30 ms·

Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

364 points by shantnutiwari 3y ago

michaelcampbell 3y ago
The headline is exactly what I've heard in many hobbyist forums for decades. (My particular sin is woodworking.) It's almost inconceivable to me that this would be shocking or surprising to anyone deep into any particular hobby.
irrational 3y ago
My hobby is board gaming. I often see people on board game forums asking questions about wanting to open up a board game store/cafe. My thought is always, "Do you want to hate board games? Because that is the path to hating board games."
- haswell 3y ago
  I mostly agree with this, but there are some people who very happily run board game stores. But they’re the kind of people who love the process of running a store, and who also happen to love board games and decided to sell them. Put another way, I think there’s a common mistake people make that “I love <this>, so I’ll do <this> + business and it’ll be great”, without considering what it takes to do the business part. But I think the other mistake is assuming that working on something you love will automatically make you hate it. That really depends on your business acumen and mindset about the non-<this> factors involved.
- firesteelrain 3y ago
  When I was in Pigeon Forge, TN, they had a puzzle store. I thought it was the coolest thing. Tons of different puzzles. Niche. I couldn’t see having one in every town though
- peruvian 3y ago
  That's when people who homebrew coffee talk about opening a coffee shop. When you open a shop, even if it's a shop about your favorite hobby, 80% of the work is unrelated to that hobby and is now about running a business.
FabHK 3y ago
Advice from a friend: Never do your PhD in a subject you love, because afterwards you'll hate it.
- huijzer 3y ago
  How about "Never do a PhD, because afterwards you'll hate it"?
  - pseudonym0us 3y ago
    How about "Never do, because afterwards you'll hate it"?
    - logicprog 3y ago
      Never do, there is no try
    - BizarreByte 3y ago
      This is unfortunately true more often than not at least in my experience.
- noelwelsh 3y ago
  Did PhD in a topic. Still like the topic. My advice: people over generalize from their n=1 experience of doing a PhD. There are so many differences between fields, universities, supervisors...
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  I actually enjoyed my PhD studies (in Algebra). "Love" would be a strong word, but discovering new interesting mathematical facts was a cool activity.
- CrazyStat 3y ago
  I still love the subject I did my PhD in. I did get thoroughly disenchanted with academia though.
lynx23 3y ago
This is why I never attempted to find a programming job. I am the typical nerdy polyglot, having dabbled in a two-digit amount of programming languages. But I somehow always knew, if I had to do this 8 hours a day, for projects I am likely not intrinsically motivated to work on, I'd likely hate it after a few weeks. I envy those which managed to make this passion into a paying job without loosing the love for it.
- asddubs 3y ago
  So what do you do for a living?
  - lynx23 3y ago
    sysadmin.
- pseudonym0us 3y ago
  >the typical nerdy polyglot, having dabbled in a two-digit amount of programming languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect > But I somehow always knew, if I had to do this 8 hours a day, for projects I am likely not intrinsically motivated to work on, I'd likely hate it after a few weeks You just play with programming languages on the surface. Programming is something different and chances are you won't like it. >I envy those which managed to make this passion into a paying job without loosing the love for it. Why envy? Just find activity you love.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    Wait, I have never said anything about my supposed abilities or self-perceived performance regarding programming. How come you are diagnosing overconfidence from afar, without knowing anything beyond the few lines I've written? Being slapped with that link without any further comment feels quite out of place to say the least. Besides, this posting was about deliberately having decided to not become a programmer professionally. I am having a hard time to understand how you diagnose overconfidence from that, quite the contrary actually...
JimtheCoder 3y ago
While I somewhat agree with the premise of this post, I think it is exacerbated by the fact that the author was trying to turn something like fiction writing into a business. When I think of businesses that suck in terms of economics and chances of success, fiction writing is one of the first things that come to mind. In general, you like things more when they make you a lot of money. A lot of fun things suck when you don't make money...
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  I think you have it reversed, a lot of fun things suck when they make you money.
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    "a lot of fun things suck when they make you money" That has not been my experience...they become more fun.
    - tcbawo 3y ago
      Needing to extract money to live from hobbies that don’t pay is stressful and awful. If your hobby does that easily, good on you. Having agency — money to live and freedom/time to indulge in hobbies is the ideal.
    - milesvp 3y ago
      There seems to be a virtuous cycle with making money doing something, where you learn to be passionate for things because they make money. The opposite seems to happen with passion projects trying to make money, and I wonder if it comes down to reality vs expecations and being on the wrong side of dissappointment. “I can’t believe what people are willing to pay for this” can be either a positive or negative statement depening on what you value.
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        I would say that the issue is really one of time. A lot of hobbies are leisurely, but running a business, meeting customer deadlines requires time management, and it doesn’t help that a lot of hobbies are labor intensive. There is a difference between knitting a scarf for a Christmas gift and making enough scarves, all the time, so that you can afford the roof over your head. And even more so if you have clients anxious about timelines.
pseudonym0us 3y ago
The article should be called: >Started doing Marketing for My Passion and It Appeared I Don't Love Marketing
- ryanisnan 3y ago
  Agreed. As soon as the post pivoted from doing the writing, to all of the other aspects associated with running a business, I lost interest. The author would do well to understand the power of delegation.
  - farley13 3y ago
    I'm not sure delegating would have saved him either. I think his boredom about marketing shows a missing essential curiosity about things. Boredom kills!
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  There is a lot to that thought. Perhaps the author just needed a book agent, someone who would take their creative output and find the publishers that wanted that sort of material. In my experience mentoring folks, when they hate what they are doing it often comes down to "not enough money" or "because someone would pay me to do it." The money discussion is always interesting because people often goal "lots of money" without asking themselves what they would do if they had "lots of money." I know a bunch of engineers who, through fortuitous circumstances got to the "lots of money" stage, decided to "retire" and do only what they wanted to do, only to find themselves going back to work because after you take a year off or so the lack of mental stimulation and challenge (the whole thing that attracted them to engineering in the first place) was missing in their life. They learned late that setting a goal of "interesting problems which challenge me creatively" is much better for them than "lots of money." I personally love programming, always have. But I have come to hate programming something again that I already have, in a different framework/abi, because some third party had to re-invent the wheel and forgot that all wheels need axles and attachment points Etc.
noelwelsh 3y ago
I think people who have never run a business believe that running say, a bakery, involves baking all day. Anyone who has ever run a business should know that is false. Running a business involves doing all the stuff around the main task (marketing! accounts! infrastructure! customer support!) so that the people doing the main task can get on and do it. If you understand this you won't turn your hobby into a business and be disappointed.
- uncertainrhymes 3y ago
  I've met many people who love beer and think they should start a brewery. All I can tell them: I hope you like cleaning. Really like it, because that is what 90% of the job is.
  - brianpan 3y ago
    This is how I felt when I got one of the original Roombas. It's great if you don't like vacuuming but really like robot cleaning and maintenance.
    - thaway_thaway34 3y ago
      I have had a Xiaomi robovacuum for 3 years, and it works without any part change to this day. Robovacuums came a long way.
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      I like trying to reseat it on the charger multiple times per day.
      - no_butterscotch 3y ago
        is this still a problem? I had a Roomba 10 years ago and that was the usual problem I had with it. That and having to pick up a rug so it wouldn't get caught.
    - kelnos 3y ago
jdkoeck 3y ago
Mmh, the real reason the author came to hate his passion/hobby is that he could not make money from it. It’s that simple.
- ilyt 3y ago
  "people don't want to buy it therefore it is worthless, therefore my talent is worthless" is easy generalization to make
mlhpdx 3y ago
I love programming (not just playing with code) and making excellent things with code, and electronics and mechanisms. I get paid to be good at it and help others do so as well, and I love that, too. All that said, the author’s warning is well heeded. There are things I’ve built and run at my own expense. They could be commercialized, but that bit doesn’t seem like fun to me (I don’t need the money, so there isn’t a problem there to solve). I could give them to someone who would commercialize them, but that would create problems for the new owners and old users - so again, not fun. Perhaps there is room for both - pure fun and enjoyment without obligation or commitment, as well as the commercial tangible benefit to others (i.e. paid for).
- jstanley 3y ago
  What do you do where you get paid to make things with code, electronics, and mechanisms? I've built puzzles for escape rooms but there's just not enough money in escape rooms for it to be worth it.
  - mlhpdx 3y ago
