How to Stop Your Passion From Becoming Soul Sucking

August 18, 2022October 4, 2022 / Elliot Chan / Leave a comment

I used to think I had this curse: every hobby I have, I turn it into work. I want to monetize it. I want to make a living doing it. I want to be revered and celebrated. But what I actually want is to be able to do it every day and get progressively better. Understanding the distinction between wanting to make something a job so you can make money is very different than wanting to have time to practice every day.

It may seem that the best way to do something consistently is to make it an obligation or a responsibility, as we would with work. Because we need money, a job forces us to punch in and out even when we don’t want to. Additionally, there’s no better achievement than to make a living — maybe even a fortune — doing what we love. Even if we just make enough to get by there is something to be said about becoming a professional.

The thing is, turning your passion into work is a dangerous transition. Yes, there is this quote, often attributed to Confucious, that goes: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” What tends to happen is that choosing a job you love will make what you love a soul-sucking endeavor, especially when your passion is art and creativity.

If you want to monetize your passion, you risk “selling out” and “chasing the market.” You probably heard these two phrases before. Selling out refers to compromising your integrity or principles in order to make more money. While chasing the market means following trends and copying others’ successes in hopes of reaching a bigger audience yourself.

While both can offer a nice payday and some level of fulfillment, you may potentially lose sight of why you’re pursuing your passion in the first place. Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing bad about making money. Money is essential to survival, and while you might not be able to buy happiness, you can buy convenience and comfort. Still selling out or chasing the market is an apt way to turn your passion into a soul-sucking venture.

In a biography about the director, Martin Scorsese, he says, “Do one for them; do one for you. If you can still do projects for yourself, you can keep your soul.”

What Scorsese means is that when you pick your projects you should choose one for money and one for art. That way, you don’t lose sight of what you love and why you’ve gotten into this craft.

As a writer, making a full-time living off of your creative work is challenging. Many writers supplement their earnings by taking on copywriting gigs, teaching jobs, or writing articles on topics they aren’t interested in. But they need to remember not to solely pursue these commercial projects but also to find time to work on their art.

You see this occasionally with actors who sign on to one movie to leverage or finance another. One example is Bill Murray. It was said that Murray only did Ghostbusters so that he could play the lead in the adaptation of The Razor’s Edge, a 1944 novel by W. Somerset Maugham about a WWI pilot. That’s not a movie that crosses your mind when you think of Bill Murray. But it was an amazing performance.

I need money, but I also need to prevent my passion from becoming a soul-sucking endeavor. That’s why I hold this tightly as I move forward. One for them and one for me. This approach is essential in helping me distribute my resources, energy, and time.

When I see a piece take off and become successful, I ask myself if that is something that gave me pleasure. If not, I will only do it once in a while to appease the market and reach new audiences. I acknowledge and appreciate the success, but I don’t sell out to it, and I don’t continue chasing it, because it’s not what I’m only here for.

Take this YouTube channel, for example. My top-performing videos are notebook reviews. I understand their popularity. They serve a purpose. This could easily become a notebook review channel, but that’s not what I want to do all day. I want to write in those notebooks, not just review them. Will my channel be more successful if all I did was review notebooks? Maybe? Maybe I’d be as famous as Ryan Gosling. But that would become a soul-sucking job. Not Ryan Gosling, notebook reviewing. With all that being said, if you want a new notebook, check out my reviews (lol).

There is time to make money, and there is time to make what you want. You must strike the perfect balance to live a fulfilling life and prevent your passion from becoming soul-sucking. When you pursue money, look at the numbers. When you pursue art, numbers don’t matter. Turn your head away and look inwards because it’s not about selling out or what the market wants. It’s about what you want.

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Warren Buffett’s 5/25 Rule and the Power of Pairing Your Goals

June 6, 2019June 6, 2019 / Elliot Chan / Leave a comment

Warren Buffett, the investor — you know him — had given advice to his personal airplane pilot, Mike Flint, once. He told Flint to come up with a list of 25 things he wanted to accomplish in his career.

