> In a professional environment, it makes total sense to measure time. Cheesy as it might sound, time is money for the professional, and when your paycheck depe

> In a professional environment, it makes total sense to measure time. Cheesy as it might sound, time is money for the professional, and when your paycheck depends on how much work you can do in a limited time span, time itself becomes a factor for optimization. But when the main reason you’re doing it is because you love doing it, time becomes the gun you shoot yourself in the foot with. Except that if you do that, you're a dilettante, not a craftsman. If you take on a project to fix somebody's bike, and you take your time so as not to stress yourself out, your customer is going to be pissed off at you: they want their bike fixed, that's why they're paying you money that they earned doing things that stressed them out. You should feel a sense of obligation when you take someone's money: not an obligation to chase your own sense of joy, but to do the thing they paid you to do. That's why I think turning your hobby into a job (which is what you do when you take money for it, no matter what you want to call it) is a bad idea. The author dismisses it as a cliche, or as bullshit, but it's the most valid argument against what they're saying: making your hobby your job means it's not your hobby anymore. If you have a lot of money — enough to lose it on a failing business — it's okay to be a dilettante, take your time, and appeal only to a small number of customers. If you have a lot of hobbies, and can afford to sacrifice one of them to make it a real profession that pays your bills, while getting your pleasure in other areas, then that's fine too. But if you have one big thing you love doing, you will probably stop getting the same kind of pleasure from it if it becomes your full time job. This isn't true in every case, but in the majority of cases it is.