Choosing what to study in undergrad is an extremely tall asking order. It’s a lot to bestow upon a 17 or 18 year old who may not have much figured out.

I won’t pretend to convey any sort of advice on what to study. This is because I have yet to see the true fruits of my choices in this regard, so maybe I will comment on that another time. I will, however, try to talk a little about the things that I thought about when picking my degree in efforts to save you from some common pitfalls I came across.

There are three areas that I think factor in to choosing what to study. One area is determining what you are good at. The second is determining what you like doing. The third is figuring out how likely it is, based on how good and how much you like this thing, you are to succeed at it.

There is a lot to unpack there. Let’s start with what the current status quo is like. The common advice that you may get when deciding what to study is to follow your passion. What is often not talked about is why people tell you to do this. You are told to follow your passion because it will make you happy. But this misses the plot. Things don’t make you happy, experiences do. This is mostly a comprehension issue. For example, when you say dogs make you happy - what you really mean, is that playing with a dog makes you happy, or seeing some online do. When you say reading makes you happy, what you mean is picking up a book and physically reading does.

Put generally, when you say something makes you happy, that something has to be associated with a definable action. That’s why the phrase “following your passion will make you happy” is a little misleading since it’s unclear what action following your passion refers to. Now if following your passion lends itself to actions like, grinding and working on your craft many hours a week - then that’s great. You may derive a lot of fulfillment from that. What is also true, though, is that people generally like succeeding that things. It’s hard to beat the feeling after getting a good score on a test. Or the feeling you get after getting a paycheck. These feelings are not the same ones that you would get simply by perusing your passion.

This then introduces a little bit of a tension. Should you follow your passion, even if you won’t be successful at it - but at least you’ll be perusing what you like. Or should you follow something you will succeed at, even at the expense of you not liking it. I default to the latter, and there are couple of reasons for this.

The first is that it’s unlikely that your passion for something is that well thought out in high school. This is a very bold claim, so let me back it up with a couple of arguments. Let’s say you were interesting in cooking. As a high school student, you may have worked at local restaurant, maybe as a server or maybe as a cook. You may think that is demonstrable of your passion for cooking, but that’s probably not what you envision when you imagine your life 10-15 years later. This is to say that it’s very hard to get even close to what your actual career aspirations are for most fields in high school. Now this is not to say you shouldn’t do those things. Of course you should, but you should do them with the understanding that they are representative of the actual feelings you’ll have to the job you will probably find yourself in as a professional. For this reason, your passion for something (even if you think you had experience with it) is likely shortsighted in some respect.

The second reason I’ll give is that your interests are really likely to change over time. Nothing prepares you for the character shift that takes place when you start college. It’s a transformative experience that will probably teach you more than the classes that you take. And with this transformation comes a shift in personal interests. Here’s a personal example. I spent all of my high school years thinking that I would have really wanted to do something in law. I was particularly interested in ethics and how they relate to different areas in the real world. I took a ethics class this past summer, and quickly realized it wasn’t for me. There is an immense amount of shifting that goes on when you attend college that you can’t really account for when your in high school. It’s thus, once again - somewhat shortsighted to choose the rest of your life on a passion that may very well change.

I would add here, as well, that college is not the only thing that can change your mind about what you are interested in. There are tons of founders who, 5 years ago, could have never saw themselves building in the field of AI. But innovation and hype does something to us, and it draws us into things that may not have been of interest before. I bring this up to point out that society is going through a huge advance right now, and is likely to reveal to you things that may not have been as obvious before. All of this is to say that your passions will 100% change as you go on in life, so don’t think what you like right now will hold that charm in just a mere couple years.

The third reason I will give here is that, generally speaking, it’s a very bad idea to mix your passions with career. This is because most people value their passion because it is high agency. If you like cooking, it’s probably because you like cooking what you yourself enjoy. If you now had to follow a chef that told you what you can and cannot do, your enjoyment is likely to dilute quickly. Now here’s where you need to be honest with yourself. Some people will say this is just part of the grind. And that, being told what to do is simply a part of the process, and that eventually the agency will come. But you are unlikely to still have all that interest by the time you make it through the process. It’s also the case that mixing your passion with career introduces a lot of external variables that will detract from your enjoyment. If you’re worried about getting fired off the line as a cook all the time, it doesn’t really matter how much you enjoy cooking - you’re probably not going to enjoy all that much.

So those are three reasons why following your passion is maybe not the best idea for picking a career. Let’s talk about why picking something that you’re good at is a slightly better option. I will do this by addressing the three concerns that I just mentioned above.

