For most of my twenties, I treated work as a game of maximum yield. I didn’t think much about what lit me up. I thought about margins, growth curves, market timing. I kept hearing that passion would trail behind success, as if enthusiasm were an obedient hound that came bounding over when you’d secured the kill. Adam Smith once noted that it was not from the benevolence of the butcher, brewer, or baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. 

I think (to a degree) I misread that as an instruction manual for a life.

Profit-first thinking has a certain cold elegance. It treats human interest as a byproduct of incentive structures, not the other way around. And sometimes it works. The Dutch East India Company didn’t require its officers to love nutmeg. But generalizing from mercantile history to your own life is a hazardous ploy. Nations and corporations can run on pure calculus; people corrode under it.

The projects that made money but bored me were the ones I procrastinated on. The things I did with an "unreasonable joy" - writing long essays no one asked for, teaching without pay, tinkering with half-broken software tools - those I could do for twelve hours without the need for caffeine. When I read about Darwin spending eight years obsessing over barnacles before publishing his grand theory, I wondered if there was a lesson there about stamina. You can’t fake that kind of endurance.

The old model promised a tradeoff: do the lucrative thing now, the meaningful thing later. Except later has a way of moving further away, like the horizon. At some point you have to decide whether to keep walking toward that vanishing point or to turn.

Passion does not automatically pay the bills. But I've learned (in a harder fashion than I'd like) is that a chosen field you care about deeply tends to open unexpected doors. 

I sometimes think of it like planting an orchard you actually want to eat from. The yield might be smaller, but you’re less likely to let the fruit rot on the branch. And in the long arc of a working life, that seems the better economy.