    I rarely get to work at all three. I think that is a manifestation of my principles - when getting paid I don’t feel like what I want to do comes into play as much as what my employer needs. When they do, it’s awesome. Right now it’s two of three (SaaS + embedded) and that’s cool with me.
septillianator 3y ago
comes down to each individuals relationship with money imo and for that I say "its complicated."
jahnu 3y ago
Good to keep in mind for sure but don’t assume it can’t be done either. Currently I’m lucky enough to be managing it but there are two of us. Every day is great and I hope we can do this for a very long time.
pickingdinner 3y ago
It's hard to imagine the economy of your hobby and all else that goes into any business. Taxes, marketing, customer service, and if you hire people, management. Very few enjoy these activities, let alone excel at them, especially with a hobbyists's mindset. The influencer is the closest to a marketing hobbyist, but from the many I've met, it often crosses the line into addiction and narcissism, which some see as talent.
AlbertCory 3y ago
The person who said this article should have been titled "Started doing Marketing for My Passion and It Appeared I Don't Love Marketing" is right on. I've met musicians who were totally uninterested in going to see anyone who wasn't "happening." You can't blame them, since they're trying to make a living. I always thought about programming: "I like it OK. Sometimes I like it a lot, but it's a living. I don't do it at home for fun." If you don't mind writing what sells, then that's a living. F. Scott Fitzgerald tried selling out in Hollywood, but he's not remembered for that non-passion part of his work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald
- ranting-moth 3y ago
  Marketing for me is a soul eroding process. I can't help but quote Terry Pratchett in Equal Rites, where he's talking about the Zoon tribe, who genetically cannot tell a lie. Some Zoons figure out a way to twist the truth and they develop great respect for him. "It must be understood that while the majority of Zoon cannot lie they have great respect for any Zoon who can say that the world is other than it is, and the Liar holds a position of considerable eminence. He represents his tribe in all his dealings with the outside world, which the average Zoon long ago gave up trying to understand. Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars. Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like “diplomat” or “public relations officer.” They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing."
- majikandy 3y ago
  Funny, I bet many of us actually do do programming at home for fun! Also the day job. However I wouldn’t do the day job type of programming at home for fun, so I guess it is a similar concept.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    A lot of people do. Nothing wrong with it.
ilyt 3y ago
shrug I turned one of my hobbies that I like into paying for other hobbies I like. The key thing I was relatively good at it so finding people to pay me to do it on good conditions was easy. I might do that hobby far less in free time but it is far better than doing something I hate for a living. So I guess key point here you need to also be relatively competent and the hobby has to be marketable. I'd be miserable if my ops jobs would just be managing someone's shitty Wordpress instances all day. As article's author showed being mediocre in market with a lot of competition probably won't get you all that much money, passion or not. Also, it is sometimes worth to leave the "business" part to someone else and just find a job. I absolutely hate anything around a business so it is fine tradeoff for me to have someone else manage majority of it, find customers etc. rather than be whole one man shop.
petabytes 3y ago
I had a similar situation with programming, I wanted to make a ton of money with a successful game, but I ended up quitting halfway through. I hated it. Eventually I settled on making a niche wifi app, and ended up enjoying most it. Didn't really make a whole lot of money but I definitely learned a lot.
keiferski 3y ago
I wish more people would write about “subsidizing” your hobby business with a more reliable source of income. If you’re a remote worker with some schedule flexibility, for example, you can probably run a low-contact business like a bookstore or art gallery without much interruption to your work day. Just set up a desk in your shop and take a break when the occasional person wanders in. Not having to worry about your hobby business being profitable enough to pay the bills immediately - or ever - seems like a nice way to maintain your interest in it.
jasonladuke0311 3y ago
My hobby/passion became my day job. I'm no longer passionate about it, nor is it a hobby anymore. On the flipside - it's a great job, pays well, and I still find the work interesting (just not enough to spend my free time on it).
analog31 3y ago
I was passionate about music in high school, but went to college and majored in math and physics, while learning electronics and programming on my own. Now it turns out that those things are hobbies too. ;-) I'm glad that I didn't pursue music as a career. I actually make money playing, but not enough to support myself. I also do a lot of programming, but on my own terms, not as a software developer. One problem that I think doesn't get enough attention, is that most businesses fail. And most people hate working for failed businesses, especially ones that they can't escape from.
bdw5204 3y ago
Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you try to make "what the market wants" rather than what you want, you're going to make garbage and further saturate a market that is already filled with garbage that was designed to cash in on "what the market wants". And you're not going to be good at it because you're not a large corporation that has perfected a soulless formula so your work is just going to be a worse version of what the large corporations are doing (soon that stuff will probably be produced by AI rather than humans). You don't turn a creative field into a career or a business until you know that what you want to make is going to be marketable or you are independently wealthy and don't need an income to live. And once you're successful in a creative field, resist the urge to pay attention to marketing data. A creative who doesn't have the backing of a large corporation needs to lead (i.e. innovate, challenge conventions, etc.) not follow. That's because you can either be better, worse or different than the competition. If you're not different and you have a smaller budget, you will inevitably be worse. That applies to startups and even incumbent underdogs in any line of business.
- a13n 3y ago
  Eh, at the same time, I think the problem a lot of entrepreneurs have is that they overfocus on "what you are interested in" instead of "what the market wants", and therefore build something that nobody wants. If you can find a perfect intersection, that's beautiful, but probably uncommon. Some of the most lucrative businesses are stuff like (anti)fraud/security/payments that is pretty darn drab.
  - Helmut10001 3y ago
    I see two conflicting motivations here and everyone has to decide for a tradeoff between these two: Being happy and being rich(er). Do what the Market wants means making a tradeoff in favor of earning more (and becoming rich(er)). Doing what you want to do means making a tradeoff in favor of your happiness. You will perhaps earn less, but what you do is more in tune with your values. A tradeoff is not always required and both of these motivations may become synergies, but in the authors case, I think this is what happened.
fabiobruna 3y ago
Wouldn't most people say something about spending all day doing this (and make money). The second being a side effect of the latter.
kodah 3y ago
I think there's a way about going about these things that can make you hate it or enjoy it. I'll share some of my story as an example of how I compartmentalize my different activities. I code for myself, I have been since I was a kid. Often they're little utilities that I find fun, interesting, or useful. Sometimes they're tested, if for instance it's something running part of my house. Most of the time they're not because testing is arduous at times. I feel very attached to what I create for myself; it's often creative or exploratory in nature. I enjoy this kind of code and share it freely, usually without a warranty. I code for a large firm. The way I code there is entirely different. I'm very unattached to that code. It receives lots of criticism that I learn from but at the end of the day as soon as I put hands on keyboard that code is their code. I'm talented so I get to work on things I find interesting, but this job is a paycheck where I'm paid for meeting delivery deadlines at a standard of quality. As a result the code I write here is of a different nature, it's easily maintainable, testable, and quite rote. This money funds my day to day life and savings account. I enjoy my coworkers and select them carefully to the best of my ability but it's a job at the end of the day. I also have a consulting business. I build solutions for clients or help them attain their goals. This job isn't just a paycheck because I often work with small and medium businesses who don't know what they need or how it needs to be done. I get more agency than I do at my FAANG job, but I'm still working to get paid according by meeting the clients goals. The code I write here is less rote than my enterprise code, but not as creative as my personal code. This money usually funds projects around my house or trips. I enjoy helping small businesses, but it's a job. I also have some for-profit ventures I work on with friends. I have much more agency here, but I'm working to serve the needs of potential and current customers. My quality standard is higher but it's not enterprise code; it's not quite as rote as my enterprise code but a little more on the creative side. The goal here is to eventually replace my corporate job. I have fun doing this because it's with people I enjoy but it's a job. Compartmentalizing my commitment and knowing my desired outcomes has greatly helped balance this whole act. Outside of those things I have other serious hobbies: biking, gardening, camping, festing, recreational hallucinogens, spending time with my dog and my partner. Many of these overlap.
- twodave 3y ago
  How do you prioritize your time? I see a lot of similarities in us. I feel the same way about my main job, though at a smaller firm. I also consult with small businesses on the side and have had very similar experience. What I don't have are any for-profit ventures (of my own or with friends), and I've almost totally stopped coding for myself. I used to write code for fun all the time, and would wonder that many of my classmates/coworkers didn't do this. But I'd like to recapture it. I'd also like to take a few risks without quitting my job. I can probably spend 10-15 hours/week between all side/personal ventures combined. Currently I have all of that going towards the same consulting project, and I've found it somewhat unpalatable to "spend" the opportunity cost of working for myself instead.