Flint went off to do that and came back with his list of 25 goals. Buffett told him to circle his top five and put those into Group A and then circle the bottom 20 and put them into Group B. In this, Flint thought, okay… well, Group A will be my primary focus and Group B will be pursuits I take on during my spare time.

No. Group B must be avoided at all cost, Buffett told him. Flint mustn’t touch any of those tasks until he was to finish all his goals from Group A. That was his advice and you can absolutely use it too.

It’s hard to argue against Buffett. He is, after all, one of the most successful investors in the world.

However, as a creative, you get to blend your goals together. Such as writing and video creation, like when I daily vlogged my NaNoWriMo experience.

Something that was number 18 on your list might be the spark or the muse to help you accomplish your number 2 task.

Let’s say my #2 goal is to be a published writer, I want to write a book and my #18 goal is to become a beer judge. Well, why don’t I use my skills as a writer to write about beer tasting? Why don’t I research about beer, review beer, and go on beer tours and write about all of it? These two goals overlap and end up propelling each other. I can, of course, write about something not on my top 25 list, but why not kill two birds, right?

If you can find ways to pair your goals, you will be constantly inspired and get a more varietal creative life. In order to be great at one thing, you’ll need to have skills and understanding in many other areas. Golfing is more than just putting, it’s driving, it’s wedging the ball out of the bunker or staying mentally focused as well as physically in shape.

If you can pair your goals together and find an interesting relation, then each goal is supported like walking, where one leg holds steady as the other lifts forward. The two goals, as you make progress, pushes each other in the direction of an ultimate goal — and that ultimate goal is your fulfillment.

Go ahead, write out your 25 top goals for your life, and then, see which ones from your top five can be linked with any of the other 20.

To me, the one that can be linked to most of the others are the ones you should pursue. It might not always be the fastest path to success, but this way, you get the most bang for your buck, this way, you might just get to indulge in the buffet of life.

If you like this article, you might like this one as well: Little Bets: How I Make Decisions Without Feeling Stressed

Wake up and compromise

January 2, 2016December 21, 2015 / Elliot Chan / Leave a comment

The pursuit of dream may not be the same journey as the pursuit of happiness

By Elliot Chan, Opinions Editor

Happiness is not getting everything we want. Happiness is accepting what we have.

We all want glory and success. As children, we dream of our achievements as adults and all the possibilities. People will ask what we want to be when we grow up and we’ll list off all the options: actor, athlete, astronaut, doctor, etc. At some point, we need to face reality; perhaps our childhood desires are not what we want forever.

Having a dream is having a goal. When you are young you have all the potential in the world. Nothing seems impossible. You can become a doctor if you want. It’s like buying a lottery ticket, and you are anxiously awaiting the draw. You haven’t lost yet. You haven’t won either. As you grow older, you might realize that you aren’t that interested in medicine, and studying makes you sick. Pursuing a career as a doctor—not only dedicating time and money but also excelling in the programs—is likely to be torturous if that’s the case. So I ask: is it worth it for a well-paying job?

When we talk about dream jobs, we aren’t really talking about the job itself, we are talking about being successful in one particular field. The problem is that our society only shines the spotlight on certain roles, placing them on a higher pedestal than others. The CEO gets the spotlight, the lead actor gets the spotlight, the star athlete gets the spotlight, but we ignore the supporting cast. Rarely do children dream of being part of the pit crew. They want to be the driver.

We want to take our interest and transform it into a lifestyle. The problem with turning hobbies and interests into work is that we turn something we enjoy—music for example—into something tedious. Putting pressure onto anything may often destroy it. And so it goes with dreams.

We chase our dreams, but what we should do is chase our passion. Dreams are a fabrication, while our passions aren’t. Once we accept that, regardless of what we do, we’ll have to work hard, we can then hone in and identify what actually makes us happy—or not. That’s the thing about passion, it changes, and we can allow it to.

It’s not a crime to give up on your dreams. We are lucky to have an opportunity to pursue it, so don’t feel guilty. Not everyone is built to climb Mt. Everest and to be stupid enough to believe you can without the hard work is irresponsible. Dream is a finish line. Happiness is the desire to improve and seek progress. Dreams just happen. Happiness requires work. Find work that makes you happy and that may mean changing paths now.