Follow Your Passion: The Advice That Costs Careers

There is a version of career advice that has been passed down for so long it has calcified into received wisdom. Follow your passion. Find what you love and the money will follow. It sounds generous. It is, in practice, one of the more expensive things a young person can be told.

OpenAI's chief economist came out against it plainly — not as a contrarian flourish, but as a reading of what the labour market actually rewards. The argument is this: passion follows mastery, not the other way around. You don't find your calling and then get good at it. You get good at something, and the competence generates the engagement. Reverse the sequence and you spend a decade chasing a feeling that was never going to lead anywhere stable.

It matters more now than it did ten years ago. Morgan Stanley puts a number on it: AI displacement is currently adding 15 basis points to the unemployment rate, and the cohort feeling it sharpest is under 30. Not because young workers are less capable — because they are most likely to be in the roles that are easiest to automate first. Entry-level research, basic analysis, first-draft writing, routine coding. These were the rungs on the ladder. Some of them are being removed while people are still climbing.

The mechanism is not malicious. It is structural. Companies don't fire young people because of AI — they stop hiring into the roles that AI now covers. The headcount never returns. The graduate who was supposed to spend two years learning the trade by doing the grunt work finds the grunt work gone. The skill accumulation that would have built mastery — and eventually, genuine professional satisfaction — never happens.

This is why the advice matters. If you enter a field because you love it, and that field contracts before you build real depth, you are exposed on both ends. If you enter because you built a skill the market genuinely needs — something technical, something interpersonal, something that sits at the intersection of human judgment and complexity — you have a foundation that absorbs shocks.

The practical read is unsentimental: in a market being restructured by AI, the safest position is deep competence in something that does not yet have a clean automation path. Not passion. Capability. The passion, if it comes, arrives later — usually around the point where you're good enough that the work becomes interesting on its own terms.

For anyone in Malta navigating this in salary terms, the Malta salary guide is worth a look — particularly for roles at the intersection of tech, finance, and compliance, where the island's labour market is still hiring ahead of supply.

The career advice no one gives you is also the one that ages best: become hard to replace before you decide what you love.

— Marcus Azzopardi