climatologist 3y ago
Let's think about what it means to "make money". The phrase itself is already misleading because no one can make money, money is "made" by the central banks by changing some numbers in mainframe databases. These mainframes are connected to some local distribution banks like credit unions which then enable economic activity by business loans and other kinds of "investments", e.g. local government services like street cleaning, trash pickup, churches, schools, electricity, sewage, &etc. On top of this you have peripheral financial engineering like PayPal and credit cards. At least that's the gist of it anyway. So no one can actually "make money" but what they can do is figure out how to tap into the flow of economic services that will get them indirect access to some of the numbers in the database managed by the central banks. At this point there are one of two things you can do which is either do something that enables governments to manage their populations by moving people around and keeping them clothed, housed, and fed (essential services) or you can provide non-essential services like keeping people entertained when they're not working and informing them of what's happening in the world at large, e.g. podcasts and newsletters. The problem is the following, there is no way to get rich from doing any of this because all of these things are saturated with enough people such that the overall money pie is already split between them pretty evenly so none of them are going to end up rich in any meaningful sense. This means the only way to truly get rich is to operate on a scale that no one has thought of before, e.g. Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon, Salesforce, SpaceX, Dell, Nvidia, AMD, Arm, Raytheon, Saudi Aramco, &etc. Most of the time people are just fighting over scraps and the best they can hope for is some steady source of income that pays their rent and affords them some basic luxuries like visiting Las Vegas and watching a few acrobatic shows. The people that are truly rich like Klaus Schwab operate in an entirely different world. Similarly for the executives at big pharma and big tech. I'd say the game is inherently unfair but it still doesn't prevent people from playing it to the detriment of all the players involved.
- cvoss 3y ago
  > Most of the time people are just fighting over scraps and the best they can hope for is some steady source of income that pays their rent and affords them some basic luxuries like visiting Las Vegas and watching a few acrobatic shows. I'm sorry to react so strongly, but I think it's demeaning to suggest that the life condition you described is one of "fighting over scraps". It's also... (I'm struggling to find the right words) really entitled in a materialistic way to suggest (correct me if this is not what you suggest) that it's unfair that almost nobody can move from the average station to the station of uber-wealthy. Who is owed the life of opulence? And who owes it to them? And how many people actually aspire to this extreme wealth, vs. recognize that there is a heck of a lot more meaningful things to do with life than make money?
_xivi 3y ago
The problem isn't that you started doing it for money, it's that you didn't get much money in return. Your "business" has failed, but if you had managed to make money, you would've been satisifed. Turning passion to business doesn't sound right, as if you're selling your soul, if you looked at it like "I tried to make money doing it but the ROI wasn't good" like any other project, I feel like it'd have been more graceful.
sshine 3y ago
> His formula was, in a nutshell: Create training courses and sell them to others, just as he was doing. And at least one of us made big money (hint, it wasn’t me). There is something special about courses about getting rich by making training courses about anything non-self-referential that attracts a lot more suckers than the “real” training courses.
- doubled112 3y ago
  Any get rich quick scheme is probably a scam. If it was as easy as, say, follow this formula, wouldn't we all be rich? Instead, to get rich quick, it is likely best to prey on people who are probably already broke and desperate, but we can't all be sociopaths.
  - sshine 3y ago
    You don't have to be a sociopath to fall for this. "Make online learning material about stuff you know" doesn't seem like a shady endeavour. It is a very recommendable activity, especially if you happen to like teaching. But I would never bet on getting rich from doing it. I think it's only borderline scammy; game-theoretically you can say that it's a losing game for certain parties, but I don't think that makers of the kinds of learning material that is profitable are evil, just because it's profitable for recursive reasons. From their perspective they're just having luck because everyone wants to know how to make videos, how to talk, how to structure things, and what sites pay well. It's like drop-shipping: This is a great idea if it weren't because the profit margins get eradicated by everone doing it. Some cities arose around healing springs; the traffic alone could sustain roadside businesses that eventually formed cities. Maybe the spring didn't cure cancer, but does that make the roadside hotdog vendor shady?
majikandy 3y ago
Typo: “if you love someone” should be “if you love something”. Am I allowed to point out a typo? If not I’ll delete this. I liked the article, you’re a good writer.
majikandy 3y ago
I’m also curious. What do you love now that you paused your writing?
hugocbp 3y ago
Same thing happened with me and music. Granted, I was a teenager and nothing too serious, but loved writing some songs, getting known songs in new arrangements. It naturally progressed into forming a band, then we started doing small concerts. Before I could realized, most of my time was in spreadsheets to register the costs, the supplies we needed, transportation, on top of getting everyone to learn the same songs. In the end I got so burned out that I stopped playing almost completely. Went from 3-4 hours a day to 0 over years. Not the same as the author, but same case of trying to monetize a hobby completely killed the hobby for me.
gadders 3y ago
Kevin Kelly recently published a link to "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" which is about making a sustainable (but not massive) living from your hobbies. Might be of interest to somebody: https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/ismm.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/ismm.pdf
- cushychicken 3y ago
  The author of ISMM, Don Lancaster, just passed away earlier this week. He was also an electrical engineer by trade, and made a good chunk of bread in the 70s and 80s by self publishing books like The TTL Cookbook and selling them by mail order.
  - gadders 3y ago
    Sorry to hear that. He seemed like a good dude just from reading his ISMM.
    - cushychicken 3y ago
      He had a long and rich life, and was in his 80s, so I'd celebrate him as a life well lived.
gumby 3y ago
> As if the only value anything has is by how much dollars it makes. Thanks for highlighting this corrosive attitude right up front. The current US frenzy in this attitude started in the 1980s (remember Boesky, portrayed by Hollywood as Gordon Gekko: "Greed is Good") and went into overdrive over the last two decades. But it's certainly been popular in other times in US history, as well as elsewhere.
- Robotbeat 3y ago
  I feel like this isn’t so much a 2 decade thing but a 1 decade thing. 10-20 years ago, the open source and maker movement was at its peak. Even stuff like cryptocurrency was often motivated by interests other than money but instead ideological idealism. I think that changed a lot after a boom in startups and people just getting insanely rich for silly things… powerful fear of missing out killed a lot of the ideological idealism, and that created endless crypto scams and killed the impetus among much of the open source and maker movements.
  - iamflimflam1 3y ago
    This includes the drive to monetise everything. Hobbies, interests, skills - everyone now thinks: “how do I turn this into a side hustle? Must monetise all the things…”
    - atomicnumber3 3y ago
      Probably because the economy's screws are turned so tight on the masses that it's hard to fund a hobby that isn't generating returns in some way.
Timpy 3y ago
I read a comment on hacker news that I cannot find now, but it resonated deeply with me. Don't try to answer the question "what do you want to be?", answer the question "what do you want to do?" I answered the wrong question, I said "I want to be a musician". And what I did was teach music I didn't care for, perform music I didn't care for, work for people and gigs I didn't care for, made a salary I didn't care for. I had high skills and expertise that wasn't being used; I was never paid for playing one of Bach's lute suites, I made a lot of money off of really simple wedding music. What do I want to do? Play music that I'm passionate about. Make enough money to not be uncomfortable. Work in a field where expertise and knowledge is useful on a regular basis. I'm very happy now to pick up gigs for free because I like the gig. And as a side gig, I'm a full time programmer.
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  I had a coach recently frame this as "what impact do you want to have?" and relatedly, "how big an impact do you think you can have?" In your case the impact might be something like "to inspire others who hear the music I play". Or it might simply be "to increase my own wellbeing by taking joy through playing." After all, there must be some underlying reason why music is important to you. So this framing can help unearth that and thus allow you to focus your efforts on those goals.
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    What impact do you want to have? “It depends on how many floors up I jumped from really”
- pessimizer 3y ago
  It's the difference between an "identity" and a lifestyle. An "identity" pretends to be what you are, but it's really how you want people to see you, and 99% of the time is based on people that you admire (which I'm pretty sure means "look at" in Romance.) To me, it's a sort of self-hypnosis. A lifestyle is what you do every day. Good news: If one likes to play music every day, it's a lot easier to do that to become whatever a "musician" currently represents in the society of the spectacle.
nickelcitymario 3y ago
