Get Paid for Your Passion…What a Load of CRAP!!!

How many of you were fed the fairytale line in high school and college time and time again that you should find what you’re passionate about and get paid for it? I know I heard it time and time again. But they don’t tell you want to do if your passion doesn’t pay so well, or if you don’t have one. Does that make me an underachiever if I’m passionless? What if I’m passionate about sex? Does that mean I should become a lady of the evening? I’ll answer that for you with a big fat NO!!! Does that mean all prostitutes and strippers are living out their dream? Maybe they are.

I never had the dream as a kid of wanting to be a fire fighter or policeman. I settled on wanting to be a doctor once until my older brother savagely ripped that dream away from me by starting pre-med in college with the intentions of being the same kind of doctor I had wanted to be. Well I couldn’t be a copycat, so I let that go. Don’t worry; he wimped out and changed his major after 3 semesters and well he’s still working more hours than me. So now neither of us is a really, really successful and wealthy doctor. I showed him.

I was more passionate about not doing certain things such as teaching or nursing or being in school for a long time. While teaching and nursing are both very respectable careers, people don’t seem to understand the words I speak, and the thought of putting up with whiny kids and their parents all day makes me shudder. Kudos to those who tolerate that. Then there are the cranky, demanding patients, sponge baths, and worse for nursing, which are not my idea of good times. Never mind the fact that I could have gone into a cool specialty like surgery. You have to do the bad stuff in school and didn’t want to hate school more than necessary.

I’ve always enjoyed entertaining people and making them laugh. I have always felt most fulfilled when I made some one or a group of people laugh. Even if I think what I said was stupid. Sometimes stupid is funny. Just ask Adam Sandler, Will Farrell, and all the other Saturday Night Live alums. I was told a few times in my life that I should be on that show, which I take as one of, if not the highest compliment I could receive. The only two problems, I’m not one for fame and notoriety, and I’m not really that funny. I’d rather be in the background writing. I had some successful writing ventures in my day. Didn’t get paid, but I made people laugh. So you could say that was sort of a passion of mine, but English not so much. Which is why I passed on that major in college. Literature is an absolute bore to me and I don’t care what some author’s state of mind was when he wrote about ravens. WHO CARES!?!? Even when I tried to spice it up with my hilarious twists it was a drag. Did I ever mention that not going to college was NEVER an option? Which is paying off great in my state job!!!

Then there’s my love of various sports and activities: volleyball, skiing (water and snow), softball, football. I can/did do/play all of these very well, but not well enough to get paid. My parents would have had to devote their lives to my future career when I was a kid rather than worry about stupid stuff like, putting food on the table and clothes on my back. Besides I had a well-rounded childhood where I got to try lots of different things. So I wouldn’t change that. However I would love to be able to wake up every morning and go skiing for a few hours in the mountains, or hiking, fishing, and camping as the weather allows.

So you could say my passion is to be able to do all of these things and have such a schedule that allows me to go do them as I feel like it. Some people call that retirement. I’d like to be able to get there ASAP while I’m still young enough to enjoy it. I don’t want to be a slave to my job as I am now. So find something that will pay you enough up in the mountains. Trust me we think of this every year we go skiing. How can we make it work up here and afford to live there without living in a tornado magnet? (trailer/mobile home for those of you outside of tornado alley).

Then there’s my second dream or passion. I want to rescue boxers and doggies on death row. But I want to have enough land and shelter to support lots of them. Trust me, I would give them all the love and attention they need and desire. And I want to build them a doggy water park with a slip-n-slide and doggy pools and sprinklers. Nothing fancy, but enough for them to have some crazy fun in the summer. Think about it, it’s probably the cutest sight you can imagine.

I might be onto something here. If I could entertain enough people to make this blog thing successful enough to attract big time advertising, I could quit my job, buy a house in the mountains with some land, build a ginormous dog house with indoor and outdoor facilities for all the dogs I want to rescue. Obviously heated for the winter if need be. Then I could go skiing in the winter for a few hours a day in the morning with my season pass, come home play with the dogs and support this lifestyle all by hopefully entertaining you all and making you laugh once in awhile.

I’ll let you know in a year or two if you really CAN get paid for your passion ultimately supporting the other passions you might have, as I believe most normal people have several interests rather than just one passion. And I’ll let you know if what we were told all these years wasn’t just a load of crap!!