Standard societal programming advice is that when you start a business or go into a career, you should make sure you love it.
This way you’ll have a much higher probability of making a good amount of money.
Ask most self-made famous billionaires what their advice is for people, and they will usually parrot some kind of platitudes about:
Make sure you’re passionate about what you do.
Make sure you love what you do.
Never do things “just for the money.”
Make sure that what you do you would probably do for free.
And so on.
The core concept behind just about everything I teach is long-term masculine happiness, so obviously I find happiness quite important. In fact, it is the most important thing in life (at least in my view).
So clearly I must agree that you must do what you love as well, right?
The problem is that it’s much more complicated than this. Whether or not you should do what you love is not a simple yes-or-no answer.
I will address both sides of this.
Why You Should Do What You Love
If you start a business in an area you are really passionate about, you’ll indeed be more likely to be successful because you will be more likely to be excited to actually do the work even if you’re not making any money yet.
Also, as an entrepreneur, you will go through ups and downs. This is the standard income cycle of any business owner. You’re going to have good months and bad months, good years and bad years, and so on. Hopefully the good times will drastically outnumber the bad times, but you get my point.
If you are truly passionate about your work, this will be the energy and fire that will power you through these hard times, which are guaranteed to come. It’s almost like having a free extra battery in your body. I’ve experienced this personally many times and it works really well.
On top of all of that, I don’t believe in reincarnation or any sort of afterlife. So if you spend most of your life doing what you hate or what you’re not interested in, you're literally wasting your life, at least in one respect.
On top of all that, we have a 35% chance of all dying in a few years. Clearly, if that’s going to happen, we want to spend our last few years on this Earth doing something we enjoy rather than doing something we hate all the time.
So that’s that. Do what you love!
But wait… there’s more to this…
Why You Should NOT Do What You Love
The flip side of this is basic economic realities.
If your true passion is playing video games, creating comic book art, writing fantasy fiction, or playing music, these things are much, much less likely to create any real income for you, even if you are really good at this stuff.
The economic marketplace just doesn’t value these things as much as being a doctor or being really good at phone sales. It’s just the way it is.
(And yes, Mr. Nitpicker, I am aware there are some Twitch streamers or famous YouTubers who make a lot of money playing video games, but that is a teeny tiny fraction of a fraction of 1% of the people who attempt this. The odds are overwhelming you’re not going to make shit for money if you follow passions not valued at high premiums in the marketplace, period. As always, the exceptions prove the rule.)
Then we have our new friend, AI. If you are passionate about something highly mechanical like accounting or video editing, you’ve got a real problem because AI is going to take over that function very quickly. It has already begun.
Therefore, you can edit videos and look up tax law all you want, but very quickly you won’t be able to make any money doing this, regardless of if it’s your passion or not. (Unless you do something extremely niched, unusual, and very out of the box, which I admit is possible, but most of the people like this aren’t going to do these things.)
I am the classic example of this. One of my greatest passions is writing fantasy fiction and it always has been. However, I was smart enough to know in my early 20s that if I spent my life writing fantasy fiction, the odds of me making any serious money or living a free lifestyle that this money could bring me would be extraordinarily low.
Instead of going into fantasy fiction, I chose two other areas that I was interested in: computers and real estate, back in the ‘90s. Those both worked out very well for me.
Sadly, I had to defer my passion for fantasy fiction and kept it as a hobby only. Only this year, fucking 30 years later, have I finally started to indulge this fantasy of engaging in fantasy fiction.
Again, don’t give me the bizarre exceptions to the rule, like George R.R. Martin or Stephen King. Again, these are the fraction-of-one-percent exceptions to the rule and will be very unlikely to apply to you, even if you’re really good at writing fiction or creating artwork or whatever it is your passion is.
The Actual Technique
Alrightee. I’ve just made some compelling points on both sides of the issue. What then is the answer?
The answer is this. It’s two steps.
The first thing you do is take the thing that you love and rationally, objectively, and dispassionately assess how much money you could actually make in the marketplace doing that thing with a high probability of success.
For example, your passion is to create superhero art. If you rationally and objectively assess this, your odds of making any serious money doing that, ever, are microscopically tiny even if your artistic abilities are amazing.
On the flip side, if you’re someone like William Brown or Charlie Morgan, and your passion is creating marketing funnels for online B2B companies, then congratulations! Your passion just happens to be wedded to something that is extraordinarily valuable in the marketplace, and now you’re probably going to make some serious money relatively easily, and do so at a young age like these guys did.
(Sadly, most of us are not in this category, but if you are, you’re good to go.)
Perhaps your passion is not on either one of those extremes and it’s hanging around somewhere in the middle. For example, maybe your passion is something related to finance or engineering.
If that’s the case, you need to follow my standard advice and niche the fuck out of that passion and serve a very niched area. That way you can make money relatively quickly and easily and still maintain your zone of passion, at least to some degree.
Another thing you can do, which is what I did, is instead of looking at your number one passion, look at your top three or four. The odds are decent that you probably have several passions (though you may not; everyone is different).
Writing fantasy fiction was probably my number one passion as a young man and it probably still is. However, right below that is my second passion, which is teaching men how to maintain long-term non-monogamous relationships with multiple women without any lying, cheating, or drama. I love this stuff and I would do most of it for free.
And I’m pretty much the only person on the entire internet with any real audience who teaches these skills, so it works out pretty well. True, it’s not as valued as highly in the marketplace as something like being a doctor or being a wizard salesperson, but it’s not bad. As always, niching helps.
When I was a young man in the ‘80s and ‘90s, back when computers were super exciting, that was another huge passion for me. Even though I wasn’t involved in writing fantasy fiction as a way to make money, I was involved heavily in computers, and that was extremely gratifying for me.
My point is that the odds are pretty good you don’t have just one passion. Great. Pick the one out of the two or three you have that is most economically viable and focus on that one, at least for now.
But what if your absolute number one passion, or God forbid your only passion, is something that is not economically viable, like making music?
The answer is you engage in that passion as a business, but you only do it at a point in life where you’re able to do this financially and logistically. And, you don’t assign a big financial goal to those activities.
In other words, if you’re 27 years old, deeply in debt, have no income, and are still living at home with mommy and daddy, then you shouldn’t start a business making music. That would be stupid.
Instead, start a business that’s going to make you money. Then when you get to a point of financial stability, you live on your own, you’ve escaped the collapsing West, and you’ve got location-dependent income, then you can indulge in your number one low-profit passion all you like.
But even then, when you do that, I wouldn’t even bother setting any financial goals with that passion. I would do it as a business for fun (Jay Abraham used to call this a “money hobby”). If you don’t make any money, fine. If you actually make money, great, but you’re cool either way.
Again, I am following that model. When Black Dragon and Pink Firefly release in about two weeks, I am not going to give a shit about how much money I make. I’m doing this for the excitement of it.
However, I’m at a place in my life (financially, spiritually, with my international lifestyle, my dating/relationship life, and with my age) where I can easily do this. I would have never done this 30 years ago. Again, that would have been stupid (unless I literally didn’t care about how much money I made).
Lastly, if you have to choose a type of business that is not your primary passion, you need to make sure that you don’t hate it.
I have seen men make this mistake, my own father included. They start a business that is irritating to them because that’s what they went to college for, or because that’s what their dad did, or whatever. Then they end up utterly hating their life. You can’t do this.
You don’t have to love what you do, but you cannot hate what you do.
I hope that clears this up.