One of the oft repeated dialogues of modern generation is "Uncle I am following my passion" when asked, what do you plan to study after 12th or whatever school leaving exams.
In olden days Passion and Profession were two different entities. You could follow passion once you achieved Profession.
Let me put in perspective the distinction. Passion is doing what you feel like doing the best in an area of your liking. Profession is doing what gets you your daily bread and keeps the money flow to make your living comfortable. In olden days, Engineering, Medicine and finance used to be the profession that gets you a good job and money. People followed those setting aside their passion as putting food on plate was more important than following the passion. Playing music, drawing, writing, photography or any other artistic works involving passion was subset of the Profession. Javagal Srinath, Ashwin, Sivasri Skandaprasad and many others did Engineering (Profession) before following their Passion. My classmate the famous TN musician- Ramani Bharadwaj did his CA before becoming a top ranked musician in Tamil film Industry. It was always a backup in case the passion did not earn enough money or you got tired of it or you were not in the best of the league.
Rare were the cases where passion and profession met together.
Today, thanks to the Profession taken by earlier generation and having created a certain wealth level, it has given the freedom for the next gen to follow the passion on the back of a fall back wealth. In a way that is good, but my belief is that if you follow a passion that at some point of time does not make it a Profession (i.e money flows in- like say in IPL), the focus should move to the Profession. Passion can be a time pass, but focus on creating wealth.
This is the core of investing as without money, investing cannot be done and without investing wealth cannot be created.
