Alan Watts stresses the importance of doing what you’re passionate about, and not working for the almighty dollar. Here is the excerpt of the video:
“What makes you itch? What sort of situation would you like?
Let’s suppose, I do this often in vocational guidance in students. They come to me and they say well we’re getting out of college and we haven’t the faintest what we want to do.
So I always ask the question, ‘what would you like to do if money were no object?’ How would you really enjoy spending your life?
Well it’s so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can’t earn any money that way. Another person says I’d like to live a normal life and ride horses. I say you want to teach in a riding school?
Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something which the individual really wanted to do, I will say to him, ‘you do that.’ Forget the money because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing. Which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
After all if do really like what you doing, it doesn’t matter what it is. You can you can eventually become a master of it. The only way to become a master of something is sticking with it. And then you will be able to get a good fee for whatever it is.
So, don’t worry so much. Somebody is interested in everything. Anything you can be interested in you’ll others find others will. It is absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on spend time doing things or doing things you don’t like and teach your children to follow in the same track.
What we are doing is we are bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives we are living. So they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing. So its all wretch and no vomit, so it never gets there, and so therefore it is so important to consider this question, what do I desire?”
– Alan Watts