What Passion Will Buy You

There is an interesting discussion brewing in the blogosphere at the moment. My friend and fellow blogger Lisis Blackston of Quest for Balance wrote a controversial article last week about the feasibility of dropping your day job to pursue your passion.

We’ve all witnessed a growing culture of people who are quitting their lukewarm office careers to do what they’ve always wanted to do. There are countless success stories floating about (particularly in the online world) and it almost seems like following your passion — given an unwavering will — all but guarantees financial success. Lisis challenges this notion in her post.

Her article is here, and it is absolutely worth a read.

Several bloggers have responded with their take (a full list is at the end of Lisis’ article) and the topic is dear to me, so I’ll weigh in too.

It does seem passion generates income for some, but not for others. Therefore, ditching a steady job — under the assumption that your passion cannot fail you in the income department — is not exactly a bulletproof idea. But how do you know if your passion is the kind that would make you rich if you ran with it?

When it comes to making money, it seems to me that the starving artists and the turkey-feather craft peddlers are missing a crucial law of profiteering:

Passion has never paid bills, not for anyone.

Not for Michael Jordan, not for Bill Gates, not for the Beatles. What made all of them wealthy was that they created something large numbers of people were willing to pay for.

It just so happens that the Beatles’ passion (along with its much more rare and useful cousin, talent) resulted in the production of recorded music that has actually improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Forty years later, I can come home after a rough day, put on Abbey Road, and suddenly feel a lot better. That’s real, concrete value that their work has brought to my life — “value” as in something so useful I would pay money for it. I even bought Beatles coasters. Sixteen dollars, and worth every penny.

When I was a kid, I watched Michael Jordan’s unbelievable moves on TV and I loved it so much I wanted to be him. I had all the Chicago Bulls paraphernalia: basketballs, shoes, posters, clothes and more. At ten years old, whenever I could round up exactly $1.13, I would rush off to the card shop and buy a pack of NBA cards. So often I had not a penny more, and that’s what I did with my money. Because it was so worth it to me.

The point is this: people part with money when they find something that is directly valuable to them, that is to say they pay for what they believe improves their lives. Jordan’s passion for the game really didn’t really enter into the equation from my perspective. I just bought what I really liked.

You could argue that without passion, Michael Jordan would have had difficulty putting in the thousands of hours of practice required to be so spectacularly profitable. I wouldn’t disagree. However, he needed to be part of an intelligent business model (the NBA) for his basketball passion to be worth a cent. Playing for big bucks in the NBA just a natural career path for a basketball prodigy, but if he’d been a backgammon player — even an equally masterful one — he would never have become rich.

Money doesn’t come in exchange for passion, it comes in exchange for what other people value. That’s the key: the other people. Who says I value what you are passionate about? Elite backgammon matches just don’t produce enough value for enough people for it to make anyone rich.

I spend maybe $150 a year on Gillette Mach 3 razors. I buy them because they are far and away better than any other disposable razor I’ve used. I have no idea if the people at Gillette are fanatically passionate about making the best razors. It is more likely they are fanatically passionate about making money. I don’t care either way, I pay for what is useful to me, just like everyone else. Particularly in the realm of big business, the creative motives behind a product are usually quite distant and irrelevant to the person who is shelling out the cash.

Passion is a rather private and internal thing; it’s more of an interaction between your emotions and your actions. Your customers can only guess at why your product is so awesome (or so awful) and they probably aren’t particularly concerned with how it makes you feel inside.

So who ever said passion creates cash? I suspect, rather than outright snake-oil salesmen, it was people who decided to follow their passion and found that suddenly they enjoyed working, and were able to approach work with much less resistance and much more creativity. Imagine the difference between living a life where you cringe when you wake up, to one where you rush to work with enthusiasm.

But if your passion does not help you produce something that people will pay for, it cannot be expected to make you money. If your passion is to build and sell houses, you’ll come to your work with an excited and innovative attitude, which can only improve your chances to please clients and master your trade. It’s not hard to imagine that outlook leading quite organically to increased profits.

If your passion is to balance chairs on your chin, no matter how good you are at it you may have difficulty paying your bills, simply because people generally don’t tend to spend a lot of money to see people balance furniture on their chin. This, in turn, is because watching a chair-balancer doesn’t improve people’s lives in a significant or lasting way.

The correlation between passion and income, then, is only circumstantial, not absolute.

The economics of it can’t be ignored, and I don’t think any reasonable person would say that business sense is irrelevant just because passion is in limitless supply.

Fine art is one area where the passion-for-money fallacy is most apparent. I’ve seen more incredible works of art than I can count — intricate, painstaking, eye-popping work that must have taken hundreds of hours for the artist to compete.

But who will pay for those hundreds of hours of passionate work? I can see a hundred such works of art in the same gallery, deriving a measure of joy from each, for twelve dollars. For all the untold heaps of passion that go into it, where does the equivalent in money come from?

Nowhere, because there is no equivalency between passion and money. The market for fine art is very small. Most people never buy art, and when they do they don’t spend much. How much do you spend on paintings and sculptures in a year, compared to say, gasoline? There are art collectors out there who spend fortunes, but not many.

There is a tremendous disparity between the passion and effort that goes into a work of art and the amount a person is likely to pay for it. Some areas pay better than others, and your passion may very well not create much in the way of salable value for anyone else.

In a Mexican gallery I once saw a wonderful iron sculpture that I would have loved to own. The price tag was eight thousand dollars. Even though I loved it, if I had a spare eight thousand dollars (or a spare fifty) I wouldn’t buy it. There are too many other things I would rather spend that kind of money on: travel, furniture, living expenses. Eight thousand dollars worth of any of those things add much more value to my life than eight thousand dollars worth of sculpture.

Even if I had a spare half million, I don’t think I’d drop eight grand on it. I can always get more value out of eight thousand bucks than what a sculpture or a painting could possibly bring to my life.

So you can see how unbridled passion can easily eat up time and resources that nobody will ever see fit to compensate you for. Passion is no safety net at all. It could very well be dead weight, at least as far as supporting yourself goes.

To make money, you have to understand what makes money: delivering something of value to people willing to pay for it — and you have to be able to create that something of value efficiently. It’s extremely simple, but for some reason it it doesn’t seem to be widely known.

So to follow a passion with no regard for its value to others is just plain foolish, if you’re expecting it to pay your rent.