If you have a passion and you see yourself doing it for the rest of your life, go for it. No amount of money will bring you more joy than doing what your truly love. That said not everyone has a passion or it may take time for someone to find its true calling or it’s just not your personality and you’d rather do something for while and then move on to something completely different. If that’s you, you’re not alone and that’s OK. So if you see yourself being able to different things, it may be worth looking at the potential paycheck for each of these things.
After all if you’re equally excited by a few opportunities, you might as well go for the one that pays the most.
If you’re lucky enough to be about to go to college or are in college and you’re not sure in which area you should study, take a bit of time looking at the average salary for the industry people from a given major go to.
For the U.S. job market you can check the website of the Bureau Of Labor Statistics.
Glassdoor.com and salary.com are also good sources. For tech jobs, levels.fyi is a pretty good source.
If you’re completely undecided, just have a look at the highest paying jobs and check if there’s a job that may seem appealing to you.
If college is not for you, becoming a real estate agent or a realtor can be a good move, especially if you expect to eventually earn some passive income through real estate investing.
You can also try summer sales, where you will get some mentorship and the opportunity the make money along the way, if you can handle rejection or want to explore developing this skill. Learning to sale is an invaluable life skill and spending a summer learning the rope is definitely some time well spent. Because let’s face it everything in life is about sales: if you have a day job, you need to learn to sell yourself, if you start a company you need to understand how to sell a product or a service for the company to be profitable. If you invest, it’s likely that at some point you’ll need to sell some of investments to buy others and learning how to sell right is important.