I firmly believe that if you follow your passion and create something that solves a problem you're passionate about, that no one else has solved yet (i.e. with the features you care about, at a price you can afford), you'll find others with the same passion who want what you're selling. That's not the same as saying you can sell "anything", or that you can definitively strike it rich doing so. My simple math is this. There are 8 billion people on the planet. If you can create something that appeals to just 1 out of 800,000 people (or 0.0000025% of the population), you should be able to attract 10,000 people who at least follow you online. It won't happen overnight, but if it's something you're passionate about, there are at least 10,000 other people who share that passion and are looking for what you're offering. If you can't find a way to monetize 10,000 followers, you're doing something wrong. But if you're not solving your own problems, and if you're not pursuing your own passion, there's no reason to assume others are passionate about the thing you're just doing for the money. Even if they are, they're likely to see through the facade.
- thealchemistdev 3y ago
  Pretty much my driving force. And it's not about getting rich. I'm solving my problems and looking for people who feel the way I do about how it should be solved. Since “there is nothing new under the sun” and I'm not special, the odds are in my favor. Thank you. Today was the best day for the reminder.
- urinotherapist 3y ago
  These potential users must have connection to internet, speak your language, have free time to interact to watch you, have free money to spend on your product.
kthejoker2 3y ago
This blog is like Selfawarewolves ... "if you don’t have the big dolla’s in your bank account, you are a failure." "fiction that sells is in ... mainstream genres" "one genre I love writing is comedy-horror .. books like these are not mainstream." "I never cracked the Amazon algorithm; I never got 10,000 fans on Facebook; I never got a huge email list of people" I mean, you can't make up this lack of self-awareness. If you're going to write offbeat fiction, set your goals appropriately! Oh wait, the author did! "I was still hoping to make some money, [not] more than a fancy night out each month." And then still wrote this blog!
tennisflyi 3y ago
Of course it did.
8thcross 3y ago
many years ago, i wanted to turn my passion in photography to my career. I did a few professional gigs and found out that it was turning out to be a job; and i was enjoying less of what i loved. in fact, it was making me hate it. I was wise enough at that time to stop it.
gjvc 3y ago
Turning my hobby into a job made me hate it. Wish I'd become a plumber.
throwuwu 3y ago
The only way to avoid this is to make the business a hobby too.
glitchcrab 3y ago
Am I the only one who detests the term 'creative' as a noun? It seems to have come into being in the last few years and I just hate it. It feels like if you're not a creative then you're not creative. We're all creative in some way, so calling yourself 'a creative' is just daft.
- shadowfoxx 3y ago
  I'm also not a much fan of 'creative' as a noun for much of the same reasons. I feel this way about how we commonly use 'talent' to mean - "They are magically gifted in ways that are innate", as if they rolled 18's in all their stats, and not "This person has achieved a level of skill that is remarkable."
  - kashunstva 3y ago
    > about how we commonly use 'talent' I think the Anders Ericsson “10,000 hour” theoreticians would agree with you. And yet there are studies that point to a smaller effect of practice than Ericsson proposed. (Rather, practice may explain a smaller amount of the difference between cohorts that are divided by some measure of ability.) Very likely it’s a nature _and_ nurture phenomenon, particularly at the highest levels of certain fields of pursuit.
    - shadowfoxx 3y ago
      Sure, while I'm skeptical I'm not going to act like there isn't some unknown secret sauce that bends a person's abilities in a direction. But as far as I know, there is no baby that has ever been known to pick up a paint brush and give us the Mona Lisa. I think when we start the "Talented" conversation with the premise being, "if they rolled different stats at birth, they wouldn't be capable of this ability" we're flattening a lifetime of not only focus on a craft (10k) but their home life, did they have community, did they have supportive people in their life, proper nutrition, socioeconomic status, the technology at the time (I mean, more skilled peoples exist today than have probably ever existed), the education they were able to receive, were they born standard, etc etc. If talent was decided in a way where talking about 'something innate', as in we could go so far as to say... 30%? 40% 50% nature accounts for aptitude.. wouldn't we actually have reason for a caste system? Is it specific - This person is wired to code - what does that even mean? There are so many skills and subskills. I'm sure it exists, its just funny/frustrating that the word is used to describe what appears to me as the minority factor instead of the majority.
avinoth 3y ago
I used to do programming projects on the side for almost 10 years now. Programming has been my hobby, passion or time-pass whatever you could call it. At the beginning, these projects was my vent from the day job to learn new tools/tricks, try out random stuff, nothing specific. And I mostly don't finish it, I just move on, because I didn't have to complete those. Some were open source, many weren't. And then one of my project that I spent hardly few hours on got some 1000+ upvotes on ProductHunt. So many emails, new follows, it was exhilarating. It pegged me into submitting my next project to PH as well. Though it didn't get as much recognition, it was covered by few tech journals, then some more followed. Suddenly I had users who were using something that I've created and I started charging for it. When it started making money, albeit little (i think at the most it was $100/mo), it changed things. A thought arose, "I like building sideprojects, what if I get to do this full time!". It was exciting! After that, I could never go back to working on my projects for just "fun". It always had to have some business reason. Can it work? Is the idea worthwhile? What is the revenue potential and so on. Suddenly, I'm not just programming, but doing customer support, marketing, trying to promote the project, etc. Eventually, I wasn't doing the thing that I enjoyed and by pursuing it for commercial motives, it had become something else entirely. I think many of us fall into this pit either by chance or being egged from outside. In my case, what I enjoyed was just programming. I conflated it with building a business. Unless you are famous or successful, almost anything that are pursued by passion alone, had to morph into something if you want it to support your life. I just went full-time a month ago to try and build some profitable products. And I'm trying to get that "fun" part into the full-time thingy again. Can I truly work on things I enjoy, try new stuff and still make money out of it? Only time will tell. If the results don't come, so be it.
jfvinueza 3y ago
Malcolm Lowley writes on The Literary Situation (1958; first published 1947): "Aside from the hard-working authors of textbooks, standard juveniles, mysteries and Westerns, I doubt that two hundred Americans earned the major portion of their incomes, year after year, by writing hard-cover books". This was before television took over.
asimjalis 3y ago
Maybe instead of asking “how can I monetize this” ask “who else might be interested in this and how can I reach them?”
d--b 3y ago
A-fucking-men.
carl_sandland 3y ago
The market often doesn't know what it wants until it taste's something. I'm wary of any true 'formula' for creating art. It must be hard for artists to be heard (ironically given our digital age). Patreon is a good model?
nottorp 3y ago
Basically if it's a hobby you can say "fuck it, i don't feel like it today" and if it's a business... nope.
al_be_back 3y ago
In this case, the author chose to Self-Publish the book (amazon), and so they'd have to do their own Marketing, Networking, Editing, on-top of writing (the fun, creative part). If they'd had a Literary Agent, it may have worked out - Agent does the heavy-lifting i.e non-writing tasks. The writing business (books) is extremely competitive - keep a main job, write on the side (hobby) until sales / Agent / Publisher pays enough for you focus on writing full-time. Stephen King, "On Writing" covers this well, and it's a joy to read.
Scubabear68 3y ago
I think writing is a very unique area, so the lesson here may not be generally applicable. Writing fiction is incredibly time consuming, and there’s no where at all to hide - there your work product is, for all to see. Plus, you can’t scale it with help. Sure, there are editors and some people collaborate, but pretty much it is all on the author to produce. Other businesses you can hire people to take some of the load off.
_madmax_ 3y ago
That person didn't turn their hobby into a business, they turned their hobby into a cheap hustle. I like that they sort of get that as a revelation towards the end of the post, but they let it go way out of hands, enough to ruin it.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
Yup. That’s a big reason I’ve avoided paid gigs. I got forced into retirement, but have since learned that’s one of the best things that ever happened to me. These days, I do software for free, that is better than most commercial software, partly because I don’t need to make the types of compromises that profit-generating companies do.
satisfice 3y ago
The relationship between paid work and unpaid work can be complicated. I make a living doing something I would still do if not paid. I know this is true because I do in fact voluntarily engage in a lot of unpaid work of exactly the sort I am paid for. The kind of work I do is training. I train software testers. Working without pay is nice because it is lower stress. I generate new training material in this way. Working with pay means I have customers. Customers deserve value for money. So, it’s more stress. Still, I only teach what I believe. It’s fun for me. I have agency. But I rely on people to sign up. If not enough sign up, that will be the end of my business. I don’t know what I would do, then— except I know for sure that I will continue teaching until a few days before my death.
bearmode 3y ago
Turning something you do for fun into something you do to survive has always been a great way to sap the enjoyment out of it. I've been told numerous times over the years to turn my photography into a business. Or my baking. Or my cooking. Or to start music tuition. I can't think of anything I'd hate more.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

