Finding Happiness in Your Passion

Since the age of 8 or 9 the idea of being anything other than a “business man” has literally never dawned on me. I never ever dreamed of of doing

anything else. So when I was asked this question:

@garyvee what was your dream job when you were a kid? What would you be doing if you weren’t a businessman?

— Amanda Liz (@madebyamandaliz) June 7, 2014

It stirred something in me that I think about quite often, but have never really articulated.

A lot of times I think about the fact that my passion, the one thing I want to to in life, ended up being so practical. So much of one’s life is predicated on the practicality of what that person wants to do. It turns out selling stuff and making money is super practical, but what if your passion is to make art installations out of old pizza boxes? I dream that if my children want to be starving artists that we go all-in on that.

I talk a lot about buying a billion dollar sports team, but the truth is that finding happiness in what you do every day is so imperative. Outside of your health and the health of your loved ones, that luxury of being happy every day is absolutely humongous. We spend an ungodly amount of time on the thing we “do for a living,” the thing we do “when we’ve grown up.” I’ve been fortunate enough to see some of my friends and close acquaintances become ten/hundred millionaires two or three times over, and I’m very aware that I have other friends who are making $50,000 a year. Having seen all that, I can honestly say that there is very little correlation between the amount of money someone has and how happy they are. There are those who say money can buy happiness, and I respect that, but then there are studies that say $75k is the threshold to happiness.

So to answer the question, I never thought that I’d become anybody other than what I’ve become. At some level, I wish everybody could have that luck.