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 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, 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 most of 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?
This comic has been adapted from an original post on #entrepreneurfail: Startup Success.