CBP S1E10: The Importance of Pursuing Your Passions

In this episode, I reflect on a Quora question I came across the other day. It made me think about the importance of pursuing your passions with intention and effort. For both ourselves as individuals, and as parents supporting our kids in doing the same, it can make all the difference between having a dream and achieving a goal.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome. This is Dianne Whitford from Coffee, Grit, and Inspiration and this is the weekly Coffee Break podcast. Welcome to the show!

Hey everybody, before we get into this week’s podcast, I wanted to take a quick second and remind you that if you haven’t had a chance to check out our blog at www.coffeegritandinspiration.com I would encourage you to do that. We have a lot of articles and some really great content that we’ve been delivering there. Also, there are transcriptions of all the podcasts if you wanted to read them instead of listening to them. We also started a YouTube channel where we’re publishing videos that go with every podcast as well as additional things that we find helpful or that we want to share with you guys. And then lastly, we have a Pinterest. And I don’t know if you like Pinterest or if any of you out there are as big a Pinterest freaks as I am, but we’ve been putting a lot of content on our boards on Pinterest. So I’ll put the links to all of those things in the description. And I would encourage you to check them out.

So this week’s podcast is prompted by a question I found on Quora, and this is what it says: “My 18 year old son wants to drop out of college to be a YouTuber. He has only 62,000 subscribers and thinks he’ll make it big. How do I tell him that college is best for him?”

And I didn’t answer this on Quora because there was already a lot of really great answers that people had provided to this person. I don’t know if it’s a mom or a dad, but there was already a lot of great answers that had been provided and upvoted. But I did want to address it in a podcast because I feel like that this has a lot to do with the new theme that we’re kicking off in our blog, which is grit. And that is all about finding your passion and then having the perseverance and willingness to put in the effort needed to make that passion become a reality or those goals and those dreams become a reality.

And so the first thing that struck me about this question is that 62,000 subscribers on a YouTube channel is really a big deal. That takes a lot of time and effort. So this kid has already put in quite a bit of time and effort into growing his channel and getting a lot of people listening to what he has to say. In order to do that, he has to put in a lot of effort, a lot of time, a lot of effort. He has to have come up with a bunch of content that people wanted to pay attention to, whatever that is. He probably has been doing it for a while. He probably has been consistently doing it for a while. And all of that stuff tells me that this is something that he is passionate about and he’s willing, already willing, to put in the effort to make it happen.

I mean, just to give you a little, just to give you a little context, I just started my YouTube channel probably three weeks ago and I have two subscribers. One is my husband and one is my son. Thank you guys. I’m, I’m trying to imagine the time and effort it’s going to take me to get anywhere close to 62,000 subscribers. Most of the people that I subscribe to that I’m subscribed to on YouTube have nowhere near that. So that amount of subscribers is, is really a remarkable accomplishment. I think what that means too is that it’s not beyond possibility that he could monetize his channel and make some money. I don’t know if he could make enough to live on, I don’t know what his content is or if he’s gotten any kind of, like, affiliate things that he’s doing or anything like that.

But it’s not beyond possibility that he could. There are a lot of people that make an okay living or more than OK just doing YouTube. And so it’s not it’s not a ridiculous dream. So to get to where he is, he clearly has a passion for it. He’s clearly willing to put in the effort. And I think that whether this is mom or dad, we’ll just say it’s a mom. We’ll just pretend it’s a mom. That mom has a fear for his future. She wants to make sure that he has a reliable source of income that he’s going to be safe and cared for and he’s going to be able to support himself. And that’s totally understandable. I feel the same way about my son. I worry all the time about whether he’s gonna, you know, whether I’ve turned him into a capable adult that can support himself. And I believe that he will.

I think we also as parents have a responsibility to support our kids in the passions that they find, especially when they’ve got ones that they’re willing to put that time and effort into. It’s not like that is common. Like at 18. I don’t think I was anywhere close to knowing what I wanted to do with my life. I was lucky if I could figure out what I was gonna wear that morning. So the fact that this young man at 18 has already identified what he wants to talk to people about, he’s developed a message that he thinks people, and people clearly do, want to hear, and he’s going out and putting that message out there. I think that’s really remarkable. I think also, this mom believes she knows what’s best. And I think as parents, this is something we all face is we want our kids to do the thing that we think is best for them. And it is super hard to acknowledge that what might be best for them is not necessarily what we think is best for them.

The thing I think is really important about this question and what it made me think about as I was reading it, is that as individuals we owe it to ourselves to find out what it is that we’re passionate about. Whether it’s video games or guitar playing or crossword puzzles or blogging or YouTubing or doing podcasts or writing or whatever it is. I think that it’s important that as individuals we understand what those passions are and then we give ourselves the latitude and the permission to pursue them. And so in this particular case, as a parent of somebody who is trying to do that, I think this, this mom owes it to her son to really support that, to really make sure that he understands why she’s concerned and understands what the potential outcomes could be, but also feels like she’s supporting him in pursuing what he’s passionate about.

