This article is Part 2.5 of a 3-part series on finding your passion. Ok, I’m cheating. This is technically a preamble to the real Part 3. But it’s an important one so please read ahead. If you missed the other two, you might want to go back and read part 1 here, and part 2 here.

So you’ve been doing the inner work. You’ve been journaling and asking yourself some questions. Maybe you’ve taken a course or two on how to discover your passion. You’ve been working really hard on figuring out who you are, and what you’re interested in.

And now, you’ve decided to pick something to pursue as a real means of making money.

Congratulations!

Now what?

There’s lots of messaging out there that says you should follow your passion. But then what? Are we to think that once we’ve picked something to pursue, money will suddenly start raining down on us from the heavens and we’ll suddenly be rich doing what we love?

The problem is, there are few steps missing in that equation.

Here’s a little bit of a truth bomb: Just because you’ve found what you’re passionate about doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly start making money from it. You still have to put in the work.

Decide what you want the outcome to be

The first thing you need to do, once you’ve decided WHAT you want to do, is whether you want this to be something you do full-time, or part-time, or part-time until it becomes full-time.

Option 1 – Quit your job and jump in full-time right away

SPOILER ALERT: It’s a bad idea. DON’T DO IT!!

A long time ago, the loudest voices told you that you should just quit your job, suddenly and unceremoniously, and go build yourself a passion-based, location independent, online business.

Taking that risk was fine… when you were in your early 20s. You barely had any commitments, if any, and you could totally survive on noodles if you had to.

But many people have invested years, even decades into a career they thought they wanted (or maybe still kinda sorta want). It’s not that cut & dry.

Once you get into your 30s, you have financial and emotional commitments to think about. Maybe you have a partner, a mortgage, a car payment, debts to pay, children to feed.

If you’ve already quit your job on a whim, don’t worry, you can still figure something out. Just know that it may be harder to put all the pieces together. It will likely be a bit more complicated, and it may take some time, but you can do it.

The problem is, if you try to make this thing you’re passionate about be the thing that makes you enough money to pay your bills, you run the risk of killing your passion.

Liz Gilbert has a lovely way of speaking to this in Big Magic. She vowed to her Creativity to never to put it under the pressure of asking it to take care of her financially.

If you make your passion, your creativity, your only means of income, you may end up a few years down the road, burnt out and hating the thing you used to be passionate about.

This is what happened to Leah Hynes, a dear friend of mine and a fantastic coach.

“If I have one regret about my entrepreneurial journey, it’s that I wish I had stayed in my day job until I had at least started to earn an income that could continue to cover our basic expenses.” – Leah Hynes

I don’t know about you, but I’m choosing to heed her words and try a different route. As for Leah, she’s one of the strongest women I know. I have no doubt she’ll find her way back to whatever it is she’s passionate about.

Option 2 – Part time forever: The Side Hustle

What if you’re good at your job and you don’t necessarily want to leave it? What if you’re in that place where you don’t hate it, but it doesn’t necessarily fire you up either? What if for you, it’s just that you feel like something’s missing?

See if this is you: You’ve spent the last decade of your career climbing the ladder to a point where you’re now leading a team. Your work now consists of building strategies, maybe you’re advising senior management on what they should do in a specific area. Maybe you love that part of your job. Maybe you’re a great leader for your team and you love guiding them, encouraging them, coaching them, and watching them grow. What if you don’t want to give any of that up?

But something is still missing.

By choosing to climb the ladder to a management position, maybe that means you had to give up the creativity, the challenges, the innovative thinking, the fun of going knee-deep into a project and getting your hands dirty.

But you’re not in the trenches anymore. You’re leading the people who are doing what you used to do.

What if all you need a creative outlet?

It’s ok to love what you do AND still feel like something’s missing.

Nothing is wrong with you and it doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful. Just like it’s not likely that your romantic relationship will be your complete source of emotional fulfillment (and it’s not fair to assume that it will be), it’s normal to not quite feel completely fulfilled by your full-time work.

