“Choose a job you love, and you
will never have to work a day in your life.” ~Confucius
Editor’s note: This is a reposting of an article by Scott Dinsmore of Live Your Legend.
Is it possible to have your
passion also be your core source of income?
We seem to hear more and more
stories of people reaching the promised land, but is it really possible for the
everyday person? Or are those ‘lucky few’ just that— lucky?
After years of research I have
good news for you…
I bet you there’s something you
love doing that someone else would be happy to pay you for right this second. I
might go as far as saying I’m sure of it.
But let’s start with a question.
Why is it that the people who
succeed once, seem to have similar successes on future endeavors? Whether it’s
fitness, entrepreneurship, career, relationships, you name it.
Success begets success.
What are the things that
consistently allow certain people to build a business and living around the
things they love most, but allow the other 80% of the world to continue to drag
themselves, day in and day out, to a job they can’t stand?
Why can some people charge
seamlessly from one creative endeavor and passion project to the next,
experiencing all sorts of success along the way, while many others can’t take
the first step to finding their passion, let alone building a career around it?
The steps aren’t foreign; they
aren’t cryptic, or hidden behind some secret handshake. They aren’t complicated
and in many cases not even that difficult. But yet they are still massively
underused.
Why is that?
These questions have kept me up
at night for years.
As it turns out, the answer is
pretty simple…
The passionate people simply know
what’s actually possible. They are crystal clear about the steps that work, so
they don’t think twice in applying them to whatever the excitement of the day
is.
The rest of the world doesn’t
know the first move to distinguish up from down.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Living Off Your Passion Is a Right – For Everyone
For the past eight years, and
more specifically the past three, I’ve lived and breathed passion. I’ve done
case studies with hundreds of passionate workers around the world, conducted
countless experiments and profiled 14 of the top experts on and off the web.
Not only have I been obsessed
with how people find their passion, but also how the seemingly ‘lucky few’
(hint: it’s not about the luck) are able to push through to the next level and
turn their passion into a career – as entrepreneurs and employees alike.
My goal was to combine the art of
discovering your passion with the science of making money from it. I
recently published the results and process into a self-study course
called Live Off Your Passion.
The results were invigorating.
But as it turned out, they were not as complicated and unique as one would
think.
Living off your passion is more
possible than most realize. We just have to condition it.
I wanted to share some of the
most profound lessons with you all. If you follow the steps below, I’m sure you
can monetize your passion in record time if you want it badly enough.
The 3 Sacred Steps to Converting Passion to Income
1. Separate passion from reality.
We must start with brainstorming
your passion projects in a way that encourages success. Unfortunately most
people do the opposite.
As humans, our immediate reaction
to someone’s new idea (or our own) often is to figure out why it won’t work. I
know, sad but true. The problem is that when you get critical of something the
moment the idea comes up, it gets stomped out immediately. It might not even
make it more than a sentence or two before someone else yells out the reasons
it ‘obviously’ won’t work. Then you feel stupid and move on.
But if that idea were given say
five or ten minutes of brainstorming whiteboard action, along with a solid dose
of open, creative and non-critical discussion, it’s very possible that the idea
would turn out to have some merit.
Imagine how many brilliant ideas
get killed too soon due to premature criticism.
This happens with passion every
day—even if we’re just doing it in our own head (which is the most likely and
most dangerous case). A lot of times when we task ourselves to think of our
passions we only allow ourselves to play in part of the sandbox. Since the end
goal is to find something we can make a living from, we subconsciously discard
the ideas that are totally off the wall. We stifle our creativity without even
knowing it.
In order to have a fighting chance
at developing world-changing business ideas or personal passion pursuits, you
absolutely must separate the creative and the critical stages.
Brainstorm your most far-out
dreams of passion careers you can think of. Then wait for at least a few days
if not a week or more before you start to get practical and critical. Mark my
words, for every wild idea you come up with, I’m sure there’s already someone
out there making a great living off it (and that’s a good thing). More on
finding them below.
2. Be the expert you
already are.
