Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

Let me say it again. Slowly. Because the world is desperate to sell you a lie.

Do not follow your passion.

Not yet.

The Passport of Privilege

Look closely at who is giving you this advice.

They started coding at nine. Both parents present, educated, invested. Books everywhere – a library at home.  Their early childhood was a benevolent hedge fund — compounding every talent, buffering every failure, opening every door before they even knocked. They won the parent lottery. They won the race lottery. Their skin colour does not get them followed in a store. A security guard does not clock them as a threat while they walk home in the sun. They have never been the subject of an SMS that reads: “BM (Black Man)  walking in the suburban  street” sent by Karen.

Their passion is not a gamble. It is a diversified portfolio built on decades of unearned privilege and inherited social capital.

Your passion, when you start from nothing, is a prayer.

And prayers do not pay rent nor get you out of poverty trauma.

Maslow Was Not Being Poetic. He Was Being Literal.

We love to quote Abraham Maslow. We skip the order.

Self-actualisation — purpose, meaning, significance — sits at the top of the pyramid, even thiugh Maslow never wrote a pyramid. At the base? Food. Water. Shelter. Safety. Not dying. Not being one crisis from total collapse.

If you grew up poor — real poor, the kind of poor where ‘garage door’ is a phrase other people use — where your ACE (Adverse Childhood Effects) score reads like a batting average, where one parent was a ghost and the other was exhausted, where you belong to the group this economy was designed to exclude — then your first calling is not passion.

It is survival.

Here is the only sequence that works when you start behind the starting line:

Survive. Get your head above water. Breathe. So you can think about next week, not just the next meal.

Succeed. Build economic freedom — and freedom is not a bank balance. Freedom is choices. It is not having to say yes to the boss who degrades you. It is walking into a store without calculating the price of each item before you reach the till.

Significance.  Then — and only then — follow your passion. When you have built a floor. When you have  f***k off shankuras (money). Not discarded — f***d off money. Meaning: it no longer owns you. It no longer speaks first in every room.

Dead people do not leave legacies. All you hear – isitye edible asidleli “good people die young” … Nonsense – have you been to an expensive antique store – expensive things do outlast their owners.

Burnt-out people do not build anything that lasts.

Get the sequence right. Confuse the order and you risk drowning while trying to philosophise about the ocean.


On Side Hustles and Self-Deception

You have a job. You hate it. You tolerate it. Fine.

You also have a side hustle.

Here is the only Sunshine (YC)  test that matters:

Does your side hustle make in one month what you earn in one year at your main job?

No?

Then you do not have a side hustle. You have a hobby. There is nothing wrong with a hobby — but do not confuse motion with progress. Being busy is a coping mechanism. Being productive is a bridge out.

If your passion project cannot clear that bar — one month’s income equalling one year’s salary — keep your job. Be pragmatic. Do not quit to paint. Do not resign to find yourself.

Find yourself after you have bought yourself.


The Inequality of Risk

Here is what the passion preachers never tell you:

the well-off can afford to fail.

When they follow their passion and stumble, they fall onto a safety net woven from educated parents, social capital, and skin colour that does not attract suspicion. They fall — and bounce back up, funded by a family loan, a warm reference, a second chance the system happily extends.

When you fall, you fall into the abyss.

This is not about talent. It is about infrastructure. Passion without infrastructure is just an expensive emotion. And the infrastructure — the floor, the buffer, the safety net — must be built *before* you leap.


The Only Advice That Will Not Lie to You

Follow effort. Show up when you are tired, scared, and unglamorous. Effort is the only currency that does not discriminate at the border.

Follow pragmatism. Take the ugly job that pays. Take the qualification that opens doors, not only the one that feeds your soul. Infrastructure is not the dream — it is the condition under which the dream becomes possible.

Follow money. Not greed. Money is oxygen. Money is the difference between surviving and choosing. Money is the tool that eventually lets you say: now I work on what matters.

And when you have enough — enough that a broken car is not a catastrophe, enough that choices feel like choices and not like traps — then look at passion.

Not before.


Passion Is the Reward for Pragmatism. Not the Starting Point.

The poor do not get to follow passion. They get to outrun extinction first.

So keep your job. Grind the side thing until it actually replaces your income — not partially, not eventually, but decisively. Stack survival until survival bores you. Build the floor. Earn the freedom.

Then f**k 9 off money.

Then ask the deeper questions:

What matters to me?
What impact do I want?
What does significance look like?

Then leave your legacy.

But first?

First you live. You survive


This is not cynicism. This is the kindness the world never gave a Serf – a Pauper – a Have Not –  you.

—
Between Thoughts — Intellectual Musings | Dr. Mzamo Masito
Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.