The Downside of Monetizing Your Passion
It is a chilly, chilly day here in NYC. Cold, but beautiful. I’m ok with that. Probably because I am nice and warm, cuddled up on the couch with a coffee and my cats. Aaaah, the joys of unemployment!
Something that has been on my mind constantly is the current obsession with monetizing our passion. What do you love to do? Cuddle pandas? Sharpen pencils? Netflix and chill? Figure out how you can you make a living off of it!
The issue with monetizing your passion is that once you go from “this activity provides me intrinsic joy” to “how much can I make off of this,” you shift the dynamic of what makes you feel passionate about the work in the first place. The joy you feel can start to become stress. You may begin to antagonize about whether people “like” your work and whether they will shell out money for it. This can immediately make you start dreading the work. Pretty soon, you are procrastinating and avoiding and then, eventually, discarding the work. In the process, you can destroy the very thing that brought you joy. It is a slippery slope.
When I was a kid, I had a lot of “passions.” I loved making things. I loved reading and writing. I loved my friends. I was involved in projects I loved through clubs, activities, and community service. As I got older, I turned my love-radar to different things. My husband, and then my son. My colleagues. My city and neighborhood. My corporate jobs building software (yes, I was still passionate about the work, though I hated the politics.) Shopping and happy hours. Yay!
The activities may have changed over time, but the passionate themes continued. Family, friends, and community. Making. Doing. Learning. Sharing. Living. This is called identity. This is called life. Whatever happened to just being passionate for passion’s sake?
Passion manifested is self-expression, and self-expression is our hearts’ yearning as humans. We should be free to be ourselves and follow the things we love without expectation of monetary gain. No one should have to pay you for you to be you. Once we move into a mentality of charging for our self-expression, we start catering to the institution that is paying us and the vehicles through which we deliver our thoughts. The self-expression has now been influenced and potentially lost so if we continue to tie our self-identity to it, we risk losing that as well. It becomes necessary to set boundaries and compromise our vision in order to survive. Are we then capable of separating ourselves from the final product? If it is not profitable, does that mean it is not good? Does it mean *we* are not good?
There is a difference between having a job and just being yourself. Even as I type this, I cringe, because I wish it weren’t so. But it is. Some people understand the difference and are able to straddle the line between doing the job in order to find a way to be true to their vision. My hats off to them.
I’m not saying that making money doing something we love is not possible. What I am saying is that we have to be careful to protect ourselves from the overwhelming commercial force that threatens our personal identities. We are living in a false world, where social media paints tightly curated portraits of friends, celebrities, communities, and causes. Everyone is successful, everyone loves what they are doing, everyone is “authentic” and making a difference and transparently sharing their work, process, and results for all to see. Anyone can do it! You can do it! Why aren’t you doing it! Why aren’t you doing more of it! We don’t hear of the millions of missteps and fears of failure and departures from personal truth in order to “succeed.”
It is a tough economy and many people, people like me, are sitting on their couches wondering how they can make some money without being overly miserable. So our natural tendency is to slurp up this “monetized passion” message like a Shake Shack shake.
Know this: There are people who are selling the dream, chasing the dream, and living the dream. The ones who are making the money are the ones who are selling the dream.
So here’s what I say: Follow your passion without monetary expectations. Recognize yourself fully in your passionate endeavors. Feel joy, feel love, learn about yourself without fear of judgement or missing a mortgage payment. Engaging in truly authentic actions that allow you to express yourself honestly will give you the confidence, clarity, skills, and strengths to be successful in your job, your career, your relationships, and your life. The rest will follow.
Update: Terrific article in The Guardian touching on a similar theme: Art is a Business