I honestly think our very nature, as humans, is to never quite be totally fulfilled by our work. There will always be something more we’ll want to do. It’s natural, and it’s ok.

If that sounds like you, then a Side Hustle might just be what you need.

Chris Guillebeau, author of the massively successful book The $100 Startup (you can read my review of this book here), believes that a side hustle isn’t just nice, it’s necessary. He has a short daily podcast called Side Hustle School where he shares real stories of people who are making money from something they are doing on the side.

It’s a really great podcast and I highly suggest it. It’s so great in fact, that I had to stop listening to it because it was giving me too many ideas and I was getting distracted from what I was really wanting to focus on.

Here’s what Chris has to say about it:

“If you’re trying to make big change, a hustle can help you build a foundation to move on to something else. If you love your day job, that’s great too – the hustle will provide a creative outlet and a backup plan.” – Chris Guillebeau

Option 3: The runway model (no, I’m not talking about fashion)

You may have caught my hints at this as I explained the previous two options.

What if it’s not an either/or situation?

What if you don’t have to decide whether you stay in your job, or you quit to pursue what makes you happy? What if you could use a Side Hustle as a transition plan?

What if you took that passion topic, started building a side hustle from it, and used it as a runway to buy yourself some time BEFORE you quit your job?

Building a business, if that’s what you choose to do, doesn’t need to be this giant risky thing.

This means that your full-time job would afford you financial security and time while you followed your curiosity, tried different ways to begin making products or offering services in the topic area that you’re passionate about, and built it slowly and organically until it can finally support you financially AND MORE!

This will do 2 things:

1) You have greater chances of still feeling passionate about the side hustle work you’re doing over time

And you’ll need it.

Remember: Passion is the emotion that DRIVES you.

When you get to that point where you should be working on your side hustle and you just don’t feel like it (trust me, that’ll happen… a lot), you’ll need that passion to boost you forward.

2) It will reduce the amount of self-induced stress and pressure to succeed because your timeline won’t be so tight.

Nobody wants to burn out while building something they love. Don’t be that guy or that girl.

Don’t add to the stupid culture of entrepreneurs who carry burnout like it’s a badge of honour (cue the entrepreneur who says “I burned out 3 times in the last 5 years but I’m still here!”). It’s not worth it.

Don’t you want to be happy AND succeed? Do it this way. Trust me. It’ll pay off in the long run.

But what if I don’t want to build a business and I HATE my job?

I know this may come as a surprise to you, but, it IS possible to find work you enjoy either within the organization you work for now, or elsewhere.

Yes, I agree, organizations everywhere have a long way to go before it can generally be said that employee wellbeing and culture are truly at the centre of their priorities. But here’s something most people don’t tell you:

How much or how little you like your work largely depends on YOU.

Seriously, have you stopped to ask yourself if you’ve truly done everything you possibly could to change your mindset about how you view your work? I know I say this all the time but it bears repeating: No matter where you run to, you’re always taking yourself with you.

You can quit your job because you think the people and the environment sucks but chances are you’re just going to end up finding more of the same elsewhere.

“While we of course can’t change reality through sheer force of will alone, we can use our brain to change how we process the world, and that in turn changes how we react to it. […] The mental construction of our daily activities, more than the activity itself, defines our reality.” – Shawn Achor (The Happiness Advantage)

Even as you search for new work, having a positive mindset truly can change everything.

What if instead of dreading that meeting, you decided you would focus on making sure you learn 3 new things during that time?

What if instead of defining a task such as data analysis as boring, you changed the language you use and called it “scanning for new interesting patterns”?

Work in a call centre? What if you perceived your work as an opportunity to connect with individuals who have lives, and purposes, and needs that you can help fulfill?

None of the actual work changed, but you have all the control over how you PERCEIVE that work.

Change the language you use to define your work, and you change everything.

Some things to consider.

Ready for the real part 3 of this series? Awesome! Head on over here.