The other thing I think is a pretty awesome about this story is that there’s not a whole lot of us that can make money doing what we love and what we’re passionate about. And if this, if this young man has the opportunity to do that, I think that’s cool. It’s scary. Of course. Just like working for yourself in any field is scary. If you started up a lawn mowing service or you were doing landscaping and you’re working for yourself, all of those kinds of things. Even being a lawyer and having your own practice, all of that is scary because you’re not employed by somebody. You’re not – you’re responsible for what you’re doing and what you’re making. And so I think it’s hard to see sometimes self-employment as a viable option for making a living because it could be here one day gone tomorrow. We don’t know. And that’s the risk you take when you try to get into a field like that. But I don’t think it means you shouldn’t take that risk.

The other thing about this that I think is really hard, is that this mom is facing the chance that her kid might fail. And I don’t think any parents wants to see their kids fail. We don’t want to see our kids fall flat on their face. But I will tell you, I’ve got a, my son is 19 now, just had his 19th birthday and one of the hardest things that I’ve ever had to do is let him fail. And there’s a couple of reasons why I feel as a parent that that’s important. One is, it teaches him how to handle failure. I don’t want to raise someone that can’t handle failing. I want to raise someone that when they fail, they learn from that. They get back on the horse and they try again.

As parents, we can’t always be there to fix it. If we’re always swooping in and saving our kids from having to fail, then we’re never – I think, in my opinion, we are preventing them from also learning how to overcome that failure and how to eventually succeed. Kids want to be their own people. They want to be able to make their own decisions and they have to be able to. At some point, they have to grow up and they have to get out there and have that freedom and that latitude to make their own decisions. And then take the consequences of those decisions. So maybe what this mom could do is you know, do some research and understand more about YouTube and how you can monetize and how much money you can actually make.

Have a real honest conversation with her son about her concerns and why, why she is so worried about it, but maybe also help him understand that here’s some examples, some real life examples of what people have been able to do as YouTube content creators and how much money they’ve actually been able to make. And you know, some reality. And that may be a dash of cold water in his face, but it might also be something that inspires him and makes him work harder.

She might also be able to talk to him a little bit about how a degree could be a fallback plan for while he’s waiting for his YouTube channel to take off. Or maybe something – get a good degree in something that helps him in his YouTube like, you know, working in, in media production or something along those lines. In my opinion though, ultimately I think she has a responsibility to support him in what he’s trying to do. To be there, whether he succeeds or fails, help him through the failure, if he fails. Help him understand where he could have done better or help support him when he, if and when he does fail. Help him overcome that failure, help him try again. And possibly he’ll just completely knock it out of the park and completely surprise her.

Someone who has a passion and a willingness to put in the effort to master that field or task or skill or whatever, they can make amazing things happen. And I think that’s what’s really cool about this is he’s 18 years old, he’s got a passion, he’s already out there trying to do stuff and he could really make something amazing happen. It just takes effort and luck and other things obviously. But people can make amazing things happen if they just have the passion to pursue something and the willingness to put in the effort to master it.

So I guess that’s my message for today. Whether you’re a parent or not, having a passion to pursue and a willingness to put the effort in to master it, can make all the difference between having a dream and achieving a goal. Maybe you need to give yourself permission to pursue your passions. You know, sometimes people think, well that’s just a dream, or that’s just, you know, that’ll never happen. It’ll never, you know. But maybe it could, but maybe it could! Maybe you need to give yourself permission to pursue those things.

If you are a parent, try to encourage and support your kids in finding and pursuing their passions. I mentioned I’m the proud, proud mother of a 19 year old son and I love him to death. And I think that he’s struggling a little sometimes to find those things that he’s passionate about. And so I want to help him as much as I can to find what it is that he really, really gets passionate about.

So I believe that his parents, not only do we have to help them find those things they’re passionate about, but we also need to support them in pursuing those passions. Make sure they know that if you’re passionate about something and you’re willing to put in the effort, you can achieve awesome things.

Thanks for listening to today’s episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Just wanted to also let you know if you don’t already, that we have a biweekly newsletter. We send out links to any podcasts or YouTube videos or any other content that we’ve published over the last two weeks as well as a little bit of a view of what’s coming up in the next two weeks. If you’d like to sign up for that newsletter, you can do so at www.coffeegritandinspiration.com/subscription. If you have the time and inclination, check out our blog or YouTube channel or our Pinterest and I’ll put the links for those in the description. If you watched this on Apple podcasts, I would love it if you would give a review and a rating. I really, really appreciate the support. I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful week. I’ll talk to you next time. Bye now.