11 ms·

Don’t pin the butterfly: not all hobbies need to become hustles

114 points by anthilemoon 7y ago

samlevine 7y ago
It's great advice, but if I'm not sometimes tempted to skip a day for a hobby (hello running) it doesn't feel as fulfilling to me. I'm under no illusions that I will ever be a great runner, for example, but pushing my boundaries is really important to me.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
Here is the point that stands out for me in this article -- The lower your self-complexity, the more fragile you are. Let’s say you’re a man who thinks about his life mainly in terms of work and family. If your manager gives you harsh feedback, that’s 50% of your sense of self taking a hit. But if your self-complexity is higher—let’s say you have a couple of hobbies, personal goals outside of work, and relationships outside of your family members—the impact will be lessened. People will often define themselves by what they do, this has been true since the stone age when people named themselves after their profession. The more things you do, the less impact there is on your opinion of yourself if someone says that one of the things you do is substandard. Having hobbies will help avoid the trap that people get into when they take a job "because it pays well" and not because they are interested in it. The trap is sprung because it is harder to work at a job you're not invested in, and you don't generally do as well as people who are invested. So you can end up taking time away from other fulfilling activities to get told your doing badly at the thing you are spending all your time trying to do. That is a horrible place to be mentally.
- mtberatwork 7y ago
  > So you can end up taking time away from other fulfilling activities to get told your doing badly at the thing you are spending all your time trying to do. That is a horrible place to be mentally. I suppose this would be another selling point of BI? If your entire livelihood isn't tied to a demoralizing/uninteresting job, then it may be easier to brush these things off.
  - paulannesley 7y ago
    BI = Basic Income?
- vincentmarle 7y ago
  > If your manager gives you harsh feedback, that’s 50% of your sense of self taking a hit. The answer to this is not diversification... the answer is to work on yourself so your “sense of self” does not get affected by what anyone says.
  - MadWombat 7y ago
    > so your “sense of self” does not get affected by what anyone says But it should be affected. As the substance abuse programs say "the first step to solve any problem is to acknowledge that there is a problem". For example, if you think of yourself as a good husband and a good father and then your wife and kids come to you and tell you that you are not, you should probably reassess your self-evaluation. Maybe you are not what you think you are.
    - georgebarnett 7y ago
      Taking what others say on board without allowing it to destroy your own confidence and blind indifference to what others think are separate things.
- LiquidSky 7y ago
  >Having hobbies will help avoid the trap that people get into when they take a job "because it pays well" and not because they are interested in it. What? People take those jobs because they need money to live and that's their only option (or at least they think it is). Unless your hobby pays, it has absolutely nothing to do with it.
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    FWIW I have known Vice Presidents with this problem. Their entire notion of self worth was wrapped up in their job performance and what people said of them. People internalize their value in different ways, some are more resilient than others. Having something that you can be passionate about and good at outside your job has been shown to help resiliency. That's a good thing for anyone's mental health I suspect.
- nsomaru 7y ago
  The solution might be not to increase the number of things that define you, but to sublimate your ego (used loosely here to define what you “believe” yourself to be) into larger circles of identification. For example, a (wo)man (I’ll be using male gendered pronouns here but do not intend to be male-specific) motivated to feed his family has a larger circle of ID than when just looking to feed himself. Thus he is willing to sacrifice the “littler” self for the “bigger” self. Most people end this growth (also known as vairagya in Sanskrit) at the level of family, but it’s possible to keep expanding upwards to community, country, humans, living beings etc. Perturbations at the lower level from wherever you’re standing do not affect you because you’re standing at a higher level. A more expanded viewpoint, if you will. Ego has become finer and more refined.
spacemark 7y ago
I started doing astrophotography ~5 years ago because I found the mysterious beauty of the incomprehensibly large cosmos a rejuvenating, wondrous thing. In the course of my fun I built a star tracking mount that people seemed to like, so I refined the design, built 10 and sold them on Etsy to test the waters of entrepreneurship. Today, I sell 20-30/mth via a dedicated store. How often do I do astrophotography these days? Never. In fact my camera broke and I haven't bothered to replace it. I don't have the time. Has the entrepreneurship been worth it? Probably. But I do miss looking at the stars.
- anthilemoon 7y ago
  This is beautiful/a bit sad and articulates perfectly why sometimes hobbies are better left alone. Thanks for sharing.
- cdjk 7y ago
  Do you have a link?
  - spacemark 7y ago
    Sure - https://nyxtech.us/ https://nyxtech.us/
    - tartoran 7y ago
      Im not into astrophotography but this is a very very cool product that you’ve made. I hope you’ll grow it and give life to other cool things as you’re clearly very talented
      - spacemark 7y ago
        Oh, thank you :)
- jacobolus 7y ago
  Looks like a great product! If you don’t mind my asking: Do you have another day job? Some external investment? Are you expecting to grow to a much larger scale? Selling 250–300 devices per year at $100 each doesn’t seem like it would pay the bills even for one person, after materials and other business expenses.
friendlybus 7y ago
My highest self-complexity is in my work and main goals. Like composing an orchestra there any many moving parts that need to come together. Hobbies and sports are generally less complex and more simple. I don't think dropshipping chinese tea counts as a passion or method of self-expression for her and she's articulating that across the whole category. She's clearly more interested in consuming and learning about Chinese tea than expressing an inner desire to be a drop-shipping tycoon, that's cool. Responding to money stress by forcing your hobby into a job is not a great idea, I agree.
- abruzzi 7y ago
