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title: Follow your passion is overrated, Anu Bulusu
description: The worst career advice you can give? Follow your passion. A grid that taught me the difference between what fulfils you and what pays you.
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# Follow your passion is overrated
Purpose
The worst career advice you can give? Follow your passion. A grid that taught me the difference between what fulfils you and what pays you.
**Anu Bulusu**
11 July 2025 2 min read
**2 min read**
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**The worst career advice you can give?**
“Follow your passion”.
Love singing? Keep it as your joy, not your job. The minute you turn passion into invoicing, it stops being fun.
This grid taught me the difference between what fulfills you and what pays you.
I’ve lived in all four quadrants of this grid. Sometimes painfully, sometimes powerfully.
Drifting: In high school, I hadn’t found my passion, and I definitely wasn’t committed to myself yet. I just went with the flow.
Burnout Zone: I chased a post-grad degree in Civil Engineering, full of passion but no job prospects. Passion fizzled fast when I realized it couldn’t pay the bills.
Steady Builder: In my corporate years, I was committed. Reliable. Maybe not always high on passion, but I showed up because I said I would. And that mattered too. I grew steadily, did well.
Enduring Impact: As a founder / CEO, I finally hit the zone. I discovered my passion isn’t a job title. It’s building things from scratch. Bootstrapping, chasing the first few clients, watching something come alive. Turns out, I’m still a civil engineer at heart; just building a different kind of structure.
In the end, commitment is what carries you through.
Passion is the spark, but without commitment, it fizzles every time.
Written by
## Anu Bulusu
Anu Bulusu is the author of Sticking On, Purpose Has A Pattern and Accumulate, and a co-founder of INRY and the founder of L5. She lives between Eden Prairie, Minnesota and Hyderabad, India.
[About me](https://anubulusu.com/about)[The books](https://anubulusu.com/books)
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