Alright, Samantha asks, How do I pick a college major if I shouldn't follow my passion slash interest? Well, so Samantha, this is where I can point again to my core idea videos, there is now a core idea video live on the YouTube page about my idea of not following your passion.

So the background for this discussion can be found on that video, everyone can go reference it to get the specific thoughts behind my ideas about passion and its role in career selection. And the thing you will notice if you go back and rewatch that video is that passions slash interest is a problematic conjunction, they're not the same thing.

So you're the issue here is you're joining those two things together. Passion is the idea that you are wired for a particular pursuit or direction. And that if you align yourself with that pursuit, you will be happy and fulfilled. And if you don't, you won't. It is a very high bar, there's one true thing you're supposed to be doing, get it right or you're screwed.

Interest is here's something that seems interesting to me. There can be many things that seem interesting to you. And many things that don't. I think interest is a perfectly fine criteria to help select, let's say a major, this major seems interesting to me. I like the opportunities that would open up if I did it well, good, go for that.

And what if there's five majors that pass that criteria, then it doesn't really matter which one you choose. Passion is not the same as interest. Passion says there's one true thing if you get it wrong, you're screwed. Interest is just a useful piece of information you can use in making a choice.

So what I'm trying to do here is lower the bar. Lower the bar when it comes to selecting something like a major or selecting a career, lowering the bar from there's one right answer. If you get it wrong, you're screwed. Down to there's a lot of reasonable pursuits on which you can build a enjoyable academic career in which you can build an enjoyable professional career.

There's a lot of them. So give it a little bit of thought. But once you find something that's reasonable, go with it and don't overthink it. I think the straw man that you're sitting up here, Samantha, is throwing the bar out and say, no, it doesn't matter what you do.

Just choose completely randomly. Problem studies or computer science. I'll just throw a dart. Who cares? And I think that's nonsense, right? Like we have inclinations, we have interest, we have skills we've already built out in one area versus another. We like the lifestyles enabled by this path better than the lifestyles enabled by that path.

Use all that information to make a selection, but just don't overthink it and be happy with the fact there might be a bunch of different choices that all satisfy those criteria. What really matters is what you do next. What you do once you actually made that choice. And the reason why this is important is that it was actually college majors was the original thing that got me interested in the topic of following your passion.

It was the original thing that set me down the path to writing my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. Because what I was seeing when I was a graduate student writing advice for students is I kept hearing the same story again and again. Students at these elite schools like MIT would come time to choose their major and they'd been taught follow your passion.

So they believed there's one major I'm wired to do. The chorus of angels will start singing if I choose that right major and if I get it wrong it's going to be bad. And here's what would happen. They would get to their junior year. The courses would get harder.

Why did the courses get harder? Because they're in their junior year. This is where you have to take the upper level courses that depend on the intro courses as their prerequisites. Hard courses aren't super fun. The problem sets are difficult. It's frustrating. You can't get things right. They're difficult.

You get worse grades on essays than you're used to. That's part of how this works. But because these students were taught you have a one true passion in the chorus of angels will sing if you find it, they would take this hardness, this sense of, oh, I don't love this every day as an indication that I must not have chosen the one true passion.

How could this possibly be my one true passion if it's frustrating me and I don't love it? And what they would do, they would switch their majors late in the game. And it would be a problem because it's hard to start from scratch with a new major. And it was this epidemic of late stage major shifting that actually first got me interested in these topics of passion culture.

I thought this was crazy. Like, what are you guys doing? You can't switch your major this late. Like, you're going to have to spend an extra year. You're going to be scrambling. You're going to be miserable. But they were so sure that passion was a thing and passion means you'll love it.

And they weren't loving it because, you know, the differential equations you're doing in your junior year, you're in your physics major are a pain. And they would switch and it would really be bad for them. It would really be negative. It would hurt their academic life. It would make them miserable in their personal life.

And it didn't open up any new opportunities. And so that's what actually got me into this topic in the first place. So no, we're not wired to do one thing, but it doesn't mean we can do everything. So use reasonable criteria to make a choice. Have a reason why you choose something, but don't over sweat that reason.

And don't be worried if more than one thing satisfies it. There's lots of paths to a passionate, interesting life. You don't have to find the one true thing, but you do have to give it a little bit of thought.