  > My highest self-complexity is in my work and main goals. Like composing an orchestra there any many moving parts that need to come together. Hobbies and sports are generally less complex and more simple. I think that depends a lot on the hobby and the individuals dedication (and ability to devote time) to the hobby. For example, one of my hobbies is I'm working on writing an opera. So that is literally writing for a full orchestra, but with the additional complexity of writing a story and libretto. In truth most of my hobbies can easily get as complex as my job, if I want to take it that far. However, for many people (sometime myself included) the fact that they are hobbies means we are limited in how much depth we have the time to commit.
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    Do you think there's any overlapping benefit from increasing your hobby complexity to the same level as your work complexity? I wonder if high performance individuals commit to a lifestyle that has high performance across the board and reap a certain kind of structure or skills increase from doing so.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      That's a really interesting question. When I look over my hobbies, they are all pretty much as complex and demanding as my job as a software dev. But from a very young age, I always preferred complex activities (I suspect that's a big part of why I was drawn to software engineering).
awillen 7y ago
I definitely think this is a useful perspective, but if you're creating something, it can be nice to turn your hobby into a hustle in order to increase the amount that you can create. If you're getting into glass blowing, you can only have so many vases (or bongs, whatever) in your house, so selling them is a good way to cover the cost of your materials while letting you continue to engage in your hobby. The key is to remember the purpose of selling them - it's not to make a bunch of money, it's just to enable you to blow more glass. Don't give refunds, discounts, or anything else - just price your stuff so it sells and move on after each sale.
- ldeangelis 7y ago
  That's an intersting way of looking at it that I didn't think about, thanks for sharing it.
JohnFen 7y ago
I agree with this. The problem with monetizing your hobby is that it turns your hobby into a business. That eliminates a whole lot of the benefit and joy of having the hobby.
ben7799 7y ago
Good article, I get it. I've had 3-4 different hobbies over the past 20 years that have stuck. Bicycling/Motorcycling, Photography, and Music. They all have semi-obvious side hustles that are pretty poor business opportunities that suck people in and ruin the hobby. Bicycling - Was on a team, sucked up a lot of time, racing was fun, team members in charge of finance embezzled the team finances. We ran a weekly race series so the amount of money was pretty shockingly large. Ruined it for a lot of us. Racing is massive effort and was never that fulfilling. At no level do the prizes start to make any sense. Bicycling/Motorcycling - I would say less so for these hobbies but there are some traps around making/producing accessories & trinkets. Photography - The side hustle you see people get into is small time sales, wedding/event photography, etc.. the problem being most of this stuff is a really expensive way to not make much money and take almost all the artistic fun out of it. Music - people get into bands and try to get paid to play concerts, etc.. pay is crap, it's hard work, gotta have a lot of equipment, etc..
- wruza 7y ago
  Software development - Was on a team, sucked up a lot of time, programming was fun, team members in charge of finance embezzled the team finances. We ran a weekly sprint so the amount of money was pretty shockingly large. Ruined it for a lot of us. Programming is massive effort and was never that fulfilling. At no level do the prizes start to make any sense. I would say less so for ios development but there are some traps around making/producing apps & widgets. The side hustle you see people get into is small time sales, short projects, freelance, etc.. the problem being most of this stuff is a really expensive way to not make much money and take almost all the artistic fun out of it. People get into bands and try to get paid to support in-house, etc.. pay is crap, it's hard work, gotta have a lot of equipment, etc.. Sorry for abusing your comment :) but it seems that programming is a king of all hobbies.
  - em-bee 7y ago
    if you do it that way on the side to a fulltime job then i agree with you. both programming and biking as a side project are more fun and relaxing when they are done without pressure.
drmpeg 7y ago
There's an old saying in the amateur radio hobby. If you want to make a small fortune in ham radio, start out with a large fortune.
nkrisc 7y ago
As I once read here on HN: Don't ruin a perfectly good hobby by making it a job.
- anthilemoon 7y ago
  Great way to put it.
robocat 7y ago
There is a corollary to this as well, where people say they are starting a business, where actually they are trying to start a hobby. A business exists to make money, and usually is not particularly enjoyable (with some exceptions of course). Whenever someone tells me about their business idea I internally rank it on a hobby<->business scale, although I usually try to hold my judgements to myself.
gwbas1c 7y ago
I love building speakers, and I've been doing it off and on for almost 20 years. Here's the thing: I can't build speakers very often, because it's expensive, they take up space, and I really don't need multiple sets of speakers for every room in my house. Furthermore, if I built speakers for money, I'd have to charge thousands of dollars for a set just to justify my time; or I'd have to figure out how to grow volume to get anywhere near the low cost and high quality of factory-built speakers. In both cases, that means spending a lot of time "hustling." So, I just build a new set of speakers whenever I want a new set. I don't try to turn it into a business. (For the curious: This page is from 2003: https://andrewrondeau.com/Voight%20Pipes/index.html https://andrewrondeau.com/Voight%20Pipes/index.html)
- Talanes 7y ago
  You don't have to charge enough to justify your time if it's an activity you enjoy doing for free. Could easily sell them on a commission basis, limiting how many you offer to whatever you would enjoy, and then just charge materials plus a small profit that you can put toward funding your own projects. Less charging for your labor as securing funding for your hobby.
tartoran 7y ago
I wholly agree. I’ve been programming for about 20 years professionally and I’ve always been juggling too many hobbies to count until I stumbled on one to two that stayed. About 10 years ago I started to paint and draw and that gave me so much satisfaction and filled a whole in my life that to this day I continue to do this almost daily. I’ve had epiphanies, realizations or simply enjoyed quietly how drawings unravelled in front of me. I have learned and perfected the craft over the years and even though the ‘stream of creativity’ continues to this day I am happy this is just a hobby. I would not like to deal with the art world in any way. I think that if I went to art school I’d be quietly pursue computer science or computers or something like that. Hobbies have the potential to be something in which you have complete freedom and don’t need to justify to anyone or compete with anyone.

