Several years ago, a guy named Mike Rowe started a show called "Dirty Jobs." The show acts as a sort of homage to workers in the skilled trades and seeks to show that there are a bunch of weird jobs out there, many of them pretty gross, and some of them surprisingly profitable.

When he is not hosting the show, Mike Rowe also occasionally guest stars on news networks or posts things on his blog where he reinforces that jobs in the skilled trades are in high demand, as there are not enough people to do them. His target audience is a young and idealistic generation who dream of being artists or scholars or business tycoons for high tech companies, and who have little interest in being a plumber or electrician.

He sums this up in a pretty good five minute video:

What's sort of ironic is that Rowe's passion was actually to be a skilled tradesman, but he found that he wasn't very good at it. What he didn't say in the video was that he actually became an opera singer which eventually led to a television career, so one could say his life path is the opposite of what he preaches to his viewers. I find that amusing.

In any case, his message from the above video is "don't follow your passion and hope it leads to a career, follow opportunities and then find a passion in what you are good at."

While I only recently saw this video, I unknowingly followed this advice in my own life.

Why I Didn't Follow My Passion

Since I was a little kid, my passion was always aviation. I used to have dreams of being the pilot for my own airline and soaring through the skies everyday. As I got a little older, though, the reality of starting an airline dawned on me, and I learned just how bad of a business venture it would be.

I still got my pilot's license when I was 17, at which point I had a legitimate chance to pursue being a commercial pilot as a career. For some reason, though, I didn't want to become a professional pilot. I loved flying, but I found that the more I did it, the less I loved it. It was like a drug to me, and, like other drugs, its effect started to wear off after awhile with the same dosage.

Being a professional pilot also has its own hard realities. The pay is pretty good for the top tier of pilots, but after 9/11 the airline industry has been notoriously unstable (thanks, terrorists), and getting to be a well-paid pilot is a long and difficult road. There is also an enormous cost to building up the thousands of hours of flight time necessary to get the licenses and ratings to be a professional pilot, and I didn't have any way of paying for it. Most pilots build the time by flying for the military (it helps to fly on someone else's dollar), but I decided that the military wasn't really my scene.

It's all fun and games until you have to sit in an enclosed cockpit for 4 hours with a copilot who has bad breath.
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So there I was, a high school kid who didn't really know what he wanted to do with his life. It seemed like everyone else around me had such passions, they wanted to be writers or doctors or actors and stuff. I was just a lazy kid who was pretty smart but didn't really have an interest in any legitimate career.

Until high school, I was always just good at anything academic. History, English, Math, Science, I made As in all of it. I also didn't really like any of it. Unlike many nerdy kids, I actually hated school. I just did school because my parents made me, and I always feel guilty if I don't try my best at something.

That all changed, however, in high school. High school was the first time in my academic career where I really started to notice my strengths and weaknesses, thanks to two classes. The first class was my 9th grade literature class. Our teacher made us read these absurdly dry short stories and write takeaways on them almost every night. Not only did I actively despise this, but I was also pretty bad at it. It was the first time that I ever struggled in a class, and was the only B I made in high school.

The second class was my 9th grade geometry class. I found this class extremely refreshing, as everything about it, and math, just made sense to me. What also surprised me was that so many of my fellow classmates seemed to be struggling with the class. This was the first time I realized that I may have a real strength when it came to math, a realization that was continually reinforced with every other math class I took in high school.

As a senior in high school looking at colleges, I was still fairly undecided as to what I wanted to do with my life. Until then, I had often thought that I would go into business or marketing just because I knew a lot of people who did that. The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized that I had little interest in business, and furthermore due to my introverted personality, I probably wouldn't be very good at it.

I had an odd realization just weeks before the final college decision deadline occurred. I was doing homework for my AP Calculus class and was really getting into solving the equations. I thought to myself: is there a job where I can do calculus and get paid for it?

Sure, I could be a mathematician or scientist, but I didn't really know what either of those jobs might entail, and also didn't know if those jobs were in high demand. I also wanted to do something that was more applied, something that would allow me to make things, kind of like when I used to play with Legos as a kid.

The conclusion I came to was that I should be an engineer. Engineering has a nice blend of mathematical and scientific theory combined with real-world application and problem solving. It was perfect! Then the question became: what type of engineering? There are many to choose from, and they all do vastly different things. On something of a whim, I decided on electrical engineering because someone told me "it's all math."

Not too much later I submitted my acceptance to Georgia Tech (their admission requirements used to be less strict, I wouldn't have gotten in today), and I put everything I had into getting my electrical engineering degree. I did pretty well, in fact.

An interesting thing happened, even though electrical engineering was something of an impulse decision that I didn't put too much thought into, I developed a strong passion for it, which was good, because I would have never made it through college without passion.

My advice to people would be to find what you are good at and do it. There are a lot of careers out there, and many of them are hiring. If you get a good enough job, then you'll have plenty of time and money to pursue your passion as a hobby.

And sometimes I do calculus at work, just because I can.