MaxBlume

The sweet spot seems to be where both overlap

@Leo Gura Agreed on attitude. Some people just aren't serious and don't want it badly enough. To be honest, a 9-5 isn't fulfilling to me either. There's so much I want to do in life, and it feels like not living up to my full potential or getting the most out of life. Attitude also pays off most in entrepreneurship. With your own business, pushing harder actually gets results. With a job, you can max out your skill and still get stuck at the filters: CVs, degrees, someone deciding to hire you. That's where I got stuck. What I see a lot here is people in a dream world: "I'll make music and it'll work out." Passion alone isn't the point. The question is what value you can provide that people will pay for. Getting good takes time, but it helps to be honest early: once you're good, would you pay for this yourself? If the answer is no, there's nothing wrong with keeping it as a hobby. Not every passion has to make money, and it's often more enjoyable when it doesn't have to. As you say, "your brain learns by contrast." Looking at what you did differently from others, a few principles stand out to me: Get really good at your craft Provide as much value as possible Listen to the market and make something people actually want or need Build a brand and following through content, so selling later is way easier Actually monetize your audience Stay consistent for years Marketing was the biggest insight for me. Most skilled people never learn it, so nobody knows they exist. None of this guarantees success, but following these principles raises the odds a lot, and missing one drops them fast. What do you think, is that most of it, or am I missing something? Also you said you can't be great at something you don't love. But what if it often works the other way too, and you start loving something because you got good at it? Most people don't enjoy things they're bad at. Research backs this: feeling competent is one of the core drivers of motivation (self-determination theory), and people who believe passion is something you discover tend to quit faster when things get hard (O'Keefe, Dweck & Walton, 2018). So maybe some people haven't found their passion because they haven't gotten good at anything yet. How do you see it: does passion have to come first, or can it be built through skill?

@Leo Gura Really appreciate the honesty here. I've gotten a lot of value from your work, and I know no advice fits everyone. In the end, each of us has to take responsibility for checking if it actually applies to our situation. If the odds of succeeding at your passion are that low, what should most people do?

@Leo Gura Agree on pragmatism and planning money years ahead. I think that's actually the core of what I'm getting at: if passion needs years of financial planning to be sustainable, then demand is doing a lot of the work. And I'm not saying great artists can't make it. Just that "possible" and "likely" are very different when your rent is on the line. Supply and demand Skill × demand = opportunity. Fields that are fun, creative and high-status attract far more people than the market needs, so pay drops for everyone but the top. Unsexy fields have the opposite problem: US construction needs ~349,000 new workers this year and most firms can't find electricians. Nobody's "passionate about wiring," but almost everyone competent at it earns a living. Winner-take-most One song can reach 100 million people, so listeners just pick the best. One electrician can only wire so many buildings, so the work spreads across many people. Spotify's 2026 data: of ~13 million artists uploading music, about 0.6% generated $10k last year and 0.1% hit $100k. Survivorship bias Success stories are what we see. The thousands who were also great and worked just as hard but didn't make it mostly stay quiet. Even Spotify's ~250k "serious professionals," who already have an audience, mostly didn't clear $10k from streaming. Barrier to entry Medicine attracts passionate people too, but licensing limits supply, so it pays. Design has almost no barrier. It got sold on social media as good pay, remote, no physical strain, and bootcamps flooded it. Global competition and commodity Digital work means competing with everyone on earth with a laptop. A bricklayer competes with people within driving distance. Now AI is turning digital execution into a commodity too, while physical work is much harder to automate. Market shifts When cars arrived, harness makers didn't get worse. If 10,000 excellent ones are left with 500 customers, #501 isn't incompetent. The market shrank, and getting better doesn't fix that. So the question isn't just "am I great" but "is this market big and durable?" Employment: what I learned the hard way I'm self-taught and got genuinely good at product design over years of near-daily work. I was laid off when companies cut whole design departments, then applied to 1,000+ jobs in two years. Hiring filters on paper, not skill. A master's plus four years at one company beats self-taught, no matter what the portfolio shows. Entrepreneurship: what I'm learning now So I'm trying to build my own thing. It skips the CV filter but has its own: marketing. I always assumed good work would get found. It doesn't. A great product nobody hears about makes nothing, a mediocre one with great marketing makes money. Quality of life Compare two people. One chases a passion in a flooded field, stays broke and anxious, and works a job they hate on the side to survive. The other does an OK job in a field with real demand, earns a stable living, has a family and free time for what they love. The second one often has the better life, and maybe more room for passion, not less. Where I'm at Right now I think passion is the second question, and the first is: what's scarce, what's needed, and what can I get good at that people will pay for? But I'm genuinely open to being wrong here, so I'm curious how you see it.

@d i e g o Thank you, man! I’m checking it out right now

@d i e g o True, I see a lot of people teaching on Skool and making good money doing it. But then you need to be comfortable being on camera. Leo said himself that he's deeply introverted but still speaks to millions on camera, that probably took huge pain to make money to push through. For me, I'm more of a builder type

@Joseph Maynor Yeah, "marketing yourself" is a big one. I applied to over 1,000 jobs in the past two years and got nowhere, maybe doing my own thing is the better move. Employment feels too unstable anyway, with a boss who tells you what to do etc. Leo's actually a good example of this combo, he's genuinely good at marketing and provides massive value to a lot of people

@Joseph Maynor I also think it's mostly execution, and people who think and theorize too much can use that as a form of procrastination to avoid executing. But it's important to work on the right things, otherwise it's just wasted effort, and you figure that out by learning and evaluating. I mainly thought about employment and the actual value you provide to people

@Ulax Agree with the core idea. Only thing I'd add: market needs keep shifting, so it's not a one-time choice, you need to keep adapting to where the demand actually is

@Schizophonia Order's the point, not either/or. Most people here start with "what do I like" instead of "what does the market need." Feels kind of selfish too, honestly, doing what you like instead of what's actually needed

@Stick I mean, it hurts to admit, but we want to be maximally truth-seeking. And I think many people have invested so much into it (sunk-cost fallacy) that they keep trying with no results

I followed this advice for years, became a good designer, and I'm currently working a warehouse job because that career didn't pan out. Looking around this forum, I see the same pattern in a lot of people, painting, music, ended up broke and anxious, now stuck in a job they hate just to survive. Here's what I think we all missed: "follow your passion" assumes the market pays for what you love. It doesn't. It pays for what's scarce and needed. Art and music are winner-take-most. Everyone wants to do them because they're fun and high-status, so supply floods the market and only a handful at the top get paid. Bricklaying for example is the opposite: nobody wants to do it, but buildings still need to get built, so the income curve is flatter and almost everyone doing it competently earns a living. I've never heard anyone say "I'm passionate about bricks" but they earn good money, can start a family, and have actual free time to enjoy life and do whatever else they care about The deeper issue is that "passion" was never the right first question. Baked into the advice are a bunch of assumptions nobody examines: That you have one identifiable passion, instead of several mild interests or none That passion is discovered rather than built through competence over time That the economy will reward whatever you happen to love That fulfillment should outrank stability and what's actually needed That your passions at 22 are stable enough to build a career on None of this means passion doesn't matter if you genuinely like one path more than another, take it. But that's a second-order question. The first one is supply and demand: what's scarce, what's needed, what can you get good at that people will pay for. Satisfaction can follow from mastery and usefulness. It doesn't have to come first. Anyone else here hit this same wall?