364 points by shantnutiwari 3y ago

The headline is exactly what I've heard in many hobbyist forums for decades. (My particular sin is woodworking.) It's almost inconceivable to me that this would be shocking or surprising to anyone deep into any particular hobby.

irrational 3y ago

My hobby is board gaming. I often see people on board game forums asking questions about wanting to open up a board game store/cafe. My thought is always, "Do you want to hate board games? Because that is the path to hating board games."

haswell 3y ago
I mostly agree with this, but there are some people who very happily run board game stores. But they’re the kind of people who love the process of running a store, and who also happen to love board games and decided to sell them. Put another way, I think there’s a common mistake people make that “I love <this>, so I’ll do <this> + business and it’ll be great”, without considering what it takes to do the business part. But I think the other mistake is assuming that working on something you love will automatically make you hate it. That really depends on your business acumen and mindset about the non-<this> factors involved.
firesteelrain 3y ago
When I was in Pigeon Forge, TN, they had a puzzle store. I thought it was the coolest thing. Tons of different puzzles. Niche. I couldn’t see having one in every town though
peruvian 3y ago
That's when people who homebrew coffee talk about opening a coffee shop. When you open a shop, even if it's a shop about your favorite hobby, 80% of the work is unrelated to that hobby and is now about running a business.

FabHK 3y ago

Advice from a friend: Never do your PhD in a subject you love, because afterwards you'll hate it.

huijzer 3y ago
How about "Never do a PhD, because afterwards you'll hate it"?
- pseudonym0us 3y ago
  How about "Never do, because afterwards you'll hate it"?
  - logicprog 3y ago
    Never do, there is no try
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    This is unfortunately true more often than not at least in my experience.
noelwelsh 3y ago
Did PhD in a topic. Still like the topic. My advice: people over generalize from their n=1 experience of doing a PhD. There are so many differences between fields, universities, supervisors...
inglor_cz 3y ago
I actually enjoyed my PhD studies (in Algebra). "Love" would be a strong word, but discovering new interesting mathematical facts was a cool activity.
CrazyStat 3y ago
I still love the subject I did my PhD in. I did get thoroughly disenchanted with academia though.

lynx23 3y ago

This is why I never attempted to find a programming job. I am the typical nerdy polyglot, having dabbled in a two-digit amount of programming languages. But I somehow always knew, if I had to do this 8 hours a day, for projects I am likely not intrinsically motivated to work on, I'd likely hate it after a few weeks. I envy those which managed to make this passion into a paying job without loosing the love for it.

asddubs 3y ago
So what do you do for a living?
- lynx23 3y ago
  sysadmin.
pseudonym0us 3y ago
>the typical nerdy polyglot, having dabbled in a two-digit amount of programming languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect > But I somehow always knew, if I had to do this 8 hours a day, for projects I am likely not intrinsically motivated to work on, I'd likely hate it after a few weeks You just play with programming languages on the surface. Programming is something different and chances are you won't like it. >I envy those which managed to make this passion into a paying job without loosing the love for it. Why envy? Just find activity you love.
- lynx23 3y ago
  Wait, I have never said anything about my supposed abilities or self-perceived performance regarding programming. How come you are diagnosing overconfidence from afar, without knowing anything beyond the few lines I've written? Being slapped with that link without any further comment feels quite out of place to say the least. Besides, this posting was about deliberately having decided to not become a programmer professionally. I am having a hard time to understand how you diagnose overconfidence from that, quite the contrary actually...

JimtheCoder 3y ago

While I somewhat agree with the premise of this post, I think it is exacerbated by the fact that the author was trying to turn something like fiction writing into a business. When I think of businesses that suck in terms of economics and chances of success, fiction writing is one of the first things that come to mind. In general, you like things more when they make you a lot of money. A lot of fun things suck when you don't make money...

gymbeaux 3y ago
I think you have it reversed, a lot of fun things suck when they make you money.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "a lot of fun things suck when they make you money" That has not been my experience...they become more fun.
  - tcbawo 3y ago
    Needing to extract money to live from hobbies that don’t pay is stressful and awful. If your hobby does that easily, good on you. Having agency — money to live and freedom/time to indulge in hobbies is the ideal.
  - milesvp 3y ago
    There seems to be a virtuous cycle with making money doing something, where you learn to be passionate for things because they make money. The opposite seems to happen with passion projects trying to make money, and I wonder if it comes down to reality vs expecations and being on the wrong side of dissappointment. “I can’t believe what people are willing to pay for this” can be either a positive or negative statement depening on what you value.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      I would say that the issue is really one of time. A lot of hobbies are leisurely, but running a business, meeting customer deadlines requires time management, and it doesn’t help that a lot of hobbies are labor intensive. There is a difference between knitting a scarf for a Christmas gift and making enough scarves, all the time, so that you can afford the roof over your head. And even more so if you have clients anxious about timelines.

pseudonym0us 3y ago

The article should be called: >Started doing Marketing for My Passion and It Appeared I Don't Love Marketing

ryanisnan 3y ago
Agreed. As soon as the post pivoted from doing the writing, to all of the other aspects associated with running a business, I lost interest. The author would do well to understand the power of delegation.
- farley13 3y ago
  I'm not sure delegating would have saved him either. I think his boredom about marketing shows a missing essential curiosity about things. Boredom kills!
ChuckMcM 3y ago
There is a lot to that thought. Perhaps the author just needed a book agent, someone who would take their creative output and find the publishers that wanted that sort of material. In my experience mentoring folks, when they hate what they are doing it often comes down to "not enough money" or "because someone would pay me to do it." The money discussion is always interesting because people often goal "lots of money" without asking themselves what they would do if they had "lots of money." I know a bunch of engineers who, through fortuitous circumstances got to the "lots of money" stage, decided to "retire" and do only what they wanted to do, only to find themselves going back to work because after you take a year off or so the lack of mental stimulation and challenge (the whole thing that attracted them to engineering in the first place) was missing in their life. They learned late that setting a goal of "interesting problems which challenge me creatively" is much better for them than "lots of money." I personally love programming, always have. But I have come to hate programming something again that I already have, in a different framework/abi, because some third party had to re-invent the wheel and forgot that all wheels need axles and attachment points Etc.

noelwelsh 3y ago

I think people who have never run a business believe that running say, a bakery, involves baking all day. Anyone who has ever run a business should know that is false. Running a business involves doing all the stuff around the main task (marketing! accounts! infrastructure! customer support!) so that the people doing the main task can get on and do it. If you understand this you won't turn your hobby into a business and be disappointed.

uncertainrhymes 3y ago
I've met many people who love beer and think they should start a brewery. All I can tell them: I hope you like cleaning. Really like it, because that is what 90% of the job is.
- brianpan 3y ago
  This is how I felt when I got one of the original Roombas. It's great if you don't like vacuuming but really like robot cleaning and maintenance.
  - thaway_thaway34 3y ago
    I have had a Xiaomi robovacuum for 3 years, and it works without any part change to this day. Robovacuums came a long way.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    I like trying to reseat it on the charger multiple times per day.
    - no_butterscotch 3y ago
      is this still a problem? I had a Roomba 10 years ago and that was the usual problem I had with it. That and having to pick up a rug so it wouldn't get caught.
  - kelnos 3y ago

jdkoeck 3y ago

Mmh, the real reason the author came to hate his passion/hobby is that he could not make money from it. It’s that simple.

ilyt 3y ago
"people don't want to buy it therefore it is worthless, therefore my talent is worthless" is easy generalization to make

mlhpdx 3y ago

I love programming (not just playing with code) and making excellent things with code, and electronics and mechanisms. I get paid to be good at it and help others do so as well, and I love that, too. All that said, the author’s warning is well heeded. There are things I’ve built and run at my own expense. They could be commercialized, but that bit doesn’t seem like fun to me (I don’t need the money, so there isn’t a problem there to solve). I could give them to someone who would commercialize them, but that would create problems for the new owners and old users - so again, not fun. Perhaps there is room for both - pure fun and enjoyment without obligation or commitment, as well as the commercial tangible benefit to others (i.e. paid for).

jstanley 3y ago
What do you do where you get paid to make things with code, electronics, and mechanisms? I've built puzzles for escape rooms but there's just not enough money in escape rooms for it to be worth it.
- mlhpdx 3y ago
  I rarely get to work at all three. I think that is a manifestation of my principles - when getting paid I don’t feel like what I want to do comes into play as much as what my employer needs. When they do, it’s awesome. Right now it’s two of three (SaaS + embedded) and that’s cool with me.

septillianator 3y ago

comes down to each individuals relationship with money imo and for that I say "its complicated."

jahnu 3y ago

Good to keep in mind for sure but don’t assume it can’t be done either. Currently I’m lucky enough to be managing it but there are two of us. Every day is great and I hope we can do this for a very long time.

pickingdinner 3y ago

It's hard to imagine the economy of your hobby and all else that goes into any business. Taxes, marketing, customer service, and if you hire people, management. Very few enjoy these activities, let alone excel at them, especially with a hobbyists's mindset. The influencer is the closest to a marketing hobbyist, but from the many I've met, it often crosses the line into addiction and narcissism, which some see as talent.

