I don't really get what his passion was. He states that he followed his passion and became a teacher, but having never worked as a teacher, there must have been

I don't really get what his passion was. He states that he followed his passion and became a teacher, but having never worked as a teacher, there must have been some aspects of teaching that he thought would be fulfilling. Most of the time when people choose career paths it is for reasons that have nothing to do with passion. In fact, for most people it seems that career choice is just a mixture of luck and somewhat random choices. What exactly makes somebody start down the path of being a lawyer? Maybe their father was a lawyer or they saw a movie about a lawyer that influenced them. Conversely, somebody might become a librarian because a job opens in their hometown and they just drift into it without much planning due to sheer convenience (I know a lot of people like that). I think that career progression is largely luck-based as well, because you cannot possibly know what the reality of day-to-day life in a career looks like without living it. Having gone through an MBA program, I have seen this first hand. People's entire career paths are condensed down to 18 months and a set of a few companies that just happen to recruit where you go to school. One student may come in convinced that he wants to be an entrepreneur, get pulled into the consulting crowd and have a complete shift in goals, just to get dinged by the top consulting firms and end up settling into the management track at Sears. That's the trouble with following your passion- it is pretty tough to define just what that is, and the fact that there are some jobs that involve it to an extent is probably not the best way to follow it. As an aside: one other thing I noticed which was quite prevalent in the bschool crowd was this dream to do your own thing and run your own business. I would hear people say "my goal is to start a company" or "I want to join a startup." The odd thing is that none of these people actually took direct steps toward trying to start a business. They felt pressure from their peers getting lucrative offers from consulting firms and such and said things like "I'm going to work for a few years and get some experience under my belt and then I'm going to start a business or join a startup." It seems what made these people happy was convincing themselves that they were planning a future that would best set them up to create this business and become rich at some point in the future. What made them get out of bed early and work hard was satisfying some false prerequisite that they dangled in front of their own face. When that was accomplished, they created another, and another, and another. It seems that actually is where their happiness came from- making themselves believe that they were progressing towards their goal.