:50]:
And I think that right there just kind of showed a misunderstanding of what money allows you to do. Because for me the answer in that question of would you rather $100,000 but have a really cool rad job or make a ton of money doing something that is kind of boring. For me the answer is make a ton of money doing something boring because money allows you to buy back your time. That’s really the only value that money has to us. There’s only one utility, which is a dollar is just an IOU that you can claim later to recoup somebody else’s time and energy. That means either I’m taking my dollar to buy this product, this monster energy drink that somebody else spent their time creating the product, then producing the product and distributing the product and marketing the product. So they put their time and energy into this thing that now I am exchanging my dollar for, right? And that dollar comes to me as a result of exchanging my time and energy and resources to acquire that. Right? So it’s really just an IOU and all we’re really exchanging is time, my time, your time, this other guy’s time, right, as kind of like this vague concept.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:00]:
So through that lens, if money’s only job is to buy back our time, then I want to make as much money as possible because then I’m going to be able to buy back as much as my time as I want. And the misnomer here, the misunderstanding, is that this person, I think, was under the impression that I was going to work a job that I don’t necessarily love, like selling a product that I’m not passionate about and therefore I would hate what I do. But for me, it’s more about the process than it is the result. And so even if it was a product that I wasn’t really passionate about, I would still find a lot of passion in the process of creating the product or distributing that you’re selling or creating the systems around how we can do this thing more efficiently. There’s a lot of ways that you can find love and passion within the process. Which, there’s a great book on this topic that Cal Newport, who’s a professor at Stanford wrote called so good they can’t ignore you. And it debunked this myth that has been, I think, really popularized since Steve Jobs gave a really famous graduation speech many, many years before, years ago, but right before he died, where he said, go pursue your passion. Pursue the thing in life that lights you with fire.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:12]:
And then if you enjoy what you do, you never work a day in your life, right? Something like that. And a lot of people have taken that to mean that you should pursue your passion. And that’s like the most important thing. And I don’t necessarily disagree, but I don’t agree. And Cal Newport, in his book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You lays out why this is not necessarily good advice for people. The big reason is in the beginning, especially when you’re young, you don’t have any idea what you’re going to really be passionate about long term. Like, if you had told me when I was 22 years old that I was going to be passionate about entrepreneurship, about real estate or about content creation when I was 38 years old, I’d say there’s no chance in hell it would have been the furthest thing from my mind at that age. So if I had been following my passions, which I did, that took me following rock climbing, right? And that didn’t necessarily lead me on a path towards becoming the person that I wanted to be or living the life that I wanted to have.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:06]:
It was just me becoming a Peter Pan and ignoring my responsibility to the universe, which was my job, is to go out there and become the best version of myself. And so chasing your passion, I think, can be a really slippery, dangerous slope. And then instead of chasing your passion, you should pick a direction that you think you could be interested in, that you think you could be passionate about and then pursue it and become competent and then become masterful at the thing. Because one of the things I’ve realized in my own life is that the more masterful I become at an activity, the more I tend to enjoy it, right? It’s like this positive feedback loop. The better I get at marketing, the more I find marketing interesting, the deeper I go, the more I uncover and realize how deep of a topic it is. And so that’s the first step of this, is realizing that there’s an infinite amount of passion and complexity and fulfillment and progress to be had in any direction. But you won’t necessarily know what that direction is until you go out there and you try a whole lot of things. You get your hands into them, and you just start experimenting and experiencing.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:11]:
Now, all this to say is, for me, going back to that initial question, would you rather have a great job, $100,000 or selling this thing, making a lot of money? It’s a hands down answer. Go with the money personally, because the money allows you to buy back your life if you’ve built that business in the right way, which you can always learn how to do later even if you’re not doing right in the beginning. And his point was, he’s like, I don’t want to live a boring life. I want to be able to go out there and experience things. And I’m like, you know what? In the last four months, I’ve gone to Antarctica. I’ve traveled to Salt Lake City to speak at an event. I’m going to go race rally cars here in a couple of weeks. Then my girlfriend and I were going to Ireland for a couple’s building retreat.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:50]:
We’re going to go up to the cabin here in a couple of weekends. Like, I do jiu jitsu multiple times per week. My life is really dope. I love my life. And it’s all because I have the financial wherewithal that when somebody asks me, do you want to go do this really cool rad thing? I don’t have to clear my schedule. I don’t have to wonder, Do I have the money to do it? I can just go do it. Whereas the job always locks you in. I’m not saying the job isn’t the right path for some people, or most people even.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:19]:
