Passion, right? People love saying it. Find your passion. Pursue something you're passionate about. And every time I hear it, I run into the same problem: there aren't many things I'd call myself passionate about.

There are things I'm interested in. And because I'm interested in them, I spend time with them. I read about them, mess with them, get a little better each time I come back to them. Eventually that turns into something else: competence. Skill. The ability to do the thing well.

So when someone tells you to pursue your passion, I think the more useful advice is to pursue your competence. Building competence puts you somewhere real, working on something you're getting better at, something you can eventually put in front of another person as worth paying for.

There's research that backs this up more than I expected to find. There's a 2018 study that ran a series of experiments on how people think about interest itself. Some people hold what's called a fixed theory: passions already exist, fully formed, waiting to be found, and once you find the right one it should feel easy. Other people hold a growth theory: interests are built over time, through effort, and getting through the hard part is part of what makes something interesting. The fixed-theory group lost interest fast the moment a new subject got difficult. The growth-theory group pushed through, and often ended up caring more, not less.

That tracks with how I experience it. The interest doesn't show up fully formed. It shows up as competence, built slowly, by doing the thing more than once.

Money is where this gets real for me. I sit and think about this a lot: how do I increase my value, not just at a job, but in the things I'm trying to build for myself? I think the honest answer has two parts. You need competence. And you need to know how big a problem that competence lets you solve.

The second part is what I really find myself hyper fixated on. How big of a problem can you solve. Because that number, more than anything else, decides what your skill is worth to somebody else.

It also changes how I think about hard work. There's a whole range of what "working hard" looks like. Someone doing manual labor is working hard. Someone sitting at a desk running strategy for a company is working hard too, just differently. Mental labor is exhausting in its own way, and I don't think people always give it credit for that. Somebody will look at a person sitting at a desk and say, well, you're not doing anything physical, so it's not real work. That's not right. There's a competence in that chair, and there's a problem being solved. The size of that problem is a big part of why office jobs tend to pay more than physical ones, not because the person is working harder.

Labor economists have documented a version of this too. There's research tracking what happens to wages as the economy changes that found pay and job growth moved toward "nonroutine" work, tasks that are hard to standardize or automate, and away from "routine" work, whether that routine work is manual or sits behind a desk. What decides whether a task pays more isn't how physically demanding it is. It's whether the task requires solving a problem a checklist or a machine can't.

That's why "work smarter, not harder" is a real idea and not just a phrase people repeat to feel clever. Your value isn't always tied to how exhausted your body is when you get home. We treat those two like they're supposed to match, and they're not.

Which brings me back to passion. I want people to stop putting so much pressure on the idea that their passion has to become their job. I think passion works better as something you get to do for you, something that exists because you enjoy it, with no monetization plan attached.

Some people do land the overlap. If you're passionate about dogs and you work at the pound, that's real, and it's worth naming instead of talking past it. But I don't think that's what many people are chasing when they take a job, if they're honest about it. What people want is a way to live: rent, groceries, keeping the lights on. That takes money, and a job is the structure already in place for trading your time and your thinking for it. When passion lines up with that too, it's a bonus, not the baseline you should walk in expecting.

Psychologists have a name for why that split holds up. Self-determination theory is a framework that argues competence is one of three basic psychological needs people have, alongside autonomy and connection to other people, and it operates on its own, separate from money or approval. You can meet your need for competence at work. You can meet your enjoyment of something, your passion, somewhere that has nothing to do with a paycheck. Neither one has to do the other one's job.

You can love a thing and never get particularly good at it. You might pick up an instrument because you love the process of learning it, and never become someone who could play a gig. That doesn't make the time wasted. It can still matter to you, still be worth doing, just for a different reason than building a skill you sell.

But if you're trying to build something professional, trying to figure out what you bring to the table, competence gives you something to work with. You can ask yourself what you're already good at. What you've gotten better at over time. What comes easier to you than it seems to come to other people, whether or not it came naturally in the first place.

Then the real question shows up, how do you sell that? That takes a mindshift, and it takes work. Sit down. Take inventory. What are you competent in. What problems does that competence solve. What are those problems worth. And can you explain that worth to somebody else in a way that lands.

I'm still working through that last part for myself. But I think it's worth putting in front of other people too, because the goal was never to turn every passion into a paycheck. It might be simpler than that.

Chase the competence. Enjoy the passion.

- Kan