Why "following your passion" is more rational than you think.

Making progress in life comes down to making a series of life leaps.

All leaps vary in size.

Some leaps are huge: quitting your day job to go all in on your business.

While some leaps are small: starting to go to the gym 3 times per week.

In this article Lawrence Yeo shares how society conditions us to feel like we need to justify all our decisions. This leads us to not trade the comfort and safety of the present for an uncertain and rocky future — even if that future has the potential to be exponentially better.

Oftentimes, taking the leap is framed as an irrational thing to do – something that plays more to the emotions than to reason. This is why when someone takes the leap in a professional setting, we dub this phenomenon as “following your passion” instead of “following your rationality.

When deciding to make changes it's easy to let our concerns stop us because they are predictable. When the decision is career focused usually those concerns are money focused "How will I make a good living from this?". If it's a personal decision maybe those concerns are time related or a fear of being judged.

But what we leave out is that there is no way to predict the numerous unexpected rewards that await us on the other side of making that leap.

If you want to start a business sure you can predict that you'll benefit from working on things that matter to you, but you'd never be able to predict the long-tail benefits like making lifelong friends or the unexpected opportunities that will come your way.

As long as you think you can manage your concerns then the most rational thing to do is make the leap. As Lawrence says "By not making that leap, you are voting to give up all unimaginable future rewards for a single concern you can predict and prepare for today."

When making life leaps I find it helpful to refer to this graphic from Wait but Why.

There are many paths open to you, but you need to take the leap.