I’m just saying for me, it’s a very clear cut answer. Now let’s rewind that question a little bit even further and take it more to the root of what he was getting at, which is would you rather work a job that you love and not make as much money versus a job that you hate and making more money? That’s a harder question to answer. And personally, if it’s a business that I’m building and I don’t necessarily love it, I’m going to stay on that path because I know the potential upside is infinite. Right? It’s all about risk reward. And even if I’m pursuing something I’m not necessarily passionate about in business, I know the potential upside is so great that it can offset the risk, the risk of this thing not working out or the risk of just having wasted a year or two of my life being miserable. Now, if the alternative is working a W two that I love but not making a ton of money versus working a w two, I hate making a ton of money. That is a much harder question to answer because there is only so much upside in the W two. And so your risk is that you will hit that ceiling.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:22]:
It will never be enough to live the life of your dreams and your fantasies and you will get complacent and locked in into this thing that you hate. And this is where we talk about the fuzzy handcuffs. The fuzzy handcuffs are the ones that are so comfortable, life is good but not great that it’s hard to break them. It’s much easier to break the handcuffs, like when you’re at rock bottom because you have no other option but just to go and snap them in half, right? So for me in my life, I know that it was much easier when I hit rock bottom to make changes than it was when things were going okay or good. And this is where the idea that good is the enemy of the great really starts to manifest itself. And so in that dichotomy, would you rather work a job that you love but you’re not making as much like a teacher, a nurse, a firefighter, a police officer or a job that you hate but makes a ton of money, like a financial banker or insurance salesman or something like that? That’s a hard question that each of us have to answer for ourselves. For me, it really depends. It really depends.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:16]:
I would never be sated making a low income knowing what I know about the world now and my responsibility to my family and wanting to be there for them and be able to withstand any of the vicissitudes that life kind of throws at us. If my brother gets sick or my sister has a stroke or if I get sick, I want to have the financial wherewithal that we can get them the best treatment and health care that they need. And so knowing what I know about the world now and how it works and how fragile we all are in the grand scheme of things. I would never be complacent working the low job just because I enjoyed it. I’ve had that. I’ve had that as a rock climber. And what ultimately happens is you will get to this point in your life, or at least I did, where something goes wrong. And for me, the real turning point, how stupid as it sounds, was my cat got sick.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:05]:
Like, my cat, just a cat, a gato, he got sick, was dying, and they had to do a surgery that cost $5,000. And we had decided it wasn’t worth. Like, we couldn’t justify the expense. It was too much money, $5,000 for this animal that I loved, and I cared for it. And a lot of people look at that and be like, yep, that’s a no brainer. Let the cat die. A lot of people will look at that and be like, tormented by it. I was tormented because I love this cat, and I was frustrated by the fact that money was now the thing that was stopping me from saving his life.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:34]:
And if only I had not been selfish before and only pursuing the thing that brought me fulfillment, I would have been in a better financial position that I could have without batting an eye, saved his life. Now we ended up finding another place that could do the surgery at a fraction of the cost, and he ended up living. So that’s awesome. But that was such an eye opening moment for me in my life where I was like, I don’t want to experience this ever again because that was my cat. Imagine what it’s going to be like the day that’s my dad just imagine what that’s going to feel like. It’s going to be orders of magnitude more because it’s not going to be $5,000. It’s going to be half a million. What’s it going to feel like to know that I can’t save his life simply because I wasn’t able to make more money? Okay, so that’s the perspective that I come at this from.
Anthony Vicino [00:11:17]:
That’s not to say you should work a job that you hate only such you can go and be greedy and accumulate all the money. It’s not about that. It’s about putting yourself in a position where you are financially unassailable. And for me, that means the higher paying job that I hate, it’s probably because it’s probably higher paying because it’s a skill or a value to the marketplace that’s more valuable than that lower skilled one. So I can take that skill, I can use it, I can leverage it later. I might not love selling insurance, but sales being such a high value skill, I can take that and learn how to sell something that I am passionate about later. Or I can use that money as the nest egg that then allows me to go out there and pursue my entrepreneurship goal, right? And so that’s the way that I personally look at this question. It’s a very interesting question.
Anthony Vicino [00:12:01]:
There is no right or wrong. Everybody has to answer it differently for themselves. But for me, when I review what I want my life to be and the legacy that I want to live, and it’s not even about legacy that I leave behind, because I’m not going to leave generational wealth to my family or anybody else. I’m just going to give it all away. I don’t think just giving money to loved ones is the solution, but I want to be in a position where if they get sick, if they’re hurt, if something happens in life, I can help. So I would always take the higher paying job personally. So that’s just me. I’m curious, what would you guys choose? What’s your mental calculus that you go through as you’re debating a question like this? Because it’s a big one, so let me know.
Anthony Vicino [00:12:40]:
Go find me on Instagram at the Anthony Vasino. Go find me on Twitter. I’m just Anthony Vasino or YouTube there. Shoot me a comment. Shoot me a DM. I’d love to hear from you guys and how you go through this mental model. So hope this brought you some value. If it did, awesome.
Anthony Vicino [00:12:56]:
If it didn’t, I’m so sorry. But as always, guys, I really appreciate you being here. I’ll see you back around these parts tomorrow, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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