AlbertCory 3y ago

The person who said this article should have been titled "Started doing Marketing for My Passion and It Appeared I Don't Love Marketing" is right on. I've met musicians who were totally uninterested in going to see anyone who wasn't "happening." You can't blame them, since they're trying to make a living. I always thought about programming: "I like it OK. Sometimes I like it a lot, but it's a living. I don't do it at home for fun." If you don't mind writing what sells, then that's a living. F. Scott Fitzgerald tried selling out in Hollywood, but he's not remembered for that non-passion part of his work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald

ranting-moth 3y ago
Marketing for me is a soul eroding process. I can't help but quote Terry Pratchett in Equal Rites, where he's talking about the Zoon tribe, who genetically cannot tell a lie. Some Zoons figure out a way to twist the truth and they develop great respect for him. "It must be understood that while the majority of Zoon cannot lie they have great respect for any Zoon who can say that the world is other than it is, and the Liar holds a position of considerable eminence. He represents his tribe in all his dealings with the outside world, which the average Zoon long ago gave up trying to understand. Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars. Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like “diplomat” or “public relations officer.” They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing."
majikandy 3y ago
Funny, I bet many of us actually do do programming at home for fun! Also the day job. However I wouldn’t do the day job type of programming at home for fun, so I guess it is a similar concept.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  A lot of people do. Nothing wrong with it.

ilyt 3y ago

shrug I turned one of my hobbies that I like into paying for other hobbies I like. The key thing I was relatively good at it so finding people to pay me to do it on good conditions was easy. I might do that hobby far less in free time but it is far better than doing something I hate for a living. So I guess key point here you need to also be relatively competent and the hobby has to be marketable. I'd be miserable if my ops jobs would just be managing someone's shitty Wordpress instances all day. As article's author showed being mediocre in market with a lot of competition probably won't get you all that much money, passion or not. Also, it is sometimes worth to leave the "business" part to someone else and just find a job. I absolutely hate anything around a business so it is fine tradeoff for me to have someone else manage majority of it, find customers etc. rather than be whole one man shop.

petabytes 3y ago

I had a similar situation with programming, I wanted to make a ton of money with a successful game, but I ended up quitting halfway through. I hated it. Eventually I settled on making a niche wifi app, and ended up enjoying most it. Didn't really make a whole lot of money but I definitely learned a lot.

keiferski 3y ago

I wish more people would write about “subsidizing” your hobby business with a more reliable source of income. If you’re a remote worker with some schedule flexibility, for example, you can probably run a low-contact business like a bookstore or art gallery without much interruption to your work day. Just set up a desk in your shop and take a break when the occasional person wanders in. Not having to worry about your hobby business being profitable enough to pay the bills immediately - or ever - seems like a nice way to maintain your interest in it.

jasonladuke0311 3y ago

My hobby/passion became my day job. I'm no longer passionate about it, nor is it a hobby anymore. On the flipside - it's a great job, pays well, and I still find the work interesting (just not enough to spend my free time on it).

analog31 3y ago

I was passionate about music in high school, but went to college and majored in math and physics, while learning electronics and programming on my own. Now it turns out that those things are hobbies too. ;-) I'm glad that I didn't pursue music as a career. I actually make money playing, but not enough to support myself. I also do a lot of programming, but on my own terms, not as a software developer. One problem that I think doesn't get enough attention, is that most businesses fail. And most people hate working for failed businesses, especially ones that they can't escape from.

bdw5204 3y ago

Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you try to make "what the market wants" rather than what you want, you're going to make garbage and further saturate a market that is already filled with garbage that was designed to cash in on "what the market wants". And you're not going to be good at it because you're not a large corporation that has perfected a soulless formula so your work is just going to be a worse version of what the large corporations are doing (soon that stuff will probably be produced by AI rather than humans). You don't turn a creative field into a career or a business until you know that what you want to make is going to be marketable or you are independently wealthy and don't need an income to live. And once you're successful in a creative field, resist the urge to pay attention to marketing data. A creative who doesn't have the backing of a large corporation needs to lead (i.e. innovate, challenge conventions, etc.) not follow. That's because you can either be better, worse or different than the competition. If you're not different and you have a smaller budget, you will inevitably be worse. That applies to startups and even incumbent underdogs in any line of business.

a13n 3y ago
Eh, at the same time, I think the problem a lot of entrepreneurs have is that they overfocus on "what you are interested in" instead of "what the market wants", and therefore build something that nobody wants. If you can find a perfect intersection, that's beautiful, but probably uncommon. Some of the most lucrative businesses are stuff like (anti)fraud/security/payments that is pretty darn drab.
- Helmut10001 3y ago
  I see two conflicting motivations here and everyone has to decide for a tradeoff between these two: Being happy and being rich(er). Do what the Market wants means making a tradeoff in favor of earning more (and becoming rich(er)). Doing what you want to do means making a tradeoff in favor of your happiness. You will perhaps earn less, but what you do is more in tune with your values. A tradeoff is not always required and both of these motivations may become synergies, but in the authors case, I think this is what happened.

fabiobruna 3y ago

Wouldn't most people say something about spending all day doing this (and make money). The second being a side effect of the latter.

kodah 3y ago

I think there's a way about going about these things that can make you hate it or enjoy it. I'll share some of my story as an example of how I compartmentalize my different activities. I code for myself, I have been since I was a kid. Often they're little utilities that I find fun, interesting, or useful. Sometimes they're tested, if for instance it's something running part of my house. Most of the time they're not because testing is arduous at times. I feel very attached to what I create for myself; it's often creative or exploratory in nature. I enjoy this kind of code and share it freely, usually without a warranty. I code for a large firm. The way I code there is entirely different. I'm very unattached to that code. It receives lots of criticism that I learn from but at the end of the day as soon as I put hands on keyboard that code is their code. I'm talented so I get to work on things I find interesting, but this job is a paycheck where I'm paid for meeting delivery deadlines at a standard of quality. As a result the code I write here is of a different nature, it's easily maintainable, testable, and quite rote. This money funds my day to day life and savings account. I enjoy my coworkers and select them carefully to the best of my ability but it's a job at the end of the day. I also have a consulting business. I build solutions for clients or help them attain their goals. This job isn't just a paycheck because I often work with small and medium businesses who don't know what they need or how it needs to be done. I get more agency than I do at my FAANG job, but I'm still working to get paid according by meeting the clients goals. The code I write here is less rote than my enterprise code, but not as creative as my personal code. This money usually funds projects around my house or trips. I enjoy helping small businesses, but it's a job. I also have some for-profit ventures I work on with friends. I have much more agency here, but I'm working to serve the needs of potential and current customers. My quality standard is higher but it's not enterprise code; it's not quite as rote as my enterprise code but a little more on the creative side. The goal here is to eventually replace my corporate job. I have fun doing this because it's with people I enjoy but it's a job. Compartmentalizing my commitment and knowing my desired outcomes has greatly helped balance this whole act. Outside of those things I have other serious hobbies: biking, gardening, camping, festing, recreational hallucinogens, spending time with my dog and my partner. Many of these overlap.

twodave 3y ago
How do you prioritize your time? I see a lot of similarities in us. I feel the same way about my main job, though at a smaller firm. I also consult with small businesses on the side and have had very similar experience. What I don't have are any for-profit ventures (of my own or with friends), and I've almost totally stopped coding for myself. I used to write code for fun all the time, and would wonder that many of my classmates/coworkers didn't do this. But I'd like to recapture it. I'd also like to take a few risks without quitting my job. I can probably spend 10-15 hours/week between all side/personal ventures combined. Currently I have all of that going towards the same consulting project, and I've found it somewhat unpalatable to "spend" the opportunity cost of working for myself instead.

