You’ve heard it a thousand times if not more. Do What You Love and the Money will follow.
Sounds simple enough, right? If you’re really passionate about something and devote enough time and energy to it, you will be able to “live” from it. However, the “idea” of laboring away in darkness while waiting for the “world” to catch up to you is just so much romanticism. The truth of the matter is that regardless of how talented or passionate you are, if no one knows about you, you’re never going to get any closer to living off what you love to do!
So, more thoughts from the “simple” methods: Talk to People. Since the advent of the Internet (and especially Social Media) folks have believed that bombarding everyone and anyone with “ads” on how great they are or how they should “click to get rich” will bring them what they want. You know what’s better? Straight communication. Call it Grass Roots if you want.
Get out there, get involved, speak with those who are as passionate about things as you are. You might be amazed to see how many amazing people you could meet.
A good friend of mine (Mark Shainblum) once said to me, “Never pass up an opportunity for self-promotion”. Since this first came up during a discussion at a conference we were both guests at way back in the early 90’s, I have always remembered it. Of course, this is not meant as another avenue of bombarding folks (in person this time) about who you are and what you can do. It’s simply meant that unless people know just what you can really provide for them, there is no way to be certain they do.
I think about these things for a variety of reasons. Firstly, Social Media. I’m definitely not using it as well as I should/ could be. For me, FaceBook has always been used as a place to keep in touch with friends, family, and some professional (writing and comics) friends and contacts. I had started using Twitter as a place to keep my Writing life separate from FB. My LiveJournal blog has always been a mix-match of many things. But you know what’s missing? My “other” life.
I’m an IT Professional who has been Leading developers for over 10 years, the last 5 in Agile methodologies. In fact, I’ve worked hard to define and deploy an adapted Agile methodology at my day job. Agile fascinates me to such a degree that I’ve started outlining a new nonfiction book on explaining it to non-technical people.
There are definitely other points I wanted to make, but seeing as I’ve been slowly veering off from the main topic, I’ll stop this here and continue at another time. (After all, there are many more hits to be done on all the other things I do and have been involved in such as: editing, copy editing/ proofing, Training, Leadership, etc. For this time, I don’t have to talk about my singing :))
The point is: if you’re really good at the things you love to do and no one knows about it, you’re cheating yourself out of a future. Keep that in mind. I’ll tell you all about the Boiling Frogs analogy in another post 🙂