114 points by anthilemoon 7y ago

It's great advice, but if I'm not sometimes tempted to skip a day for a hobby (hello running) it doesn't feel as fulfilling to me. I'm under no illusions that I will ever be a great runner, for example, but pushing my boundaries is really important to me.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

Here is the point that stands out for me in this article -- The lower your self-complexity, the more fragile you are. Let’s say you’re a man who thinks about his life mainly in terms of work and family. If your manager gives you harsh feedback, that’s 50% of your sense of self taking a hit. But if your self-complexity is higher—let’s say you have a couple of hobbies, personal goals outside of work, and relationships outside of your family members—the impact will be lessened. People will often define themselves by what they do, this has been true since the stone age when people named themselves after their profession. The more things you do, the less impact there is on your opinion of yourself if someone says that one of the things you do is substandard. Having hobbies will help avoid the trap that people get into when they take a job "because it pays well" and not because they are interested in it. The trap is sprung because it is harder to work at a job you're not invested in, and you don't generally do as well as people who are invested. So you can end up taking time away from other fulfilling activities to get told your doing badly at the thing you are spending all your time trying to do. That is a horrible place to be mentally.

mtberatwork 7y ago
> So you can end up taking time away from other fulfilling activities to get told your doing badly at the thing you are spending all your time trying to do. That is a horrible place to be mentally. I suppose this would be another selling point of BI? If your entire livelihood isn't tied to a demoralizing/uninteresting job, then it may be easier to brush these things off.
- paulannesley 7y ago
  BI = Basic Income?
vincentmarle 7y ago
> If your manager gives you harsh feedback, that’s 50% of your sense of self taking a hit. The answer to this is not diversification... the answer is to work on yourself so your “sense of self” does not get affected by what anyone says.
- MadWombat 7y ago
  > so your “sense of self” does not get affected by what anyone says But it should be affected. As the substance abuse programs say "the first step to solve any problem is to acknowledge that there is a problem". For example, if you think of yourself as a good husband and a good father and then your wife and kids come to you and tell you that you are not, you should probably reassess your self-evaluation. Maybe you are not what you think you are.
  - georgebarnett 7y ago
    Taking what others say on board without allowing it to destroy your own confidence and blind indifference to what others think are separate things.
LiquidSky 7y ago
>Having hobbies will help avoid the trap that people get into when they take a job "because it pays well" and not because they are interested in it. What? People take those jobs because they need money to live and that's their only option (or at least they think it is). Unless your hobby pays, it has absolutely nothing to do with it.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  FWIW I have known Vice Presidents with this problem. Their entire notion of self worth was wrapped up in their job performance and what people said of them. People internalize their value in different ways, some are more resilient than others. Having something that you can be passionate about and good at outside your job has been shown to help resiliency. That's a good thing for anyone's mental health I suspect.
nsomaru 7y ago
The solution might be not to increase the number of things that define you, but to sublimate your ego (used loosely here to define what you “believe” yourself to be) into larger circles of identification. For example, a (wo)man (I’ll be using male gendered pronouns here but do not intend to be male-specific) motivated to feed his family has a larger circle of ID than when just looking to feed himself. Thus he is willing to sacrifice the “littler” self for the “bigger” self. Most people end this growth (also known as vairagya in Sanskrit) at the level of family, but it’s possible to keep expanding upwards to community, country, humans, living beings etc. Perturbations at the lower level from wherever you’re standing do not affect you because you’re standing at a higher level. A more expanded viewpoint, if you will. Ego has become finer and more refined.

