Skill, Passion and Market: Make Money Doing What You Love

At some point, you've probably found yourself hating your job, dreaming about your hobby and how great it would be if THAT was your job. If you voiced that desire to someone else, there's a pretty good chance that you heard one of the favorite lines of motivational speakers and self-help authors the world over: "Just do what you love".

The sentence is usually accompanied by anecdotes of riches-to-rags-to-riches stories of high power lawyers who quit their jobs to make a new form of jewelry that turns out to be the next big thing and ends up happy and even richer than before.

Unfortunately, that's the kind of advice that leads people to believe that they can turn their hobby directly into a business. Nevermind that it's extremely difficult to make a living directly doing most unmodified hobbies. Writing poetry, keeping fish, painting landscapes, taking still life photos, playing jazz piano, etc., etc., etc. are all things that people do, indeed, make a living at. However, there are hundreds of people who would LIKE to do those jobs for every one that actually does.

I've seen more than one person get all charged up by this and start drawing up plans to jump right into directly turning their hobby into a business or a career. That's because they didn't have all of the pieces necessary to make money doing something you love: Skills/Talent, Passion and Market.

Passion
This is the part most people start with: Stuff I Enjoy. If you're going to spend a large portion of your days and weeks in an activity, you have to actually enjoy it. Seems obvious, I know. However, it's something that more than a few miserable people ignore when picking a career or field. They see people making a bunch of money and jump in.

If there's an area of life that you already have a passion for, you're far more likely to have put in enough effort to have a pretty good foundation.

If I were starting from scratch and looking for a career, I might look, things that meet this criteria might be: writing software, watching movies, drawing, writing fiction, trivia, playing guitar, singing, photography, and reading.

Skills/Talent
In order to make decent money at anything, it needs to be in the set: Stuff I'm Good At. While there are some exceptions, people who make a living at something despite being below average at it, if you start out at least a little bit above average in your talent and skill, you won't be fighting a headwind.

If I look at my list of Stuff I Enjoy, it's clear that there's not a 100% overlap with Stuff I'm Good At. I'm a pretty good software developer and a decent photographer. However, at playing the guitar, singing, and trivia, I'm actually average at best and am not a very good movie critic at all.

Market
This dimension is probably the one that's least included in these discussions. In order to make any money at anything, it needs to be Stuff People Pay For. The market isn't exactly clamoring for another Great American Novel about the coming of age of an awkward teenager or a 32 year old guy who plays video games, or someone who reads all day. Neither is the market falling all over itself to buy my little experimental Flickr API client in C#.

The Sweet Spot
Now, there are plenty of things that overlap in 2 of the 3 circles. I was a decent technical writer and the market was there for it, but it turns out that I don't actually enjoy it. I enjoy photography and am pretty good at it, however except for wedding and high school senior portraits, there isn't a huge market and the market that DOES exist is much smaller than the supply of people who want to do it.

Whenever you don't have all 3, you're looking at a situation where you'll be fighting uphill the whole time. However, when you find something that lands in The Sweet Spot, you've got something that you can really run with.

In my case, developing custom business software is The Sweet Spot. I enjoy it, I'm good at it and there's a market. Now, of the software that I aim to write, business apps aren't what I'd write if money were no object. That stuff I write in my spare time. Because I know there's not much market demand, I don't try to push it.

The added benefit to specifically seeking out the sweet spot is that it's highly unlikely that the thing you enjoy the MOST is what will end up in that little patch. As such, your day job ends up being enjoyable, but the thing you really enjoy is saved from the destruction of your intrinsic motivation.

In short, if you're dreaming of a new career, and it doesn't land in The Sweet Spot, you might want to re-think your dream.