Whether to choose a career that pays well or a career that brings you fulfillment is the million-dollar question in every professional’s life. We turn to the Quora community to see what they have to say about going after dollars or sense.
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“At age 25, would you pursue a good paying corporate job that makes you unhappy or a hobby that makes you happy but has no guarantee to pay the bills?”
Question originally posted on Quora in Career Advice.
We’ve all heard it a million times, “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” But is that always the case? What about when your dreams become boring after you’ve followed, or when the money isn’t good enough? Quora members Oliver Emberton and Jane Chin dish out some sound advice below about what path to choose when you’re at the beginning of your career.
Oliver Emberton, founder of Skilltide, suggests that a successful life is about eliminating the need to make “this a big salary decision and start taking lots of continuous small steps” towards something you love doing. Most people miss their opportunity to follow their dreams (or any dreams, for that matter) because they’re too fearful of taking the first couple steps.
“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears. – Les Brown
What’s the solution? From Emberton’s perspective, it’s to always be closing the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. He provides four solid and realistic options for how to bridge the gap in your search for a career path:
1. Start up a small business in your evenings
2. Ask your boss what you could do for them to get promoted
3. Teach yourself a new skill that interests you
4. Write a blog or a book
Some words of encouragement from Emberton are, “Some steps will lead to greater things. Others will be dead ends. But as long as you sit feeling paralyzed, I can assure you nothing will change at all.”
Get out there and start somewhere – take a step, a hop, a leap, or a plunge – but, whatever it is, just do something!
Jane Chin, Managing Partner at MSL International, takes a more subjective approach to the question by looking to her younger self (she’s currently 41) when providing her answers to the million dollar question. Chin gives four examples below from different years (1999 – 2013) in her life and explains what she’s learned from each phase:
[1999] – “When you start out, you will think about money, and how much you make.” Chin emphasizes the importance of paying off school loans first and building a savings simultaneously. After college, you will enter the working world with ample school loans to pay off, which will help you understand the value of having a well-paying job.
[2004] – “At some point, you will gain the privilege to choose between money or a cause.” Chin explains that there will come a point in your career where you are earning a nice income but a true passion seeps in and forces you to make the decision to leave your 6-figure job for “bliss” or stay. For her, the decision was to quit the 9-to-5 and follow her dreams, which ended up teaching her that all good things, even in your career, must come to an end.
[2009] – “Eventually you will learn that what made you ‘happy’ can, and will change.” Your dreams will become exhausting, no matter how financially rewarding they may be. You will get stuck doing the monotonous work that turns your passions into work, sucking out most of the pleasure you once got from them. Chin stresses that what you consider fulfilling now can and will change over time, and that following your dreams can lead to boredom.
[2013] – “Now you will feel lost. How can this be?! You are in your 40s, you are middle-aged! You know less now what you want to do with your life than when you started!” By now, you should have experienced the good and bad of earning great money, living out your dreams, and coming to a fork in the road where you’re forced to make the decision of which path to follow. As Chin points out, the decision will still be just as ambiguous, scary, and dumbfounding as the day you started out.
What’s the happy ending or glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel for Chin? It’s about fighting the good fight and finding joy in the good and the bad, especially the bad because, as Chin attests:
“Some silver bullets hide in piles of dung, undiscovered. Because few people stick around long enough to dig through sh*t.”
Tell Us What You Think
Have you been faced with the decision to go after your dreams or bring home the bacon? Share your story on Twitter or in the comments section below.
