Young Entrepreneur Council
Much has been written (in recent years, at least) about turning your passion into a full-time job. I mean, that’s the dream, right? Getting paid for doing what you love?
Well, the situation is actually a little more complicated than that. Can you make a living doing what you love? Yes. . . and no. To be honest with you, it depends. Not every passion or every dream or everything you love to do has profit potential. Some dreams and some hobbies make lousy businesses. Professional careers don’t exist for everything.
The trick is finding that sweet spot where what you love to do and what other people want overlap. Opportunity lies at the point where your passion and its usefulness to other people converge.
For a business to exist there have to be at least two things: a product or service, and people willing to pay for said product or service. If what you love to do isn’t useful to anyone else — if it doesn’t create value for other people by solving an obvious and irritating problem or bestowing some desirable benefit — then you’re probably never going to make money doing it. Passion isn’t enough if there’s no business potential.
That said, it’s almost always possible to find a career (or make your own) in an area closely related to something you love.
No one is going to pay you to read books for fun, but there are plenty of jobs — book editor, patent lawyer, proposal writer, reviewer/critic, researcher — that require a great deal of reading. No one is going to pay you for working in your garden or taking care of your own lawn, but they might be interested in buying your flowers or produce, or in learning how to create and tend their own garden. There’s the opportunity.
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