what looks like a very painful choice:  the passionate path vs the safe path.  

The latter involves the slow mastery of a  dependable profession; we will be bored - but  

we know we’ll never be fired. Meanwhile, the  former is a high-wire act in which we fantasise  

generating an income from what we deeply love and  yet we constantly fear penury and humiliation. 

The choice can feel acute, but it may be less  so than it seems, once we properly explore  

the concept of safety. We are never properly  safe so long as we are doing something we hate  

or are pursuing out of cowardice. In the  deeply competitive conditions of modernity,  

our back-up career - the one we adopt out of  fear - will be someone else’s central ambition;  

our plan B will be someone else’s plan A,  which places us at an immediate disadvantage  

in terms of the energy and focus we are able  to muster. The ‘safe’ choice might ruin us. 

By contrast, what we love is  what we are obsessed by anyway,  

we’d do it for free - which decisively  increases our chances of mastery  

while reducing the price of failure. A  decade of mixed results on a passion-project  

is inherently less onerous than unspectacular  returns for a whole career in a hateful field. 

It is in the end not very safe to use the one life  we have forcing ourselves to do what we know from  

the outset we won’t enjoy - simply in order to  keep living. This isn’t safety; it’s masochism.  

We may all have to spend our first two decades  suffering through the education system;  

but at some point, we are allowed  to leave school; at some point,  

we need to have a shot at answering what life  could be about beyond obedience and timidity. 

It is not very common to have a passion;  most of us don’t. Yet if we are blessed  

enough to have one, we are risking far more  than we should by failing to heed its call.