When Following Your Passion Will Leave You Broke

I bet you’ve heard this one: “Do what you love, and the money will follow.”

Sounds good, it a tad glib. But is it true? If you love accounting, it might be. Most of us, thought, don’t have passions which translate straight into money in the bank. Have you ever asked yourself if I quit and do what I love, how will I pay the rent?

It’s a serious question. I get angry at the “gurus” of personal development who say that you should just do whatever you’re passionate about – you’ll make a living eventually. Many of us simply aren’t in a position to struggle along until we finally “make it”, or we don’t want to end up taking advantace of friends and relatives if things go sour:

My question is – what advice do you have on exit strategies / safety catches for someone who thinks they have a good idea but ultimately also needs to be able to pay a mortgage and buy food? Especially now, when it’s not like there are lots of jobs around to just step back into.

(Bob, in a comment)

Paying the rent is my problem. I don’t won’t to move back in permanently with my parents. I have the beginnings of ideas relating to church and fresh expressions, but whether they’ll come to anything is an interesting question.

(yrieithydd, in another comment)

Do those echo with you? Do you have a great idea, a particular passion, or a calling towards a certain service in life? And do you also want to look after yourself and your family?

You have got options. I’ll go through three (full-time day job, part-time day job, and working around your passion) and give some tips on how to make these work for you.

Work Full-Time, Squeeze Your Passion Round the Edges

This is the position where most us start. We’re in a full time job that we aren’t passionate about. (If we’re lucky, we don’t hate it.) Whatever our real passion, we squeeze it in around the edges of our job, into the evenings, the weekends, or lunch breaks and our commute. Our job feels like a cruel tax on our time, snatching away half our waking hours.

My passion was, and still is, writing. When I graduated from university and started working full-time, I thought I could fit in plenty of writing around a 9-5 job. I hadn’t thought through the commuting time, the fact that I’d need to cook and eat and shower and other such tasks, the tiredness after seven and a half hours in front of a computer screen…

Sadly, I’m sure that you’ve experienced the same frustrations. If your passion is something creative, it’s incredibly hard to find the energy for that while working full time. If you’re trying to build a business, it can feel as though it’ll take forever to get it off the ground.

If you’re currently in a day-job, try:

Giving your “best” time to yourself. Get experimental about this: if you struggle to get anything done in the evenings, try shifting things around. I was surprised (indeed, a bit horrified) to find that I was much better at getting my writing done when I got up at 5.45am and wrote before going to work. Sid Savara, even less of a morning person than me, reports something similar:

When I wake up, every day is a new day.  I don’t have anything on my mind, and when I sleep it’s a chance to “reboot” my brain before I get started on my personal projects. As opposed to trying to switch gears after work, I get to immediately focus in on personal goals in the morning.

(Sid Savara, More Important Than Money – Paying Myself First With My Time, SidSavara.com)

Cutting down your outgoings. Can you cut your spending and save some of your salary? Keep a close eye on your spending for a couple of weeks – and see if there’s any areas where you can cut back without feeling like you’re missing out. You’ll be building up capital and a safety net – which is a huge help if you do end up quitting your day job (pdf link, right-click to save to your PC) – and you may well find you can manage fine on less money than you thought.

Work Part-Time, Give Full Days to Your Passion

The obvious next step, especially if you’ve cut down your outgoings, is to work less in your current job. Can you negotiate with your employer to reduce your salary by 20% and work a four-day week?

(I realise that for some of you, the answer there will be “no”.) It’s incredibly refreshing to be able to devote a whole day each week to your passion, and it can make your day job that bit more bearable.

I tried this in early 2008, to get my first blog going and to write more short stories. We were going through a quiet patch at work, too. I talked to my line manager who talked to my boss. The result was that I got a tentative agreement to take Tuesdays off.

Fast forward six weeks, and it didn’t work out quite like I’d hoped. For one thing, my blog was still very new and I was finding my feet. I wasn’t making money from it (which was fine – I didn’t need to as 80% of my salary would have covered my outgoings with a bit left over). The main problem was work-related: one Tuesday some problems arose in my absence, and my boss was not a happy bunny. At all. I offered to work Tuesdays again, and to take the time I’d had off out of my paid annual leave rather than as unpaid leave.

Tips for working part-time, then (other than avoiding working for my former boss…):

Protect your time fiercely. As soon as friends and relatives realise you have a “day off”, they’ll want you to meet up for coffee or lunch, or they’ll suggest all sorts of little jobs you could lend a hand with. If possible, keep the changes to your working week quiet!

Treat this as a trial run. I’ll admit I used to sleep in a bit on my Tuesdays, but I got up, got dressed, and sat down and worked each morning. Behave as though this is your full time job that brings your income – treat it seriously. This is also a good way to try out whether it really is your passion – or, at least, whether it’s a passion you want to have as a career.

Compromise – Work Around Your Passion

What I am saying is that passion isn’t magic. There are far too many starving artists in the world for the “do what you love” saying to hold any water. Not by itself, anyway.

You can dream all you like, but a career you love happens in the real world. And except for the occasional stroke of blind luck, success in the real world doesn’t come by waving a magic wand. It comes from trusty stand-bys like hard work, ability, and persistence.

(Do What You Love, But Money Won’t Necessarily Follow)

If your passion isn’t a fast route to riches, can you do something similar but more lucrative? A couple of great resources for this are:

• Ten Ways to Translate Your Passion Into Additional Income – from Trent Hamm on The Simple Dollar. Give all of the ideas here some thought; there’s a good range.
• Jonathan Field’s Career Renegade book – reviewed here – Jonathan goes through a number of different routes that can turn your passion into something that makes money; such as teaching others, providing information, or creating communities.

I love writing fiction and blogging here on Aliventures. But neither of these pay me much, at the moment. Instead, I write for half-a-dozen or so large blogs which pay me per article. It’s work that I like, it pays very well per hour (I write fast and I’ve put my rates up ) and it gives me the freedom to spend the bulk of my working time on non-paying or not-yet-paying passions: my MA, my novel, Aliventures, and Church and family activities.

Blatant sales pitch alert! If you’re a writer-type and you’d like to pay the rent through blogging (and have plenty of time left over for your own projects), check out my Staff Blogging Course. It’s a step-by-step self-study guide, packed with real-life examples and templates to help you get going.

Tips for working around your passion:

Freelancing is easiest. If you’ve got a particular creative skill, you can find work as a freelancer. The most common areas are writing, design, and programming – but there are plenty of other options. Don’t worry that you’re not good enough: you only need to be better than the people you’re helping! (Dave Navarro has some great advice on this in step 2 of 7 Steps To Playing A Bigger Game)

Don’t get too “artist” about your work. I straddle two writing communities, which have at their extremes: copywriters who just care about paying the rent … and fiction-writers for whom it’s all about self expression. If you’re going to make a creative passion pay, you need to get business-like about it. Turn in good work; don’t try to be the next Shakespeare or da Vinci.

If you liked this post, you’ll enjoy:

• Reframing Work #1: Ditching Drudgery and the Conventional View of “Work”
• Reframing Work #2: Min Hours, Max Cash – Or Do What You Love?
• 10 Scary-but-Exciting Reasons to Work For Yourself – part one
• 10 Scary-but-Exciting Reasons to Work For Yourself – part two

I’d love to hear your own thoughts and stories on this topic. What are your passions? Do you want to make money from them, or do you just want to have the time and energy to enjoy them, outside your paying work? How have you balanced (or not!) the things you love doing with the need to earn a living? And if you’ve got any specific questions or problems you’d like me to tackle, just pop a note in the comments box below.