Can you ever turn Passion into Profit?

Is it even a good idea to try to earn money from what you love?

Many of us are yoked to a career which has as it’s primary (and often only) justification that it improves our bank balance each month. We show up and do things with other people, or for other people, that have no great benefit for us. We don’t do them out of choice. Often they are stressful and involve dealing with unpalatable folk, doing tasks out of obligation because it’s in a job spec.

We are coerced into this either from fear of financial Armageddon, or from a sense that it will be the right thing for “the team” or even to “get ahead”.

And then we repeat this activity for forty-five years.

But imagine if you could actually spend all day enjoying yourself and the enjoyment actually increased your bank balance as well. Imagine a time where you discover a way that you might actually earn some money from doing something that you really love. Imagine if a pastime turned into your actual career.

Wordsworth can stick being young; Oh, what very heaven would it be, to earn money from a hobby!

But the clichéd old saw about never doing a day’s work in your life if you enjoy what you do, has some wrinkles on its apparently perfect face. Let’s just focus on that saying for a second to see if we can discern reality through the misty-eyed vision. To illustrate my point, I’m going to go to the sharp end (literally) of the reality behind the dream using an example that’s close to home..

My father was a farm labourer after leaving school at 14. His young passion was aeroplanes and the idea of flying. Even though he had nothing in the way of qualifications he still joined the RAF as soon as he was old enough, just to be near the objects of his desire.

Then one day a Genie (in the guise of someone in the Air Ministry, combined with cack-handed demand management at the end of the war) appeared and granted him one wish.

“Oh, let me be a pilot please!”

“Certainly”

And so it came to pass that he started flying. Then things got even better as he proved to be remarkably adept in his new career, to the point where he piloted the enormous bombers that were charged with dropping nuclear weapons on our adversaries in Moscow. After that it was dropping the royal family and senior politicians, off around the world.

As his job got better and better however, even I, as a small boy, began to notice that the time he actually spent fulfilling his heart’s desire got less and less. He spent more time on the ground in offices. He attended meetings and even when he did fly he would only be examining other pilots. His immediate coterie of flying friends were fun, but the soul sapping effort of dealing with the dead-eyed, public school-bred functionaries on the ground got him down more and more.

He left the RAF and moved to the Middle East to fly Sheikhs and Potentates. But that didn’t fix things. The flying got even less as the Emirs and Kings didn’t actually go very far afield in their shiny new jets. His mouth was stuffed with silver but instead of bureaucracy, this time he had to deal with furnace-like temperatures and absolutely nothing to do.

He moved back to the UK and finally retired. Subsequently I used to quiz him - didn’t he perhaps fancy doing a little flying now, in his spare time?

“No, I don’t want to. I’ve done enough”

He stopped flying of any description almost entirely. Even in the days when crews would allow their brethren to go up onto the flight deck, he didn’t advertise his presence when flying anywhere. Cruises were the holiday of choice for my folks in later years. His passion was dead.

And (finally) to get to the point, it was all of the ancillary stuff that went around the pure enjoyment of flying had killed his true love. He regarded the bureaucracy as too high a price for a few hours in the air.

Which is where we came in. To my mind it is practically impossible to make a career solely from doing what you love. The enabling steps to get to the point where you have an income from your passion are many. There are meetings and emails, conferences and marketing, finance and accounting. It means that over time your day becomes more and more spent on things that are probably a mile away from the source of your enjoyment. In other words, the business steps between you and your passion. If you are not passionate about entrepreneurialism itself, you may struggle to actually take many steps at all in the direction of the earning money aspect of the thing.

But what to do about this melancholy state of affairs?

Well, some thoughts come to mind. There are those who are transcendentally good at their vocation and can name their price in the market. They can farm out a heap of the things they don’t want to do. Footballers, Golfers, Jeremy Clarkson, they have agents and flunkies for these tasks. But even they eventually end up doing the personal appearances and hiding from the press.

The only approach that seems to make sense to me is a pragmatic alteration of the terms of the objective.

We should therefore cease the quest for the Holy Grail of combining passionate intensity with money. Instead, we need to customise the idea slightly. Rather than try to earn cash from say, Classic Cars (Love ‘em, but I have no great desire to get under an oily Lancia) or Photography (Been doing it for fifty years, but it’s the very definition of a saturated market), I have decided that the solution is to go with attempting to concentrate on areas where I know I have a proficiency and which, at a minimum give me satisfaction. To avoid the friction created by process and bureaucracy, I am using tools which I don’t actively dislike and which don’t insert too high a barrier between me and people who might like what I do.

This feels like a much more pragmatic way of making progress. For example I enjoy writing and I I’m happy that I can string a word or two together (At least I am until I read say, Stephen Fry and realise that proper writing is not something I’m doing at all, but that’s for another day). I suppose this is an explanation of this newsletter. The tool I am using (Substack if you haven’t noticed) is almost frictionless – you type something and hit send. That’s it….

Of course, the obvious question arising immediately is how do you actually make money from this. Well, before you run for the hills I can promise that further down the line you, erudite, early adopting, subscriber (you have subscribed, right?), will never have to put your hand in your pocket. Later on, who knows. We might see whether paywalls for new arrivals could work. Or even sponsorship…. (alright you can stop laughing now).

The good news for me is that this approach means I have the fun of doing the creative bit to see me through the startup, without worrying too much yet about the harder part of actually earning anything.

I think that satisfaction will have to do for the moment. I can’t ask for any more.