The Twisted Reality of Turning Your Passion into Profits
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Picture this: It’s 3+ years into my entrepreneurial journey, and I’ve made it.
$20k months? Check. Programs selling out? Check. Impressive Instagram following? Check. Working whenever and wherever I want? Check.
Except ‘whenever and wherever’ I want has turned into thinking about my business every moment of the day. On vacation, at dinner with my husband, reading a particularly juicy book… there’s always something to be branded, monetized, shared to position me as a better, more aspirational brand for hire.
In the quest to not work a day in my life, I’d created a reality where every part of my life was somehow connected to work.
“So, Chelsea, how did you start your business?”
The story goes something like this (if you’ve ever heard me on a podcast or giving a talk, bear with me. You’ve heard this one before).
I was working as a PR account manager, spending every day doing work that felt pointless. I’d come home feeling drained, and all I wanted to do was numb out with Netflix and a glass (ahem, bottle) of wine. On the days I didn’t come straight home, I’d meet up with friends and spend the night bitching about our respective jobs.
At that time, I was also teaching yoga 2-3 times a week. Some days, I had to go teach after work. Instead of heading home to my sacred Netflix, wine and chill sessions, I had to go home, review my class plan, then head to the studio to hold space and teach a group of people.
I was grumpy at best before every class. But after, I felt totally high on life.
You know that feeling after a long hike when you’ve finally reached the peak, the destination, a spot with a gorgeous view? Okay, if you’re not into hiking then maybe not. It feels like fulfillment. Completion. The high of investing your energy, presence, attention into something worth doing.
The incredible contrast between how I felt after 8ish hours or PR work versus how I felt after 90 minutes of teaching was too intense to ignore. When I imagined 30-40 more years of one, I felt drained. 30-40 years of the other? Now that felt like a life worth living.
But spoiler alert: it’s really hard to make a enough to live well teaching yoga.
So I did what any millennial would do: I hit the internet. Hours of blogs, podcasts and Instagram research later, I discovered a truth that is equal parts exhilarating and exhaustion, as delicious as it is dangerous:
You can monetize any and every aspect of yourself.
Naturally good at something? You can monetize it.
Have a hobby? You can monetize it.
Like making something? You can monetize it.
So what makes the difference between a successful and failed attempt at making money from what you love? A combination of knowledge, privilege and how good you are at marketing.
The primary secret sauce required to actually monetize something instead of turning it into another half-baked project gathering literal or digital dust: you’ve got to be good at marketing.
There’s something really seductive about the idea of making money from what you love.
Girl bosses everywhere preach the luxury of ‘getting paid to be yourself.’
Then you’ve got the cultural adage that if you do work you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.
There are two damaging things going on here:
When we’re being told to get paid to be ourselves, we’re subtly starting to section off parts of ourself to be branded, packaged and sold as goods or services. We’re putting parts of ourselves onto the free market for consumption. Whether that’s our skillsets, our knowledge, parts of our personality, our story, our time. The waters feel a little less murky when we’re talking about a physical good or product - at least you can physically see the difference between your body and the thing you’re selling. But that thing you’re selling, when you’re monetizing yourself, is it not a part of you? Your art? Is it not something sacred, potent, a beautiful offering you’ve crafted to share with the world? When we’re talking about mass produced goods stocking the digital shelves of Amazon, no. But when we’re talking small business, yes. What you’re making is art, it’s got your fingerprints all over it, and we’ve got to look at the cost of slicing ourselves up into little bits of art and skills to be consumed by the world at large.
By turning the things we do naturally, do for fun, do because we love them into income streams, we’re letting work creep into every area of our lives. Like an invasive species, the work informed by decades of capitalism mixes with the noxious fumes of the Protestant work ethic to create a version of work that chokes out creativity, pleasure, play and possibly our very life force. Too dramatic? Hi, my moon is Scorpio what do you want from me.
In 2019 when I started seeing a new acupuncturist, my addiction to work came up in our first meeting. After a few minutes of me rambling, the acupuncturist stopped me and asked, “what would happen if you stopped working?”
My body went into full panic. A lump formed in my throat as I felt myself riding the edge of flight and freeze. I wanted to run from the question, from the idea that I could stop working, and at the same time felt frozen by the idea.
Who would I be if I wasn’t working? What would I even do with my time, my life? I realized then that I’d turned every one of my passions into an income stream.
Teaching yoga? Yup. Coaching + mentoring? That’s my bread and butter. Writing? It’s how I do my marketing.
And the ones I used to love, dancing, hiking, reading, had either been crowded out or morphed into ways to support my other business ventures. Dance on stories to sell something about embodiment. Showcase my time in nature or travels to show people how ‘free’ my entrepreneurial lifestyle is (ew).
In the quest to not work a day in my life, I’d created a reality where every part of my life was somehow connected to work.
Was it more joyous and fulfilling than the work I used to do at the agency? Absolutely. But it’s true what they say of all work and no play... living my ‘dream life’ funded by my personal brand left me a very dull girl indeed.
So here’s the long and short of it: not everything you love needs to make you money. If you build a life where everything you love makes you money (or you’re trying to do that), you may gain more money, but you lose a life outside of work in the process.
When I end my days, I don’t want people to say ‘the most interesting thing she did was her work.’
I want my work to matter, yes. I want a legacy woven of my thoughts, insights, innovative ideas, the impact I made. I want my fingerprint left on sites of growth, change, creation of a world where our systems support instead of stifle. But I do not want to give my life over to my work.
After all, a life is meant to to be worked, but to be lived.