climatologist 3y ago

Let's think about what it means to "make money". The phrase itself is already misleading because no one can make money, money is "made" by the central banks by changing some numbers in mainframe databases. These mainframes are connected to some local distribution banks like credit unions which then enable economic activity by business loans and other kinds of "investments", e.g. local government services like street cleaning, trash pickup, churches, schools, electricity, sewage, &etc. On top of this you have peripheral financial engineering like PayPal and credit cards. At least that's the gist of it anyway. So no one can actually "make money" but what they can do is figure out how to tap into the flow of economic services that will get them indirect access to some of the numbers in the database managed by the central banks. At this point there are one of two things you can do which is either do something that enables governments to manage their populations by moving people around and keeping them clothed, housed, and fed (essential services) or you can provide non-essential services like keeping people entertained when they're not working and informing them of what's happening in the world at large, e.g. podcasts and newsletters. The problem is the following, there is no way to get rich from doing any of this because all of these things are saturated with enough people such that the overall money pie is already split between them pretty evenly so none of them are going to end up rich in any meaningful sense. This means the only way to truly get rich is to operate on a scale that no one has thought of before, e.g. Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon, Salesforce, SpaceX, Dell, Nvidia, AMD, Arm, Raytheon, Saudi Aramco, &etc. Most of the time people are just fighting over scraps and the best they can hope for is some steady source of income that pays their rent and affords them some basic luxuries like visiting Las Vegas and watching a few acrobatic shows. The people that are truly rich like Klaus Schwab operate in an entirely different world. Similarly for the executives at big pharma and big tech. I'd say the game is inherently unfair but it still doesn't prevent people from playing it to the detriment of all the players involved.

cvoss 3y ago
> Most of the time people are just fighting over scraps and the best they can hope for is some steady source of income that pays their rent and affords them some basic luxuries like visiting Las Vegas and watching a few acrobatic shows. I'm sorry to react so strongly, but I think it's demeaning to suggest that the life condition you described is one of "fighting over scraps". It's also... (I'm struggling to find the right words) really entitled in a materialistic way to suggest (correct me if this is not what you suggest) that it's unfair that almost nobody can move from the average station to the station of uber-wealthy. Who is owed the life of opulence? And who owes it to them? And how many people actually aspire to this extreme wealth, vs. recognize that there is a heck of a lot more meaningful things to do with life than make money?

_xivi 3y ago

The problem isn't that you started doing it for money, it's that you didn't get much money in return. Your "business" has failed, but if you had managed to make money, you would've been satisifed. Turning passion to business doesn't sound right, as if you're selling your soul, if you looked at it like "I tried to make money doing it but the ROI wasn't good" like any other project, I feel like it'd have been more graceful.

sshine 3y ago

> His formula was, in a nutshell: Create training courses and sell them to others, just as he was doing. And at least one of us made big money (hint, it wasn’t me). There is something special about courses about getting rich by making training courses about anything non-self-referential that attracts a lot more suckers than the “real” training courses.

doubled112 3y ago
Any get rich quick scheme is probably a scam. If it was as easy as, say, follow this formula, wouldn't we all be rich? Instead, to get rich quick, it is likely best to prey on people who are probably already broke and desperate, but we can't all be sociopaths.
- sshine 3y ago
  You don't have to be a sociopath to fall for this. "Make online learning material about stuff you know" doesn't seem like a shady endeavour. It is a very recommendable activity, especially if you happen to like teaching. But I would never bet on getting rich from doing it. I think it's only borderline scammy; game-theoretically you can say that it's a losing game for certain parties, but I don't think that makers of the kinds of learning material that is profitable are evil, just because it's profitable for recursive reasons. From their perspective they're just having luck because everyone wants to know how to make videos, how to talk, how to structure things, and what sites pay well. It's like drop-shipping: This is a great idea if it weren't because the profit margins get eradicated by everone doing it. Some cities arose around healing springs; the traffic alone could sustain roadside businesses that eventually formed cities. Maybe the spring didn't cure cancer, but does that make the roadside hotdog vendor shady?

majikandy 3y ago

Typo: “if you love someone” should be “if you love something”. Am I allowed to point out a typo? If not I’ll delete this. I liked the article, you’re a good writer.

majikandy 3y ago

I’m also curious. What do you love now that you paused your writing?

hugocbp 3y ago

Same thing happened with me and music. Granted, I was a teenager and nothing too serious, but loved writing some songs, getting known songs in new arrangements. It naturally progressed into forming a band, then we started doing small concerts. Before I could realized, most of my time was in spreadsheets to register the costs, the supplies we needed, transportation, on top of getting everyone to learn the same songs. In the end I got so burned out that I stopped playing almost completely. Went from 3-4 hours a day to 0 over years. Not the same as the author, but same case of trying to monetize a hobby completely killed the hobby for me.

gadders 3y ago

Kevin Kelly recently published a link to "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" which is about making a sustainable (but not massive) living from your hobbies. Might be of interest to somebody: https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/ismm.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/ismm.pdf

cushychicken 3y ago
The author of ISMM, Don Lancaster, just passed away earlier this week. He was also an electrical engineer by trade, and made a good chunk of bread in the 70s and 80s by self publishing books like The TTL Cookbook and selling them by mail order.
- gadders 3y ago
  Sorry to hear that. He seemed like a good dude just from reading his ISMM.
  - cushychicken 3y ago
    He had a long and rich life, and was in his 80s, so I'd celebrate him as a life well lived.

gumby 3y ago

> As if the only value anything has is by how much dollars it makes. Thanks for highlighting this corrosive attitude right up front. The current US frenzy in this attitude started in the 1980s (remember Boesky, portrayed by Hollywood as Gordon Gekko: "Greed is Good") and went into overdrive over the last two decades. But it's certainly been popular in other times in US history, as well as elsewhere.

Robotbeat 3y ago
I feel like this isn’t so much a 2 decade thing but a 1 decade thing. 10-20 years ago, the open source and maker movement was at its peak. Even stuff like cryptocurrency was often motivated by interests other than money but instead ideological idealism. I think that changed a lot after a boom in startups and people just getting insanely rich for silly things… powerful fear of missing out killed a lot of the ideological idealism, and that created endless crypto scams and killed the impetus among much of the open source and maker movements.
- iamflimflam1 3y ago
  This includes the drive to monetise everything. Hobbies, interests, skills - everyone now thinks: “how do I turn this into a side hustle? Must monetise all the things…”
  - atomicnumber3 3y ago
    Probably because the economy's screws are turned so tight on the masses that it's hard to fund a hobby that isn't generating returns in some way.

Timpy 3y ago

I read a comment on hacker news that I cannot find now, but it resonated deeply with me. Don't try to answer the question "what do you want to be?", answer the question "what do you want to do?" I answered the wrong question, I said "I want to be a musician". And what I did was teach music I didn't care for, perform music I didn't care for, work for people and gigs I didn't care for, made a salary I didn't care for. I had high skills and expertise that wasn't being used; I was never paid for playing one of Bach's lute suites, I made a lot of money off of really simple wedding music. What do I want to do? Play music that I'm passionate about. Make enough money to not be uncomfortable. Work in a field where expertise and knowledge is useful on a regular basis. I'm very happy now to pick up gigs for free because I like the gig. And as a side gig, I'm a full time programmer.

