Let me paint a picture for you…You’re sitting at work one day and daydreaming about how great it would be to open up that brewery because of how much you love making craft beer in your garage every weekend.
Or your lifestyle revolves around health and fitness so wouldn’t it be incredible to open up that boutique fitness studio you’ve always wanted to. (FYI, this was me)
You’ve got incredible style, people always compliment you on your clothes and how put together you look so naturally opening a boutique would be the right thing to do.
You love visiting museums, studying artists, maybe you were an art history major in college, well of course Gallery owner sounds like a good venture.
Essentially, any of your hobbies sound like a better business then the actual business you’re in.
Of course it does because hobby’s are fun. And fun sounds better than work. And if we can make our work fun, then we’ve really got this whole life thing figured out, right?
This message that everyone out there should be following their passion right into business.
I’m over it.
It’s bad advice.
If you want to suck the fun out of your hobby, turn it into a business. It’s called work for a reason.
Reason #1: Your hobby is all yours. It’s your release. Your passion. It is about YOU. It is what you do to get away from work, kids, wife, life. Business is all about the customer, staff, bills, responsibilities, stress, people…Essentially it’s about everything BUT you.
Reason #2 It’s not what you think it is. Seeing the show from a great seat in the audience is awesome. You get the full on experience. Watching the show from backstage is not the same thing. Once you get back there and see all the inner workings, the frenetic pace, what it takes to produce the show, it’s not that much fun anymore. It’s actually a lot of real hard work. It ruins the façade.
Reason #3 You stop doing the things you enjoy and get stuck doing all the stuff you can’t stand. Why? Because someone has to actually run the business, field the complaints, answer the phones, handle all the issues and do all the things it takes to even have a chance to be successful…And that someone is YOU.
Reason #4 You’ll lose friends. Maybe they’re unsatisfied investors or your crew who you expected to come in all the time and spend money at your new business or now they come in and use your business, tell you all the things you should do differently and then they leave and guess what? You get to stay behind because now it’s work and you can’t just go have lunch with them like you used to.
Reason # 5 Passion has nothing to do with financial success or even personal happiness for that matter. Once you go into business it’s about making money. You can be the most passionate person on the planet and a horrible operator. There’s no correlation between the two. Unless you’re committed and capable of running your hobby like a business. Don’t do it.
Clearly, there are people out there doing all of the things you and I enjoy doing. Whatever your hobby is, there’s somebody out there who has made it their business. Just give some serious consideration to whether that person should also be you. If you decide it is, then go after it. If not, just keep enjoying your hobbies for what they add to your life.
