Mike Rowe is a former star of the Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs”
“We need to stop telling young people that the only way to be happy is to correctly identify your passion when you’re 18, 19, and 20 years old,” Rowe told CNBC. “We basically force them to figure out what is going to make them happy and then they get this idea in their head of ‘I’m going to be a musician. Or, I’m going to be an executive or an accountant.”
While all of those are good jobs, Rowe says that following this mindset typically sends young people down a long road of expensive schooling and training “in order to start feeling happy and fulfilled wherever they land.” In the end, he says, many people end up trapped — swimming in student loan debt, without any viable job options.
Instead, Rowe advises young people to follow opportunity and to then take their passion with them.
“On ‘Dirty Jobs,’ I met countless people who were doing things that visually didn’t look like anything you wanted to be doing,” he says. These jobs “looked like the thing you would go out of your way to avoid. But then, when you sit down and talk to them, you find out that they make six figures a year, and they have a vacation, and they have enough balance in their life to coach their kid’s little league team and they don’t have any debt.”
Sources:
- https://youtu.be/CVEuPmVAb8o
- https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/06/mike-rowe-of-dirty-jobs-says-follow-opportunity-not-passion.html
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mike-rowe-gives-grad-advice_n_57597c03e4b0e39a28acb092
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