http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/12/no-exit-3
You can be passionate about what you are doing and interested in making money as well, it isn't either or. Personally I have no shame admitting I would be delighted to make an obscene amount of money in a short period of time, because to me money means freedom. I could spend time with people I love and do things I find interesting and enjoyable, rather than living for the next paycheck and having money end up owning me and my life as is the case with so many people who pursue high stress, high paying long term careers to "provide for their family" and end up miserable and distant. Another reason is that, call me entitled and selfish, but I don't enjoy the idea of working for someone else, likely doing something I'm only marginally passionate about, and having them take majority of the value of my efforts while giving me a fixed salary, though for many people I'm sure the stability of this is perfectly acceptable.
However, I do agree probably nothing good will come of you if you are motivated purely by profit with 0 interest or passion in what you are doing. I select projects that I am personally interested in simply because I find it extremely difficult to work on things that I don't get excited about.
Also some things are said to be difficult, and that alone gives certain types of people motivation to solve them, since they feel a certain type of disconnect with their intuition of what is possible and what other people around them are telling them.
No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end.
The truly powerful people in the world -- the ones whose names you don't know, because they don't particularly care for your knowing them -- they never lie to themselves, and they probably know exactly where their passions are. The less powerful people, the Jeff Bezos's and the Larry Ellisons, they probably learned over time.
The people who think they do what they do for any other reason are deluding themselves about the game that they're playing. There's only one game.
If you're going to be that reductionist, then you're still wrong. The basic evolutionary drive behind our species, and all others, is to reproduce and spread your genes. Everything else stems, however circuitously, from redirected or misdirected reproductive drive.
But either way, you're being silly. For example, I want to make enough money to support myself and afford a few luxuries now and then, and have as much free time as possible to spend with friends, books, and games. It's not technically incorrect to say that I want power (over my life and environment), but to say that my motivations are identical to those of a senator or a billionaire is ridiculous.
> The people who think they do what they do for any other reason are deluding themselves about the game that they're playing. There's only one game.
See, here's your problem, speaking of delusion. You've let the people playing the game of power trick you into thinking that their game is the only one in town.
I've had a couple things that would demonstrate me having money like a super expensive watch, a brand new Audi, a big house, etc. They were great for getting fleeting "Wow, he's got money!" glances from folks. Then I realized their like for me was related to stuff, not me. It just all seemed very vacuous.
Demonstrably wrong.
Desire for power is certainly common among primates, but there are a number of basic drives. Drives people have it in different amounts. Further, there's no particular reason to think it was a huge evolutionary driver for us.
If you're really looking for the evolutionary driver that made us what we are, it might be a taste for cooked food. [1] You could also make a case for tool usage, or an arms race in language capability, a peacock's tail that happened to let us do far more than woo mates.
And even if power were a major drive, it doesn't really tell us much about what we should do. People are naturally violent, but we mostly set that aside. What's natural tells us nothing about what's right.
Of course you won't believe me, because you write like a fundamentalist. You can't tell a Freudian that it isn't about sex or a Baptist that it isn't all about God. Fundamentalism always makes me a little sad because it's so stunting.
It'd as if somebody put on a pair of blue-tinted glasses and ran around insisting that since they only see blue things, blue is the only real color and everybody else is just fooling themselves. They can't quite get that "everything they see" isn't only about everything; its also about how they see.
Could you be pulling our legs? When you call him arrogant and then explain how only you understand the deep, hidden truths of the world, it's kooky enough that I wonder if you're just trolling.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/14...