spacemark 7y ago

I started doing astrophotography ~5 years ago because I found the mysterious beauty of the incomprehensibly large cosmos a rejuvenating, wondrous thing. In the course of my fun I built a star tracking mount that people seemed to like, so I refined the design, built 10 and sold them on Etsy to test the waters of entrepreneurship. Today, I sell 20-30/mth via a dedicated store. How often do I do astrophotography these days? Never. In fact my camera broke and I haven't bothered to replace it. I don't have the time. Has the entrepreneurship been worth it? Probably. But I do miss looking at the stars.

anthilemoon 7y ago
This is beautiful/a bit sad and articulates perfectly why sometimes hobbies are better left alone. Thanks for sharing.
cdjk 7y ago
Do you have a link?
- spacemark 7y ago
  Sure - https://nyxtech.us/ https://nyxtech.us/
  - tartoran 7y ago
    Im not into astrophotography but this is a very very cool product that you’ve made. I hope you’ll grow it and give life to other cool things as you’re clearly very talented
    - spacemark 7y ago
      Oh, thank you :)
jacobolus 7y ago
Looks like a great product! If you don’t mind my asking: Do you have another day job? Some external investment? Are you expecting to grow to a much larger scale? Selling 250–300 devices per year at $100 each doesn’t seem like it would pay the bills even for one person, after materials and other business expenses.

friendlybus 7y ago

My highest self-complexity is in my work and main goals. Like composing an orchestra there any many moving parts that need to come together. Hobbies and sports are generally less complex and more simple. I don't think dropshipping chinese tea counts as a passion or method of self-expression for her and she's articulating that across the whole category. She's clearly more interested in consuming and learning about Chinese tea than expressing an inner desire to be a drop-shipping tycoon, that's cool. Responding to money stress by forcing your hobby into a job is not a great idea, I agree.

abruzzi 7y ago
> My highest self-complexity is in my work and main goals. Like composing an orchestra there any many moving parts that need to come together. Hobbies and sports are generally less complex and more simple. I think that depends a lot on the hobby and the individuals dedication (and ability to devote time) to the hobby. For example, one of my hobbies is I'm working on writing an opera. So that is literally writing for a full orchestra, but with the additional complexity of writing a story and libretto. In truth most of my hobbies can easily get as complex as my job, if I want to take it that far. However, for many people (sometime myself included) the fact that they are hobbies means we are limited in how much depth we have the time to commit.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  Do you think there's any overlapping benefit from increasing your hobby complexity to the same level as your work complexity? I wonder if high performance individuals commit to a lifestyle that has high performance across the board and reap a certain kind of structure or skills increase from doing so.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    That's a really interesting question. When I look over my hobbies, they are all pretty much as complex and demanding as my job as a software dev. But from a very young age, I always preferred complex activities (I suspect that's a big part of why I was drawn to software engineering).

awillen 7y ago

I definitely think this is a useful perspective, but if you're creating something, it can be nice to turn your hobby into a hustle in order to increase the amount that you can create. If you're getting into glass blowing, you can only have so many vases (or bongs, whatever) in your house, so selling them is a good way to cover the cost of your materials while letting you continue to engage in your hobby. The key is to remember the purpose of selling them - it's not to make a bunch of money, it's just to enable you to blow more glass. Don't give refunds, discounts, or anything else - just price your stuff so it sells and move on after each sale.

ldeangelis 7y ago
That's an intersting way of looking at it that I didn't think about, thanks for sharing it.

