Why money can distract your happiness.
“Figure out a way to make money doing what you love!” – Random guru advice.
This piece of advice can be good, but it can also turn someone’s life into a nightmare of distractions.
Seth Godin actually accidentally told us a very good way to approach money and passion. Seth was a passionate writer and made no money at first with it. He wasn’t trying to monetize his writing at first, he simply wanted to write, and a job (or credit cards) was just a means for him to make enough money to keep doing what he wanted.
If you focus on doing what you want to do, it makes things a lot easier. – Truth Cake
For example, Mother Teresa wanted to help lepers. If she thought, “Ok, I need a business plan on how I can monetize this skillset.” She probably never would have done what she wanted. Instead, she focused on doing what she wanted, and the money to be able to facilitate her continued travels and such came through other means.
While it’s nice to get paid to do what you love, sometimes trying to monetize an activity isn’t the best path. Instead consider ways to make enough money to continue to do whatever you want to do, with trying to attach some monetary goal such as saying, “I need to be make $100k doing it.” But why 100k? So you have enough money to do save up and quit and do what you love? Just do what you love now. Maybe it’s time to stop forcing monetization into something that isn’t monetized easily.
Granted, certain passions are easier to monetize than others (eg. programming vs basket weaving). So you can’t take blanket advice such as “get rich doing things you hate so you can afford the things you love,” or “monetize your passion,” or whatever.
If you’re passionate about working at the homeless shelter, maybe you should not try to force monetization into that as much as just doing it for free, enjoying it, and making money in some other fashion.
Is it easier to make money in another unrelated way to facilitate doing what you love? Or does it really seem like the best path is to monetize your passion?
