Billionaires tend to give one bad piece of career advice, according to self-made millionaire and bestselling author Scott Galloway: Follow your passion.
“The worst advice the billionaires give is ‘follow your passion,'” Galloway, a serial entrepreneur and New York University marketing professor, told LinkedIn’s “The Path” video series in an episode that published on June 3. “Anyone who tells you to follow your passion is already rich.”
Born in Los Angeles to a single mother, Galloway said that his family’s income never exceeded $40,000 during his childhood, and that he thought his passion for athletics would bring him financial freedom. After discovering that professional sports weren’t in his future, he graduated from UCLA and got an analyst job at Morgan Stanley.
He quickly realized, ‘I don’t have the skills for this,” he said. He started to workshop different ideas and decided that he’d be better suited for entrepreneurship than as an employee at a big company. In 1992, he co-founded marketing firm Prophet, ultimately selling it in 2002 for $33 million, according to LinkedIn.
Galloway later co-founded a research firm called L2 in 2010, which was acquired in 2017 for a reported sum of more than $130 million. His career journey indicates that success isn’t about blindly following passion or going into a field that’s stereotypically lucrative. Instead, combine what you’re good at with what can make you money, and embrace opportunities to pivot.
“I applied for 29 jobs [after graduation]. I got one offer,” said Galloway. “The key to my success is rejection, or specifically my ability to endure it. Because if you don’t get to ‘no’ a lot of times, you’re never going to get to wonderful ‘yeses.'”
Galloway’s sentiment echoes similar comments from Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach, who often tells young people to look beyond what their passionate about when choosing a career. He realized early in his career that he had a knack for leadership and enjoyed helping others, leading to a slew of board member roles at companies like IBM and The Metropolitan Opera, and almost 16 years at Mastercard.
“I love the fact that you’re following your passion, but you should also just look at what are you really good at? What differentiates you?” Miebach tells interns, he said in a recent interview with LinkedIn editor-in-chief Daniel Roth. “Figure out, where’s the intersection point of what is your passion, what actually matters, and what could you be good at? Bring that together.”
Finding your strengths doesn’t happen overnight and can take a bit of refining, and even failure. Say you’re a news producer who recently got laid off, so you started filming and editing documentaries to stay active. Now, you’ve learned that your strength is actually longform content and storytelling, not hard news and short packages.
You can turn difficult setbacks into learning opportunities by adopting a growth mindset, or the idea that you can always be refining your skills, according to Yale University psychologist and happiness expert Laurie Santos. That way, if you face failure or rejection again, you know what steps to take, and to avoid, to keep moving forward in your life and career, she told CNBC Make It in 2023.
“That allows us to learn more about how to do better in the future,” said Santos.
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