“It’s easier to love what you find than to find what you love.”
Those were the parting words of my asset management professor last week, after two grueling hours of investment portfolio analyses, strategic allocations, and stock performance reviews. I was stunned. Honestly, for a split second, I thought I had misheard him until he went on.
“For your entire lives, people talk about having to ‘find what you truly love,’ or to ‘chase your dreams and passions,’ but I’m going to be honest with you all – doing that is hard. Most of us can’t or won’t, and that’s the honest truth. That’s what no one tells you. So learn to love what you find. Stay open and stay curious.”
It might sound cynical, but he’s not wrong. I mean, that’s all you hear starting from childhood through your early 20s. At five, adult strangers ask you what you dream of doing when you’re older. At 17, college admission boards ask you to write about your passions, your soon-to-be-lifelong love affairs with medicine or entrepreneurship or journalism. At 22, peers ask you about what you’re going to do after graduation. And throughout it all, you’re just expected to know, to have it all figured out. This unremitting pursuit of passion is built into the very fabric of American society and it’s a narrative I bought into for most of my life – the highly masochistic, Bukowskian idea that you should “find what you love and let it kill you.” To be perfectly frank, it’s the reason I’ve wanted to move to New York city since I was 15. There’s a drive and energy that is electrically palpable in that city, where every second and every dollar means more there than anywhere else. People don’t stay in New York forever, they’re just trying to make the most of it while they can. And for the longest time, I wanted to feel that more than anything – to be completely exhausted, wired, driven to near madness by a devastating devotion to my work, yet in love with the bone-crushing process of doing so. To be able to say in the end, without regret, that I dedicated all of myself to the craft, to the greatest love of my life.
Truthfully, the reverie of it all is intoxicating. But no one talks about the difficult in-betweens, the messy period between adolescence and adulthood where you slowly lose sight of what you loved in the first place. When you start compromising on your passions for the sake of pragmatism. I’ll just push papers here temporarily. Then I’ll start painting again. I’ll only be at this company for two years max. Then I’ll start working on my novel. When you wake up and suddenly go from having “so much time” to being “two years too late.” When you’ve strayed so far from all the dreams you had as a little girl that you don’t even recognize yourself anymore. I’ve always felt like a failure because of this; it was a testament to the inherent cowardice that made me forever surrender what I love. And I’ve never heard anyone tell me otherwise until my asset management professor did, one week ago.
In my first year of university, I was downright puzzled when someone would say “I love finance” or “I love product marketing.” These were all noble pursuits and necessary in the sustenance of life, but love? These were no more than a lucrative day job. Now, just a few months from graduating and with absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with my life, I am finally getting it. I spent most of college despising my major, drudging through endless finance and marketing classes as if they were the most distilled possible form of modern day torture. That is, until I found myself kind of enjoying my investments class, my derivatives class, and then my asset management class. WTF? That is not me, I told myself, that is not who I’m supposed to be. And perhaps it is not. Perhaps there’s a version of myself that will one day live in New York, writing the book I’ve always dreamt of. But until that day comes, it is no less honorable to learn to love what you find. It might be in a completely different field, in a completely different city, and to your twelve year-old self, your dreams might feel a million lightyears away. All of that is okay. You’ll get there eventually, it just might take longer than you thought. So in the words of my slightly-cynical-yet-very-wise professor, “stay open and stay curious.” You might just learn a thing or two about yourself along the way.