On the first claim that your passion is underdeveloped in high school. This may also be true of the things that you are good at. The key thing to recognize is that you are not basing your plans on something that has a high potential to change. Apart from the methods that you employ, there aren’t very many similarities between cooking at home versus in a professional-grade kitchen. [1] But if you chose engineering because you were good at high-school algebra, you’ll find that a lot of your degree utilizes those very same skills. Of course, you probably aren’t going to be solving differential equations on the job, but you run the risk of your degree not preparing you for your job in all fields, no matter the motivation, or the method by which you got there.

On the second claim, it’s really easy to see why choosing something you are good at wins out here. What you are good at is far less likely to change than what you are interested in. It’s natural that things will change and courses will get harder and harder over time. But your ability to navigate these changes, if you are good at something, is probably sufficient enough to maintain your ability to stay in the program and probably excel. Let’s go back to the engineering example. If you are really strong in pre-calculus, you may go into engineering. Now obviously, actual engineering math is going to be a lot harder than the stuff you encountered before. But the foundation you have is going to serve you well and you’ll probably make it through it. So although you may not be good to the same level as time goes on, you are unlikely to suddenly become bad it. In contrast, your passions can change on a dime depending on what’s going on in the world and the type of experiences you go through as a college student.

On the third issue, there’s not much to say here other than the fact you’ll have a lot more tolerance for the factors that may affect your work. Since your innate reason for following the job is not based on some perception you have of it, the conditions that you work under won’t really affect you. It’s also likely you’ll have even greater agency at your job if you are good at it, since you’ll probably be so good that someone in the company will notice it and give you more responsibility. Even if you work under someone who is telling you what to do, this a bit of a easier pill to swallow since you didn’t go in with many expectations, Passions are generally built out, as I explained earlier, under some pretense that defines expectations in a very particular way. Another added bonus here is that you’ll still be able to do things that you like on the side. You’ll still be able to follow your passions, fully under your own terms, and gain a lot more out of it, since it’s not directly related to your ability to pay for expenses.

So that covers the first two areas, in terms of if you like something and whether you are good at it. The third area makes things a little more complicated. And so you’ll have to bare with me as I make some extrapolations that may not be grounded in fact.

It’s initially prudent to understand the likelihood of you succeeding in anything, no matter how good you are or how much you like something - is almost entirely based on luck. Sure you may have worked hard for things, but there is so much variability in the current world that your current position was likely a result of something random completely out of your control. It is of course possible to game your chances (if that’s the right way to put it) and maximize your luck as much as possible. I won’t get into how to do this other than to tell you there’s plenty of bad advice out there when it comes to this topic, so tread lightly.

For these reasons, this last area doesn’t matter that all that much to me. I’m a big believer in inputs being the best focus. If you apply yourself in a real way to something you are good at, some great results are likely to follow. But let’s assume, for arguments sake, that we really wanted to determine the chances of success.

In this case, we can first observe that if you are really good at something and also really like it, you’re pretty much set. This is the jackpot when it comes to this essay. It’s very likely you will succeed since this is an extremely rare position to find oneself in. It’s also the best way to ensure that you won’t burnout over time. Since if you truly love something, fluctuations in your skill when it comes to said thing won’t bother you as much. It’s also even more likely that if you don’t end up making it in the conventional path associated with this thing, you’ll just make your own. [2]

Now if you’re good at something but happen to not like it, it’s probably still more likely you will succeed at whatever you are doing. This is because there is a constant feedback loop by which you are motivated. It’s easy to feel motivated to do something if you keep on winning. If you constantly ship, constantly get your product reviewed - it’s hard not to feel motivated. Conversely, if you are in something solely for the sake of liking it, there is a good chance there is no feedback loop. You are probably not going to see a practical return, in the feedback loop sense, for a long time. This doesn’t mean you can’t succeed, but it does make the task a lot harder since you have to be purely motivated by your passion for something without expecting a lot of “success” to come naturally.

Something you may be thinking after that last paragraph is that “Well, success takes a lot of time”. And this is true, you aren’t guaranteed to be successful overnight simply by following something you are good at. But you are guaranteed some amount of success along the way, at certain intervals. That’s the key difference. If you’re following something because you like it, it will take you a very long time to get to the sort of ideal situation that you envisioned.

So when you’re choosing what to study, don’t just ask yourself what you love. Ask yourself what you’re good at. Ask yourself what you’ll be able to stick with when things get hard. Ask yourself what gives you momentum - not just meaning. If you can find something that checks even two of those boxes, you’re probably making a solid choice - even if it’s not one that seems like it in the moment.

Notes