Last night I met a young man in his early 30’s who I initially thought was a musician.
As we talked, I came to know that he is in construction business. His day job is laying tiles for a commercial company – he is composing music as a hobby.
I asked him if music is his passion – without missing a beat, his eyes lit up and responded with a resounding “Yes”.
Then I proceeded to ask him – will you be happy laying tiles for the next 30 years to support yourself and the music passion remains a passion without any chance of financial reward?
He took a solid minute to think of an answer – and it came back with another “Yes”, but this time it came with a thoughtful insight.
He said that some of his friends who are succeeded with their music passion. The money came and making music became a job – slowly and surely they lost joy in producing music.
I was going to depart the young man with the Financial Independence gift of knowledge, but, he seemed to be happy with his current arrangement – I just thanked him for the wisdom he did not directly gave it to me, but by living it.
Since my crossing the Financial Independence mile marker at the age of 42, I scaled back my effort to dig deep into the world of investing and explored my own passion.
I discovered as the young man confirmed – money and passion are two different things and it is best to keep them separate.
Let’s explore deeper the meaning of passion and rationalized the understanding why money and passion are tightly intertwined as we get older.
The building blocks for life on earth are water and star dust, but the building block of the 21st century social structure for the human species is money. It is all the world comforts and pleasures, invented and to be realized into reality, that can bought be with money is the main driving force of progress.
For the mass of humanity, the desire of self comfort and pleasure is the effective incentive to participate with the drive toward the ever greater progress.
It is money that is used to incentivize for creativities and efforts in making improvements and maintaining the civil structure that started by the countless past generations thousands of years ago.
In turn, the money received is traded in for the experiences of comforts and pleasures – the circle of trade between your time on this earth and the external environment is full and repeated.
In 1987 Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, published his works on classical conditioning through experimenting with dogs. Pavlov demonstrated that conditioned stimulus (CS) can be paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US) to bring about the unconditioned response (UR)
By repeating the pairing process – the UR is induced with just CS presented alone.
The details of the experiment will not repeat here, but the take away as this – the sound of a tuning fork (CS) can caused the dogs to salivate (UR) without the actual meat itself (US).
It is classical conditioning that elevated money over passion for many of us over the years – money is the conditioned stimulus (CS) that is paired with unconditioned stimulus passion (US) to solicit the unconditioned response of shades in emotions (UR).
Googling the definition of passion – “…strong and barely controllable emotion…”
Prior to the age of 25 – the age when the frontal cortex is fully developed for many of us, the majority of the population is emotional at “something” and for the most part has none or very little association with money.
For example prior to the age of 10, I was passionate at watching cartoons, playing with friends and huddling with my family.
From the ages of 10 to 18, activities that gave me the emotional values were playing soccer, basketball, sending money to my mom, hanging out with friends and day dreaming of girls.
From the ages of 18 to 25, I was thinking about the family of my own.
As you can clearly see, the things that gave me the emotional values have no association with money.
Although I was under my father’s roof at the age of 16 – financially, I was beginning to pay for things with part-time jobs.
It was the beginning of the classical conditioning that money (CS) is pairing up with things I participated (US) that gave me the emotional response (UR).
For example, I was a busboy at a restaurant when I was sixteen. The money I earned from work was used to pay for the activities that gave emotional values to me – playing sports, helping my mother, hanging out with friends and eventually starting my own family.
With the exception of the part-time job at the restaurant – none of the activities I was interested in participating were making any money – they cost money!
Slowly and surely since the age of 25, I was exploring and willing to settle for things that have the potential to make money verses things that I give me pure enjoy – but has very little or no value for financial capitalization.
Since the moment I have crossed the Financial Independence mile marker, I came to the realization that this is my second chance at life to participate in activities that have emotional values to me – without having money as the constraint.
As we get older, passion took the back seat to things that may not have any emotional value to us, but they are paid with money that can be used to meet the financial obligation to ourselves and our families.
As of the first quarter of the 21st century, we have yet engineered an economic model that is capable of tapping into this enormous reservoir of ingenuity and creativity.
Let’s play the game of life!
