Do What You Do

I chose today's topic to be about the idiom: Do what you love and then find someone to pay you for it. I have come to realize that this analogy is outdated and unrealistic. Sure it's great to aspire to engage in your hobbies and hopefully revel or frolic in them. However, to actually look for a career in this is very domain specific. For example, someone may love to doodle or even to paint. This is great and a wonderful outlet for creative enterprises BUT to realistically expect to be able to pay the bills with production is asinine. Maybe if you love to fix cars then this would be partially beneficial however, increasing the extrinsic motivation by choosing this medium as a vocation is thereby detrimental to one's intrinsic motivation. In other words, by getting paid for doing something you enjoy then adds an emotional and competitive component whereby diminishing one's love for this activity. Also, much like other areas in life, what you love will usually change or at least be modulated based on one's circumstances. Maybe you love listening to a certain genre of music, this will likely change within a decade. Therefore, to pursue a career in the music industry, solely because you enjoy music is short-sighted and premature.
I can add a personal testimony for this. In high school I was pressured to transition to post-secondary education with no latent period with the reasoning that if I took time off then my skills would degrade and getting back in would be difficult. Thus I was presented with trying to choose the lesser of two evils, either prematurely choosing a career versus becoming obsolete. I figured I could likely explore my choice transitionally and diversify while in the university setting. No one told me this would come at a cost and you learn as you go. After 3-years of trying and struggling I eventually gave up and deferred my academic pursuit for 2 years. But enough about me.
The general consensus, therefore infers a need for pragmatic and thoroughly (& maturely) reasoned analysis to omit pursuing something you love as a career and more so to explore that which you have natural talent for.
If you are naturally good with numbers AND enjoy this then have at it but, in general, your performance and competence should be of utmost importance in pursuing vocational experience. No sense in becoming an astronomer if you can't keep the names straight and have little ability to orient yourself in relation to cardinal directions.
Therefore, in sum I would like to suggest a revision to the saying, "find what you love and then get someone to pay you for it" with "find what you are good at and then apply yourself".
~ Keep on Keepin' on
+ ps. smoking update: made it all day w/o. I think today will be [day 1]. Keep strong and keep control; get healthy and save money.