BaseballPhysics 3y ago
I had a coach recently frame this as "what impact do you want to have?" and relatedly, "how big an impact do you think you can have?" In your case the impact might be something like "to inspire others who hear the music I play". Or it might simply be "to increase my own wellbeing by taking joy through playing." After all, there must be some underlying reason why music is important to you. So this framing can help unearth that and thus allow you to focus your efforts on those goals.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  What impact do you want to have? “It depends on how many floors up I jumped from really”
pessimizer 3y ago
It's the difference between an "identity" and a lifestyle. An "identity" pretends to be what you are, but it's really how you want people to see you, and 99% of the time is based on people that you admire (which I'm pretty sure means "look at" in Romance.) To me, it's a sort of self-hypnosis. A lifestyle is what you do every day. Good news: If one likes to play music every day, it's a lot easier to do that to become whatever a "musician" currently represents in the society of the spectacle.

nickelcitymario 3y ago

I firmly believe that if you follow your passion and create something that solves a problem you're passionate about, that no one else has solved yet (i.e. with the features you care about, at a price you can afford), you'll find others with the same passion who want what you're selling. That's not the same as saying you can sell "anything", or that you can definitively strike it rich doing so. My simple math is this. There are 8 billion people on the planet. If you can create something that appeals to just 1 out of 800,000 people (or 0.0000025% of the population), you should be able to attract 10,000 people who at least follow you online. It won't happen overnight, but if it's something you're passionate about, there are at least 10,000 other people who share that passion and are looking for what you're offering. If you can't find a way to monetize 10,000 followers, you're doing something wrong. But if you're not solving your own problems, and if you're not pursuing your own passion, there's no reason to assume others are passionate about the thing you're just doing for the money. Even if they are, they're likely to see through the facade.

thealchemistdev 3y ago
Pretty much my driving force. And it's not about getting rich. I'm solving my problems and looking for people who feel the way I do about how it should be solved. Since “there is nothing new under the sun” and I'm not special, the odds are in my favor. Thank you. Today was the best day for the reminder.
urinotherapist 3y ago
These potential users must have connection to internet, speak your language, have free time to interact to watch you, have free money to spend on your product.

kthejoker2 3y ago

This blog is like Selfawarewolves ... "if you don’t have the big dolla’s in your bank account, you are a failure." "fiction that sells is in ... mainstream genres" "one genre I love writing is comedy-horror .. books like these are not mainstream." "I never cracked the Amazon algorithm; I never got 10,000 fans on Facebook; I never got a huge email list of people" I mean, you can't make up this lack of self-awareness. If you're going to write offbeat fiction, set your goals appropriately! Oh wait, the author did! "I was still hoping to make some money, [not] more than a fancy night out each month." And then still wrote this blog!

tennisflyi 3y ago

Of course it did.

8thcross 3y ago

many years ago, i wanted to turn my passion in photography to my career. I did a few professional gigs and found out that it was turning out to be a job; and i was enjoying less of what i loved. in fact, it was making me hate it. I was wise enough at that time to stop it.

gjvc 3y ago

Turning my hobby into a job made me hate it. Wish I'd become a plumber.

throwuwu 3y ago

The only way to avoid this is to make the business a hobby too.

glitchcrab 3y ago

Am I the only one who detests the term 'creative' as a noun? It seems to have come into being in the last few years and I just hate it. It feels like if you're not a creative then you're not creative. We're all creative in some way, so calling yourself 'a creative' is just daft.

shadowfoxx 3y ago
I'm also not a much fan of 'creative' as a noun for much of the same reasons. I feel this way about how we commonly use 'talent' to mean - "They are magically gifted in ways that are innate", as if they rolled 18's in all their stats, and not "This person has achieved a level of skill that is remarkable."
- kashunstva 3y ago
  > about how we commonly use 'talent' I think the Anders Ericsson “10,000 hour” theoreticians would agree with you. And yet there are studies that point to a smaller effect of practice than Ericsson proposed. (Rather, practice may explain a smaller amount of the difference between cohorts that are divided by some measure of ability.) Very likely it’s a nature _and_ nurture phenomenon, particularly at the highest levels of certain fields of pursuit.
  - shadowfoxx 3y ago
    Sure, while I'm skeptical I'm not going to act like there isn't some unknown secret sauce that bends a person's abilities in a direction. But as far as I know, there is no baby that has ever been known to pick up a paint brush and give us the Mona Lisa. I think when we start the "Talented" conversation with the premise being, "if they rolled different stats at birth, they wouldn't be capable of this ability" we're flattening a lifetime of not only focus on a craft (10k) but their home life, did they have community, did they have supportive people in their life, proper nutrition, socioeconomic status, the technology at the time (I mean, more skilled peoples exist today than have probably ever existed), the education they were able to receive, were they born standard, etc etc. If talent was decided in a way where talking about 'something innate', as in we could go so far as to say... 30%? 40% 50% nature accounts for aptitude.. wouldn't we actually have reason for a caste system? Is it specific - This person is wired to code - what does that even mean? There are so many skills and subskills. I'm sure it exists, its just funny/frustrating that the word is used to describe what appears to me as the minority factor instead of the majority.

avinoth 3y ago

I used to do programming projects on the side for almost 10 years now. Programming has been my hobby, passion or time-pass whatever you could call it. At the beginning, these projects was my vent from the day job to learn new tools/tricks, try out random stuff, nothing specific. And I mostly don't finish it, I just move on, because I didn't have to complete those. Some were open source, many weren't. And then one of my project that I spent hardly few hours on got some 1000+ upvotes on ProductHunt. So many emails, new follows, it was exhilarating. It pegged me into submitting my next project to PH as well. Though it didn't get as much recognition, it was covered by few tech journals, then some more followed. Suddenly I had users who were using something that I've created and I started charging for it. When it started making money, albeit little (i think at the most it was $100/mo), it changed things. A thought arose, "I like building sideprojects, what if I get to do this full time!". It was exciting! After that, I could never go back to working on my projects for just "fun". It always had to have some business reason. Can it work? Is the idea worthwhile? What is the revenue potential and so on. Suddenly, I'm not just programming, but doing customer support, marketing, trying to promote the project, etc. Eventually, I wasn't doing the thing that I enjoyed and by pursuing it for commercial motives, it had become something else entirely. I think many of us fall into this pit either by chance or being egged from outside. In my case, what I enjoyed was just programming. I conflated it with building a business. Unless you are famous or successful, almost anything that are pursued by passion alone, had to morph into something if you want it to support your life. I just went full-time a month ago to try and build some profitable products. And I'm trying to get that "fun" part into the full-time thingy again. Can I truly work on things I enjoy, try new stuff and still make money out of it? Only time will tell. If the results don't come, so be it.

jfvinueza 3y ago

Malcolm Lowley writes on The Literary Situation (1958; first published 1947): "Aside from the hard-working authors of textbooks, standard juveniles, mysteries and Westerns, I doubt that two hundred Americans earned the major portion of their incomes, year after year, by writing hard-cover books". This was before television took over.

asimjalis 3y ago

Maybe instead of asking “how can I monetize this” ask “who else might be interested in this and how can I reach them?”

d--b 3y ago

A-fucking-men.

carl_sandland 3y ago

The market often doesn't know what it wants until it taste's something. I'm wary of any true 'formula' for creating art. It must be hard for artists to be heard (ironically given our digital age). Patreon is a good model?

nottorp 3y ago

Basically if it's a hobby you can say "fuck it, i don't feel like it today" and if it's a business... nope.

al_be_back 3y ago

In this case, the author chose to Self-Publish the book (amazon), and so they'd have to do their own Marketing, Networking, Editing, on-top of writing (the fun, creative part). If they'd had a Literary Agent, it may have worked out - Agent does the heavy-lifting i.e non-writing tasks. The writing business (books) is extremely competitive - keep a main job, write on the side (hobby) until sales / Agent / Publisher pays enough for you focus on writing full-time. Stephen King, "On Writing" covers this well, and it's a joy to read.

Scubabear68 3y ago

I think writing is a very unique area, so the lesson here may not be generally applicable. Writing fiction is incredibly time consuming, and there’s no where at all to hide - there your work product is, for all to see. Plus, you can’t scale it with help. Sure, there are editors and some people collaborate, but pretty much it is all on the author to produce. Other businesses you can hire people to take some of the load off.

_madmax_ 3y ago

That person didn't turn their hobby into a business, they turned their hobby into a cheap hustle. I like that they sort of get that as a revelation towards the end of the post, but they let it go way out of hands, enough to ruin it.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

Yup. That’s a big reason I’ve avoided paid gigs. I got forced into retirement, but have since learned that’s one of the best things that ever happened to me. These days, I do software for free, that is better than most commercial software, partly because I don’t need to make the types of compromises that profit-generating companies do.

satisfice 3y ago

The relationship between paid work and unpaid work can be complicated. I make a living doing something I would still do if not paid. I know this is true because I do in fact voluntarily engage in a lot of unpaid work of exactly the sort I am paid for. The kind of work I do is training. I train software testers. Working without pay is nice because it is lower stress. I generate new training material in this way. Working with pay means I have customers. Customers deserve value for money. So, it’s more stress. Still, I only teach what I believe. It’s fun for me. I have agency. But I rely on people to sign up. If not enough sign up, that will be the end of my business. I don’t know what I would do, then— except I know for sure that I will continue teaching until a few days before my death.

bearmode 3y ago

Turning something you do for fun into something you do to survive has always been a great way to sap the enjoyment out of it. I've been told numerous times over the years to turn my photography into a business. Or my baking. Or my cooking. Or to start music tuition. I can't think of anything I'd hate more.

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