[balabaster]

Was software engineering really the first one as a viable career choice or was it just the first one you could easily see how to monetize it?

As a software engineer growing up in England, you make bugger all. The software market is incredibly um... well, let's just say the pay for a software engineer in the UK sucks... but I enjoy software engineering, so I did a whole bunch of research to figure out where it was most lucrative, did some shit jobs to save up for a plane ticket and get my visa and flew to where software engineers had a higher quality of life. I could've stuck it out in the UK and limited my horizons but honestly, that's just not who I am.

If my passion had been something else, I would've figured out where/how to make a market viable enough to make it lucrative and I'd have gone there and done that.

I was raised to believe that if you have a passion for something, the only thing standing in your way is you. You were gifted with a brain, a brain to figure shit out. If you don't understand how to leverage that, then I posit that you didn't pay enough attention to those teaching you along the way, showing you how to use your brain to hop from one stepping stone to the next to make your passions lucrative.

Admittedly sometimes you have to think outside the box and sometimes it takes a few tries of looking at things from different perspectives before you can put together a viable solution, but you have a passion for a reason - it's just up to you to monetize it.