--- title: "Do what you love" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/22/do-what-you-love.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/22/do-what-you-love.html" published: "2003-07-22T16:16:00" updated: "2003-07-22T16:16:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "\" In 1960, a researcher interviewed 1500 business-school students and classified them in two categories: those who were in it for the money (1245 of them ) and those who were going to use the degree to do something they…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Do what you love By Roy Osherove July 22, 2003 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published July 22, 2003; technical details may be outdated. "_In 1960, a researcher interviewed 1500 business-school students and classified them in two categories: those who were in it for the money (1245 of them ) and those who were going to use the degree to do something they cared deeply about ( the other 255 people). Twenty years later, the researcher checked on the graduates and found that 101 of them were millionaires , and all but one of those millionaires came from the 255 people who had pursued what they loved to do!_ Now, you may think that your passion for Icelandic poetry of the baroque period, or butterfly collecting, or golf , or social justice , might consign you to a permanent separation between what you love and what you do for a living, but it isn't necessarily so. Vladimir Nabokov, one of the greatest novelists of this centurey, was far more passionate about butterfly collecting than writing. His first college teaching job, in fact, was in lepidoptery. REsearch on more than 400,000 Americans over the past 40 years indicates that pursuing your passions , even in small doses, here and there each day , helps you make the most of your current capabilities and encourages you to develop new ones. " From _[The other 90%](https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/060980880X/qid=1058901415/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/iserializable-20)_ by Robert K. Cooper, Three Rivers Press 2001" \[[Thinking About Computing(Bruce Eckle)](http://www.mindview.net/WebLog/)\]   I feel like I'm on the right way. ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Jul 27, 2003 ### [MSDN VB blog section](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/27/msdn-vb-blog-section.html) - Jul 23, 2003 ### [Faster typing achieved slowly](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/23/faster-typing-achieved-slowly.html) - Jul 18, 2003 ### [Mr. Bunny](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/18/mr-bunny.html) - Jul 18, 2003 ### [Must-have books for my new job](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/18/must-have-books-for-my-new-job.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/