Make Money: Turn Your Passion into Profit

Make Money: Turn Your Passion into Profit

A lot of people struggle to make money from doing what they love. It seems like those who make money from their passions are unicorns! So, what’s the deal with passion? How do you find it? Should you find it? And what do you do with it? We’ll answer all of these questions and more in this article.

If you don’t have a passion or you have one and don’t know what to do with it, this is the perfect article for you. Stick around until the end to find out how to do what you love and make money at the same time.

We’ve heard some people complain that they don’t have any hobbies or passions. They can’t seem to find anything worth their time that excites them.

Finding your passion is a common problem that people go through, and while the general advice is just go and do stuff, there is a deeper problem here. If you don’t know what passion feels like, you will miss it every time.

So, the first step is understanding what it feels like…

What Passion Feels Like

Okay, first of all, do you know what passion actually means?

By definition — It’s a strong and barely controllable emotion.

You get a taste of it when someone cuts-you-off, but does that mean you have a passion for L.A. traffic? In the real world, passion means “excitement”. Something you enjoy doing regardless of the outcome, something that scratches an itch and makes you curious.

You already “have” and “will have” hundreds of passions through your life. The problem you have is thinking that passion should be overwhelming, like waves knocking you back to the shore. You expect to find something that won’t let you sleep at night, that will constantly be on your mind and you’ll be willing to drop everything just to do that.

But that’s not passion, that’s obsession!

Passion happens moment to moment, something catches your attention, that one song comes onto your playlist, you read something profound in a book, you watch a random video on how to do something and then you spend hours going down rabbit holes.

That moment of excitement is what passion feels like, and if you think about it, those moments happen quite often. It’s actually dangerous to think of passion or purpose for that matter as something that will completely change your world.

You can’t find your true passion because it doesn’t exist. True passion is like true love. How lucky were you to find out your true love happened to live three houses down the street, right? Instead, identify those moments that spark your interest & curiosity and chase after them.

Next, let’s talk about how to chase it…

How To Chase Your Passion

Even when people find something they’re passionate about, they’re afraid to chase after it. Mainly because it feels like a waste of time or it doesn’t feel like their true passion or maybe it’s just a phase.

There’s also a bit of stigma toward people who jump from one thing to the next. Society looks at them like they’re confused, flaky, chaotic or unbalanced. If last year you were drawing and now you’re programming and next you want to start a TikTok account, people won’t take you seriously, right?

Well, the good news is that nobody actually cares about you. They’re too busy worried about what other people think of them. And You? You’re free to chase anything that makes you curious.

And this is how you do it, be a professional at it, take it super seriously, take lessons, read books, ask masters, take some money and invest in it, get the tools you need, don’t be afraid to go hard on it, and if at any point it stops making you excited, set those tools aside and move on.

Some say that this is a waste of money & time — it’s not! We’re giving you our blessing to invest time & money in whatever little thing catches your curiosity.

Okay, next let’s talk about how to use it…

How To Use Your Passion

The happiest & most successful people we know have a healthy balance of money & passion. This balance happens when your passion starts to challenge you. You will eventually hit a roadblock, you surpass the beginner level and you need to push.

This is when your passion will start feeding your soul. It will force you to study, practice & get better. You need to go public so to speak. Publish your writing, ask for feedback, sell it online, display it in a case. You’re not doing it for money, you’re only doing it for yourself and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t sell or if nobody cares.

The only reason you make it public is because it’s rewarding. You get a sense of satisfaction & feedback on how to improve. That’s why we mentioned you need to be a professional at it. In order for your passion to feed your soul and give you balance, it needs to challenge you.

You are now part of a group that does the thing you’re doing. You can call yourself an amateur-insert-passion here.

Next, let’s talk about the reason you’re reading this article…

Passion & Making Money

It’s been said over & over again that —

“If you do what you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life!”

But here’s the honest reality: You make money from your passions if your passion is making money. There are artists who create for two hours a day and spend 10 hours trying to sell their work.

After all, you can’t all be Beeple…

Image: newyorker.com (Edited with Canva)
And if you don’t know, Beeple is a digital artist who went from selling his art for $100 to $69 million for a single piece.

A lot of people try to marry “making money” with their “passion”, and it’s an honest journey but it rarely works out. That’s because the second you try to make money from your passion, it becomes a job and a job won’t feed your soul no matter how passionate you are about it.

It’s fine and also imperative to separate your money making activities with your passion activities. This is about “Money-Passion Balance”. They serve different purposes.

One feeds you & your family.
The other feeds your soul and you’re doing it for the sake of doing it.
Be as good as you can at your job regardless of whatever that may be and be as good as you can at your passion. You need both of them. There might be a point in your future where you’re so good at your passion that someone is willing to pay you to do it and whether or not you make that switch is up to you.

We mentioned you can have hundreds of passions in your lifetime and one of those can be a job. You will still have plenty of other passions to keep challenging your creativity and the progress that you make following your passion will boost your energy for your job as well.

And on the other hand, your job will give you resources to spend on your passion. That’s why happy and successful people have a healthy balance of both. There isn’t a good reason to have one thing that fulfills every aspect.

Avoid making work your whole life — & — Avoid making your passion your sole income!

The real honest reason people can’t find a passion is because they don’t enjoy their work. They hope they’ll find something so interesting, so amazing and so financially rewarding that they won’t feel like it’s work. And once they find something similar, they spend a lot of time trying to make it a career.

But what happens? They end up not enjoying the work and so the cycle continues. So, why not skip the career part entirely and just focus on the passion?

Turning Passion Into Business

If you get good at something outside of your work and you want to turn it into a business, then the very first step you need to take is a mentality shift.

Once you make the jump, the passion becomes work. It’ll feel entirely different. You’ll have to sacrifice a big portion of the passion in exchange for boring work. Even though you might feel excited at first because you’re working within your passion, that excitement won’t last very long.

So first: Simply be aware of this change!

Secondly: Use it as a segway for a side hustle instead of jumping in headfirst! There are too many movies about people quitting their job to follow their passion. It’s a fantasy world! Especially if you have adult responsibilities. It’s very bad advice to quit your job & follow fairy tales. You can work 5–10 hours a week in turning your passion into a career just fine.

Third: Define your competitive advantage! You won’t succeed just because you’re passionate about it — instead — you need to leverage what you learned practicing your passion before turning it into a career. Maybe you know the market really well, you know what needs are not being met, you know how to do things better or how to teach others. Again, that’s why we know that you need to take every passion super seriously from the start.

Fourth: Skill stack! Use the skills you got from your normal job, get some adjacent ones. In the beginning, you’ll be doing almost everything yourself.

Fifth & most important one: Start with one paying customer! You need to prove demand before jumping in. If you find one person willing to pay you, then you’re good to go.

CONTRIBUTED BY Entrepreneuria

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