JohnFen 7y ago

I agree with this. The problem with monetizing your hobby is that it turns your hobby into a business. That eliminates a whole lot of the benefit and joy of having the hobby.

ben7799 7y ago

Good article, I get it. I've had 3-4 different hobbies over the past 20 years that have stuck. Bicycling/Motorcycling, Photography, and Music. They all have semi-obvious side hustles that are pretty poor business opportunities that suck people in and ruin the hobby. Bicycling - Was on a team, sucked up a lot of time, racing was fun, team members in charge of finance embezzled the team finances. We ran a weekly race series so the amount of money was pretty shockingly large. Ruined it for a lot of us. Racing is massive effort and was never that fulfilling. At no level do the prizes start to make any sense. Bicycling/Motorcycling - I would say less so for these hobbies but there are some traps around making/producing accessories & trinkets. Photography - The side hustle you see people get into is small time sales, wedding/event photography, etc.. the problem being most of this stuff is a really expensive way to not make much money and take almost all the artistic fun out of it. Music - people get into bands and try to get paid to play concerts, etc.. pay is crap, it's hard work, gotta have a lot of equipment, etc..

wruza 7y ago
Software development - Was on a team, sucked up a lot of time, programming was fun, team members in charge of finance embezzled the team finances. We ran a weekly sprint so the amount of money was pretty shockingly large. Ruined it for a lot of us. Programming is massive effort and was never that fulfilling. At no level do the prizes start to make any sense. I would say less so for ios development but there are some traps around making/producing apps & widgets. The side hustle you see people get into is small time sales, short projects, freelance, etc.. the problem being most of this stuff is a really expensive way to not make much money and take almost all the artistic fun out of it. People get into bands and try to get paid to support in-house, etc.. pay is crap, it's hard work, gotta have a lot of equipment, etc.. Sorry for abusing your comment :) but it seems that programming is a king of all hobbies.
- em-bee 7y ago
  if you do it that way on the side to a fulltime job then i agree with you. both programming and biking as a side project are more fun and relaxing when they are done without pressure.

drmpeg 7y ago

There's an old saying in the amateur radio hobby. If you want to make a small fortune in ham radio, start out with a large fortune.

nkrisc 7y ago

As I once read here on HN: Don't ruin a perfectly good hobby by making it a job.

anthilemoon 7y ago
Great way to put it.

robocat 7y ago

There is a corollary to this as well, where people say they are starting a business, where actually they are trying to start a hobby. A business exists to make money, and usually is not particularly enjoyable (with some exceptions of course). Whenever someone tells me about their business idea I internally rank it on a hobby<->business scale, although I usually try to hold my judgements to myself.

gwbas1c 7y ago

I love building speakers, and I've been doing it off and on for almost 20 years. Here's the thing: I can't build speakers very often, because it's expensive, they take up space, and I really don't need multiple sets of speakers for every room in my house. Furthermore, if I built speakers for money, I'd have to charge thousands of dollars for a set just to justify my time; or I'd have to figure out how to grow volume to get anywhere near the low cost and high quality of factory-built speakers. In both cases, that means spending a lot of time "hustling." So, I just build a new set of speakers whenever I want a new set. I don't try to turn it into a business. (For the curious: This page is from 2003: https://andrewrondeau.com/Voight%20Pipes/index.html https://andrewrondeau.com/Voight%20Pipes/index.html)

Talanes 7y ago
You don't have to charge enough to justify your time if it's an activity you enjoy doing for free. Could easily sell them on a commission basis, limiting how many you offer to whatever you would enjoy, and then just charge materials plus a small profit that you can put toward funding your own projects. Less charging for your labor as securing funding for your hobby.

tartoran 7y ago

I wholly agree. I’ve been programming for about 20 years professionally and I’ve always been juggling too many hobbies to count until I stumbled on one to two that stayed. About 10 years ago I started to paint and draw and that gave me so much satisfaction and filled a whole in my life that to this day I continue to do this almost daily. I’ve had epiphanies, realizations or simply enjoyed quietly how drawings unravelled in front of me. I have learned and perfected the craft over the years and even though the ‘stream of creativity’ continues to this day I am happy this is just a hobby. I would not like to deal with the art world in any way. I think that if I went to art school I’d be quietly pursue computer science or computers or something like that. Hobbies have the potential to be something in which you have complete freedom and don’t need to justify to anyone or compete with anyone.