Monetizing Your Passion

Last week, someone asked me why I don’t promote this newsletter? Isn’t my goal to increase my followers, and maybe put ads here eventually? Why am I doing this if not to make money?

It wasn’t the first time. The idea of blogs making hefty amounts of money is popular and people often advise me to monetize this newsletter and other projects I’m working on.

Fair enough, I suppose. What’s better than making money from something you’re passionate about? Why waste your time and energy on these creative projects for nothing in return? Everyone should turn their passion into profession is what 3 Idiots taught us, right?

I won’t entirely disagree with this. Cause yes, it’s way better to make money doing something you love rather than something you don’t. But, there’s one more aspect that few people talk about and experience — Monetizing your passion is the quickest way to kill it.

When you do something out of curiosity, for the sheer joy of it, to have fun, without any particular outcome in mind, you will keep doing it. Your work will have character, an identity of its own. Your work will be intrinsically meaningful and valuable.

But to make money from your passion, you need to create extrinsic value. You will need to produce what the market deems valuable. If that becomes the goal, you can’t just do whatever you feel like. You will need to think objectively, you will need to create what the customers want.

So if I want to make money from this newsletter, I’ll need to write what’s popular, not what I want to write. If I do that, sooner or later my interest in writing will fade away. I’d make money, but I wouldn’t enjoy writing.

That’s not good. But does this mean that we should not try to monetize our hobbies? No, absolutely not. We can totally try that but if we want to avoid burnout, I think we need to treat money as a byproduct rather than the primary objective.

When the goal is to make money, you’ll sacrifice on your curiosity and taste, and instead focus on what sells the most. But if you treat money as the byproduct of what you’re going to do anyways, the amount you make won’t matter. Even a single dollar will be an added bonus, so you can do whatever brings you joy.

I think that’s a nice middle ground. Rather than monetizing all your creative projects, save some for yourself. Making money is important but don’t trade every hobby for money. Do what you feel like, and if it’s valuable to someone as it is, some cash doesn’t hurt.

I think I’ll put my programming skills to work to solve my money problems. But creative writing, most probably not. I want to keep this side of me alive for as long as possible.

Do you agree with this perspective? What are the things that you wish you could make money from? Let me know by replying to this email or commenting on the website.

Until next week,
Aachman