Hobby or Calling? One is an Expensive Experiment! In seven minutes, I’ll tell you which it was for me.
When they tell you “hey you know, you gotta have a job and do something that is … stable, that’ll support your family, that’ll bring an income, you know, you gotta do that! And sure, you can have your hobbies on the side … You can have your hobbies. You can have your hobbies but you definitely have to do something that’s more legitimate … that’s more realistic .. that’s gonna bring income .. that’s gonna bring you a stable lifestyle for you and/or your family”
But the phrase I want to focus on is when they say:
“You need to do something stable .. but you can have your hobbies“.
I’m here to tell you that’s not true 🙂 You CAN’T have your hobbies, OK.
If you treat your passions as a hobby, what’ll eventually happen is that you will have overextended yourself and overcommitted to everything else that is considered “stable“, quote unquote air quotes “stable“, to things that are more realistic.
You will have overcommitted to all those things that by the time you get to your hobby, what little energy is leftover to do that will be so minuscule that what you’ll end up doing instead … is recover .. from all the other stuff you were doing .. by sitting in front of the TV set, by doing something mindless – playing a video game, watching a movie, going out with friends – all those things are great – but my point is you will have not enough energy left over if you don’t also enjoy the stable thing you’re doing! Why? Because if you don’t enjoy it, that means it’s taking more energy from you .. than you’re getting from it!
So that’s why you CAN’T have your hobby!
Because when you get less energy back than you’re putting forth into something, you need to recover from that. So the time that you could’ve spent doing your ho.bby is now spent re.cov.er.ing!
So no, you CAN’T have your hobby.
You need to think of the things that you really enjoy as being a way of living and making those lucrative and viable and helpful for yourself as well as others. Help everybody, as many as you can with your talents and the things that you’re passionate and your purposeful about. Don’t treat those as hobbies because they will stop happening!
… as you run out of energy …
And let me ask this:
If pursuing your hobby until it becomes a professional vocation – with you – as the on-demand expert receiving an overflow of energy because you truly enjoy what you’re doing – if that, is considered un-stable, how stable is it really to work in an area that doesn’t engage your UNIQUE personal value, and because of that .. consistently saps your energy?
How long could you sustain that?
In the last video, I admitted to engaging in a very “Expensive Experiment”. Yeah, this experiment was valuing everyone else’s ideas and chasing after these instead of mine, only to find out that many years later, my ideas actually were quite valuable, so much so that everybody else had made money off these before me 🙂
Seriously, jokes aside – living this way proved very expensive for me in so many ways. Because I didn’t value my ideas enough, I didn’t have the confidence to expect a fair exchange for these. Yeah, I’m talking about money. For many years I worked long hours, giving away all my creativity in exchange for a salary that couldn’t support a family of 4 – not without the use of credit cards and living in crippling debt! That was financially expensive.
I destroyed my body in front of a keyboard for 10-14 hour days for years on end. Had to go to all kinds of chiropractors, physical therapists, had to switch my career when my back gave out, took a whole year to repair that and my lower spine – killed all my savings doing that, killed my 401K so that I wouldn’t lose my house! That was financially AND physically expensive!
And I also destroyed so many of my relationships because I was constantly working long hours to dig out of that debt. By the time I had time to actually spend time with friends and family, I was so beat up, so frustrated and just had nothing really positive to say in conversation. I lost who I was and there was just nothing cool to say. That was emotionally expensive!
It’s a lot harder and slower to go backwards like I’ve had to, pruning away all the things I didn’t want in my life.
College is a HUGE opportunity to magnify who you already are … not become someone you’re not. YOU! Definitely are enough.
So here’s some things to consider while you’re there:
Or … are you going to college for someone other than you?
Are these worthwhile questions to ask or am I just crazy? There’s no real way to make money from doing things you actually like doing right? Right?!
Smack me up in the comments below. Yeah I never thought I’d be providing for a family of 4 with my music videos and my performance art – I get it!
Thanks again guys. If you found my words hopeful, encouraging … tag a friend, share some hope, and see you soon.
Until then, I’m Rene Rafael and thanks for traveling with me.