There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your passion." In fact, the question is impossible to answer with a simple yes or no. Sometimes you should, and sometimes you shouldn't, but the boundary between should and shouldn't is very complicated. The only way to give a general answer is to trace it.
When people talk about this question, there's always an implicit "instead of." All other things being equal, why wouldn't you work on what interests you the most?
So even raising the question implies that all other things aren't equal, and that you have to choose between working on what interests you the most and something else, like what pays the best.
And indeed, if your main goal is to make money, you usually can't afford to work on what interests you the most. People pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. But there's an obvious exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if you love football, and you're good enough at it, you can get paid a lot to play it.
Of course, the odds are against you in a case like football, because so many other people like playing it too. This is not to say you shouldn't try though. It depends on how much ability you have and how hard you're willing to work.
The odds are better when you have strange tastes: when you like something that pays well and that few other people like.
当你拥有一些奇特的兴趣时，成功的几率会更高：比如你喜欢的事情既有高报酬，又很少有人愿意做。
For example, it's clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a software company. He didn't just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed, but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it.
There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can't help noticing when something is mispriced, and can't help doing something about it. It's like a puzzle for them.
（These examples show why it's a mistake to assume that economic inequality must be evidence of some kind of brokenness or unfairness. It's obvious that different people have different interests, and that some interests yield far more money than others, so how can it not be obvious that some people will end up much richer than others? In a world where some people like to write enterprise software and others like to make studio pottery, economic inequality is the natural outcome.）
In fact, there's an edge case here so spectacular that it turns all the preceding advice on its head. If you want to make a really huge amount of money — hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars — it turns out to be very useful to work on what interests you the most. The reason is not the extra motivation you get from doing this, but that the way to make a really large amount of money is to start a startup, and working on what interests you is an excellent way to discover
startup ideas
.
Many, if not most, of the biggest startups began as projects the founders were doing for fun. Apple, Google, and Facebook all began that way.
许多最成功的初创公司，甚至大多数，都是创始人为了好玩而开始的项目。苹果、谷歌和脸书都是这样起步的。
Why is this pattern so common? Because the best ideas tend to be such outliers that you'd overlook them if you were consciously looking for ways to make money. Whereas if you're young and good at technology, your unconscious instincts about what would be interesting to work on are very well aligned with what needs to be built.
So there's something like a "midwit peak" for making money. If you don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're most interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you usually can't afford to; but if you want to become super-rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.
