Do you think that pursuing early financial independence (Maximising for Income) means putting on hold my dream job and life for now?

Hi there,

Thank you for reaching out to the Seedly Community with your question. I understand you are split between (i) Pursuing your dreams (ii) Picking a practical choice

I feel that these choices do not have to be mutually exclusive – meaning to say, you can have both!

Just to share a personal example, my true interest is to contribute to society through pushing for policy change and taking practical steps to help Singaporeans cope with the various bread and butter issues that they face. However, my day job has absolutely nothing to do with that, it is in the Technology Industry.

What I do is that I simply treat my job as one segment of my life – a platform for me to grow professionally; feel a sense of achievement and most importantly, to feed my family. After all, our parents didn’t think that a job needed to be a “passion”, they simply took it for what it was – an exchange of labour and results for money.

For my passion, I pursue it outside of my main job through volunteering and sharing useful analysis and information on my blog. This enabled me to achieve two things I wanted – financial stability and to be able to contribute to society at the same time.

Hope this perspective helps :) Feel free to PM me if you have further questions.
JP

I had many friends who sloged their lives starting in a bank and then gigging on the night / weekends and side for fun. Some also teach music on weekends to keep their passion sustained.

I hate to say it, but it is easier to be mediocre and earn shitloads of money in a bank. However, you have to be truely exceptional to make a sustainable career in music. And usually its not those who purely do music, but there is a lot of "entertainment" to do for sustainability. For eg: sing in a wedding band, write music, produce, film and do youtube vids for publicity and perform for corporate gigs as well.

I'm taking the likes of local singer sisters Tay Kexin and Tay Kewei, both of whom have produced albums to fair success and see the activities they do.

Then i guess you ask yourself, is that worth it? Can i make it?

If you don't 'make it' , what are the options for me 3 years down the road?

Pursue your passion but you still need to feed yourself. Consider how to balance the two, perhaps via a day job and earning from your passion on the side. You need good original material though (not really mentioned in your post but I'd assume your passion in music is as a musician). Create a demo tape and send it out. Busk if you can at popular hangout areas in town. Create a presence / branding for your group. Score small permanent gigs and go from there. Great example you can look at: Dave Matthews was a bartender before he recorded his demo tape and used it to bring members of his legendary band together. And look at how far he went. End of the day if it didn't work out, you can pursue a career somewhere else. But you won't have regrets. All the best!

Keep the job in the bank, and test run your music career in your free time. Why? Cos you say you are passionate about music, but do you know what a music career really entails? Its not just making music, but also learning to market your band, manage your fanbase, deal with producers and what not, navigate the industry, network etc. Its like a person who likes cooking and thinks they want to open a resturant, then finds out they hate dealing with customers, managing inventory, chasing suppliers, doing accounts etc and essentially hates having to run a business, when what they really loved was cooking for friends and famiky and doing acts of service (cooking) for them. To extend the example, the dream career for that person who loves cooking may in fact turn out to be something entirely unrelated to cooking like nursing or charity NGO type work, but still has the same essence of service to others.