Telling a 22-year-old to follow their passion is one of the worst pieces of career advice in circulation. It sounds generous. It is not. For most young people trying to figure out where they fit in Singapore’s economy, passion-first thinking does not produce clarity — it produces paralysis, and then guilt that you haven’t figured yourself out yet.
Why passion-first thinking stalls most people
The standard version of “follow passion Singapore” advice rests on three assumptions: that you already know what you’re passionate about, that passion is stable over time, and that the market will reward it. None of those are reliably true.
Most people who say “I don’t know what I’m passionate about” are not broken. They haven’t done enough things to develop real preferences yet. Passion isn’t discovered through introspection at 2am. It tends to show up after you’ve gotten competent at something and started to see actual results.
There’s also a survivorship problem. The people who tell you to follow your passion — in graduation speeches, LinkedIn posts, TED talks — are the ones it worked out for. You don’t hear from the people who followed their passion into a shrinking industry or an over-saturated market and had to start over at 30.
The actual sequence that works
Skill → Confidence → Results → Passion.
That’s the order. It runs in one direction. Reversing it — waiting for passion before building skill — is why so many people stay stuck.
When you become competent at something, you can produce real outcomes. Real outcomes give you agency. Agency feels good. That feeling of being effective, of solving problems others can’t, of having people seek out your perspective — that’s what most people are actually describing when they say they love their work.
You didn’t need the passion first. You needed the skill first. The passion was downstream the whole time.
What this means for your degree or NS
If you’re halfway through an NUS Engineering or NTU Business degree and convinced you’re in the wrong course, pause before you act on that feeling.
The urge to quit is often not about the subject. It’s about feeling incompetent. Year 2 of any rigorous programme is designed to break you — you’re tackling problem sets that require thinking you haven’t built yet. Of course it feels disengaging. You haven’t crossed the threshold where the skill becomes satisfying.
The same applies if you’re in NS. Two years of structured routine can feel like suspension from real life. But the people who come out ahead are the ones who used that time to build something — a skill, a reading habit, a side project that paid back in options later. The structure is a resource if you choose to treat it that way.
The difference between interest and leverage
Here is a useful filter. Ask yourself: is this something I’m interested in, or is this something the market also values?
Interest alone is not enough. You can be deeply interested in local music, craft coffee, or documentary film. That interest is real. But if the market doesn’t pay well for it — or only pays well at the very top — building your whole identity around it is a risk most people aren’t pricing correctly.
Leverage is when your skills sit at the intersection of what you’re reasonably good at, what produces real value for others, and what you can bear to do consistently over several years. That intersection is where careers actually work. You don’t need to love it on day one. You need it to be a game worth improving at.
How to run the experiment without quitting your degree
You don’t need to blow up your life to test whether a direction is right for you. The experiment is smaller than that. Give a new domain six months of real effort — not passive consumption of videos about it, but actual output:
- Take on a role, internship, or project that pays you to do the thing
- Teach what you’ve learned to someone else — this forces real understanding
- Produce something with it: a report, a pitch, a result — and get feedback on it
- Track how you feel at month 1, month 3, and month 6
If at month 6 you still feel nothing, the evidence is in. Move on. But most people don’t even run the experiment — they decide in week 2 based on feeling alone, before any skill has had time to accumulate.
The Singapore-specific trap to watch for
There is a version of “follow passion Singapore” that plays out constantly here. Someone graduates from a local poly or JC, joins a corporate role for the stability, hates it by month eight, quits to find themselves, and spends two years drifting.
The drift itself is not the disaster. The problem is that it usually ends with them returning to a similar corporate role — except now two years behind, without the savings buffer, and with a harder CV to explain.
The alternative is not grinding through misery either. It is running your skill experiment while you’re still inside the structure, before you’ve paid the full cost of leaving. Use your weekends, your evenings, your NS downtime. Build the skill until it starts producing results. Then you have real information to make the call.
Quitting with data is a strategy. Quitting with feelings is a gamble.
What to do this week
Pick one skill that sits at the intersection of something the market values and something you don’t hate. Not love — don’t hate is enough to start. Set a 90-day window. Find the smallest version of a real-world output you can produce using that skill and go produce it.
That’s the move. Not a vision board. Not another personality quiz. An output.
If this hit, the longer version of this thinking lives in our First 14 Days reading — a free 14-day reading sequence on the same operating-system.
Written by the FINternship team. Leo Tan, our founder, is an NUS Engineering graduate, CFA charterholder, and has mentored over 1,000 young adults across Singapore.