Two words. Stop it.

I'm going to try and avoid cliches here and empirically explain to you why debasing your innate passion does more damage to you and everyone around you than good. Because I know you've seen it everywhere. "Believe in your dreams!" "Follow your heart!" "Doing what you love will lead to a land of sunshine, rainbows and free Chipotle!" Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've heard it all before, in every Disney movie in existence. I personally felt disillusioned at a young age. Despite having a love for books and writing, I was convinced that the only way to be successful in this world was to run a successful, profitable business or be a doctor.

These are in fact great, admirable paths. With hard work, these paths of science and business knowledge are promising of wealth and comfortable living in a struggling economy where most people are just trying to make ends meet. I have great admiration for people who make it big in these fields.

But it occurred to me that these are in fact the beaten paths. I used to be a pre-med student through almost half of my college career. I know every single step it takes to become a doctor and what you're supposed to be doing with your time while you are studying your brains out for school. But with time, it felt like I was merely a number (my GPA) moving along a conveyor belt (I was just mechanically going through the motions of life), rather than feeling like I was doing what I was supposed to in order to have a fulfilling, purposeful life. A life where I helped other people. Does that sound familiar?

Let me ask you another question. What good does it do you to be unhappy? Your friends and family can tell. It's equally frustrating for them to sit by and know that they can do nothing to help you, support you, or make you happy, because all you end up doing is pushing them away so they don't remind you how unhappy you are going down the path that you know isn't right for you. Avoiding your friends and family can only make things worse, and constantly lying to them about your state of being is exhausting.

You can't lie to them for long anyway, it starts to become obvious that you're depressed. You can't sleep but you feel tired all the time, you don't eat right, and before you know it you can feel like you're on the edge of insanity. Does it have to get here before you realize what you're doing is harmful for you?

Think about an ecosystem, just for a minute. If you take away one species, of an insect or a mammal, that can cause a chain reaction where one species can get overpopulated and another dies out due to starvation. You need every species in an ecosystem for it to balance out. Same goes for the world. You need people of all different types of passions to make the world work. If everyone was a doctor or a business suit, who would be the journalist that wrote about our economy or medical advancements in terms regular people can understand? Who would be the animators for the movie that inspires children and warms the hearts of adults? Who would edit textbooks for local schools?

There are endless possibilities to contributing to the world around you and the way to do it right is by doing it the way you're most talented in. There's a niche that you can fill by not being what your parents want you to be and not by being what society tells you earns the highest salary.

So think carefully about what makes you happy, you could be the best in whatever that is, and you could make a difference in the world that you couldn't have made being mediocre and unhappy in something else.