Pursue your passion…and you’ll never work on your passion a full day in your life…
Wait…that’s not how the old adage goes, is it? Isn’t it true that you if you work on something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life? What’s this about not being able to work on your passion?
Well the truth is, while there are benefits in pursuing your avocation as a vocation – you’re not going to have too much time to work on that passion when it becomes a business. You don’t get paid for just pursuing your hobby! You get paid for distributing and selling your passion.
Freelancers know this all too well. Say you have a talent that you want to share and monetize: Baking? Web Development? Design? As you start offering your service, the most of your time will not be working on your expertise. The reality is that business development, marketing, sales, finances, tech support, and other day-to-day activities will take a longer portion of the day than the actual skill you are offering to clients. Also, many solo entrepreneurs have a side job to help make ends meet as they are growing their businesses.
For bloggers, Derek Halpern, from Social Triggers, says most spend 80% of their time creating content and 20% promoting it; these proportions are exactly the reasons why most bloggers fail. He claims that the most successful bloggers don’t spend their time blogging! In fact they spend 20% of the time creating content and 80% of their time promoting it.
All in all, the thing to remember is that starting a business involves MUCH more than just your skill set and yes, you will have to wear many, many hats and serve as a jack-of-all-trades for a while.
Did you pursue your hobby as a business? What was your experience? Did you get to spend enough time working on your talent? Let us know in the comments below.
This comic has been adapted from original post from #entrepreneurfail: Startup Success.
***********
Check out our other comics on trhs here.
***********
Smit Ganatra
Nice stuff! I guess it is just the Pareto principle at work here..the core effort may be 20%,but that’s what will ultimately matter
Kriti B Vichare
True! If you don’t have that 20% you have nothing!
Anamika Joshi
perfect kriti. I always complain about not being able to do more of copywriting as it’s always about business first while riding on your passion. NIce work!
Perzen Darukhanawalla
Really connected with this one Kruti being someone that started cooking as a passion – nowadays its more like 40% of the time in the kitchen and rest of it all in promoting, social media, accounts, packaging – the list is never ending. 🙂
Kriti B Vichare
Quite ironic isn’t it! Thanks Anamika!
Kriti B Vichare
Awesome Perzen! Hopefully over time you can get back to longer the kitchen and your passion!
I also have some other statistics in the post on https://www.entrepreneurfail.com/2014/02/the-surest-way-to-stop-working-on-hobby.html
Some experts claim that 65% of time must be marketing/sales – otherwise consider your business gone!
Harish Kishore
Perfect post ! Could really connect with what Derek says! Being a content developer / blogger myself it is so important to publicize your skill more than spending more time on doing what you love – writing all day, all night!. That’s how the world of business works today.
-Harish Kishore
Founder of http://www.wonderwordscontent.com & http://www.myfoodmyprice.in
Kriti B Vichare
Thanks Harish! Quite frustrating isn’t it! 🙂 And this applies not only to service businesses, but also product businesses!
Harish Kishore
Totally true! 🙂