One of the most common barriers
keeping people from making money from their passion is the belief that you
don’t know something well enough to get paid to teach it to someone else.
That’s just flat wrong – You know
more than you think. Being an expert is purely relative and based largely on
perception.
The crazy thing is once you find
something you’re passionate about, you’ll likely realize it’s something you’ve
been learning and improving upon for years and maybe even decades. You have
more experience with your passion than likely 99% of those around you, simply
because you love doing it.
If you’ve been on this earth for
at least a couple decades, I guarantee you’re an expert at something. Give
yourself some credit. Find what it is and find the people who desperately need
your help. Combine the two and living off your passion starts to become a
reality.
3. Do the impossible.
For decades, breaking the
four-minute mile was believed to be scientifically impossible. Right up until
Roger Banister did it in 1954. Then you know what happened? 16 more people ran
sub four-minutes in the three years to follow.
We’ve been largely conditioned
that it’s not possible to build a career around passion. So many people hate
their jobs and many of us have decided to accept that as a fact of life. I did
too, right up until I started meeting people who showed me another way.
Listen carefully. The most
crucial ingredient to loving your work and living off passion is to surround
yourself with people already doing it. You must reverse the brainwashing. Spend
time around enough people living squarely in their dreams, and living off
passion not only becomes possible, it becomes probable. That shift in
psychology will change your world.
My recent course, Live
Off Your Passion, as well as my site, Live Your Legend, would
not exist today if it wasn’t for the ‘crazy’ people I spend time with every
day. Leo is at the top of that list. He and others changed my thinking from
“making a living online, helping people while doing something I love, isn’t
possible” to “I can’t imagine any other way to build a career”. Thanks to Leo
and the rest of you.
Once someone knows the process
and is convinced not only that it works, but that it is indeed possible, their
creative and business potential becomes limitless. It’s just a matter of time
before they turn the passion of their choosing into a full-blown career.
Start surrounding yourself with
people doing the impossible. Don’t look back.
Who can you help right now?
Often the first step to living
off passion, and the most realistic for those scared of the threatening income gap
is to start working with people one-on-one.
Remember, there are things you
are better at (and enjoy more) than the great majority of those around you.
There are also people actively looking for the expertise you have.
Find the right connection and you
could begin making money from a passion tomorrow if you wanted to. It’s that
powerful. And it’s that fast.
Need reassurance? Go do some
research on some of the people charging folks and making a living from the
skill and passion you enjoy. Are they all the next Steve Jobs? I doubt it. They
just decided to focus their energy where they could help the most.
The great majority of people who
have not been able to monetize a passion does not come down to lack of skill.
It does not come down to lack of credentials. It does not come from lack of
experience.
It comes from lack of creativity
and courage.
Combine those two with something
that makes you come alive, and the world will be beating your door down to give
you their money.
Crossing the Chasm—From 80% to 20%
A recent study reported that as
many as 80% of the people in the workforce don’t enjoy their job. And nearly
75% don’t know their true passion.
This is not a coincidence.
You don’t have to be one of them.
What would happen if we could
reverse that statistic? Think about it for a second.
If we can begin building an
income around the things that excite us, our work will no longer be something
we loathe. It will be something we can’t get enough of. Which quickly becomes
something the world can’t get enough of. If we can do that, we can literally
change the world.
The all-important first dollar
The first hurdle in living off
your passion is realizing it’s possible to get paid to do what you enjoy—to
show yourself that you’re capable of helping people and they are willing to pay
you for it. Whether it’s $1, $15, $100 or $1,000, the point is to make the
massively huge leap from earning exactly ZERO from what you enjoy doing, to
earning something. Anything.
People will find value in what
you have to offer, but you’ll never know unless you start offering it.
In my years of passion research
around the world, one belief has become a part of my core more than any other:
If you can find something you’re passionate about, you can find a way to turn
that passion into profit. I’ve seen too many examples of people living their
dreams to believe anything else.
You just have to be willing to
get a little creative.
So when are you going to join the
20% club?
You have the tools. The rest is
on you.
