By Gavin Boyle
While the world tells young people to follow their passion and forgo making money, Mike Rowe says this is a terrible idea and advises they should pursue success instead — then look for passion.
“The thing about passion is, you gotta have it, but only a moron would follow it,” Rowe said. “Bring your passion with you in all things, but never, ever follow it. The business of not following your passion; the business of taking the reverse commute, that’s very much a DIRTY JOBS lesson.”
“When I think of the plumbers I’ve worked with on the show, all of whom are very successful, it wasn’t their life’s dream to be a plumber, you know. They didn’t wake up in the mornings as a kid going, ‘Man, I can’t wait to get back in the sewer.’ What they did, they got to the point in their life where it was time to make money, and they looked around at where everybody else was going, and they just went the other way,” Rowe continued. “A lot of these guys on the show wound up doing something that was in no way a reflection of their wish fulfillment, but, first, they identified the opportunity, then they got good at it, and then they figured out a way to love it.”
Rowe is a major advocate for going down the road less traveled to find lucrative opportunities. For this reason, he encourages all young people to consider a different path out of high school than going to a four-year college for a degree.
“We’ve told an entire generation that the best path for most people is the most expensive path,” Rowe previously said. “And we’ve also promoted college not on its merits, but at the expense of every other kind of degree; of any kind of certification training.”
In an age where the job market seems impossibly dire for millions of Americans, Rowe believes the solution is to stop placing taboos on certain job sectors such as manufacturing — where millions of positions remain open because of a lack of workers. Currently, over 7 million American men have stopped looking for jobs altogether because they could not find anything, but, Rowe points out, there are more than enough job positions available nationwide.
Related: Mike Rowe Awards 200 Scholarships to Vocational School Students
“To say it another way, a lot of the people standing behind me are small business owners who are absolutely killing it, doing things with glass that most of us don’t think twice about. They are busy beyond belief, and every single one of them is hiring. Every. Single. One,” Rowe said in 2022.
As media continues to control the narrative on nearly every topic, it is encouraging to see someone like Rowe fight against the popular position and advocate for something that makes more sense.
Read Next: Dave Ramsey, Mike Rowe Say ‘Work Smart, Not Hard’ is Bad Advice
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