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Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

shant.nu

41–50 of 193 posts

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have it reversed, a lot of fun things suck when they make you money.

"a lot of fun things suck when they make you money" That has not been my experience...they become more fun.

There seems to be a virtuous cycle with making money doing something, where you learn to be passionate for things because they make money. The opposite seems to happen with passion projects trying to make money, and I wonder if it comes down to reality vs expecations and being on the wrong side of dissappointment.

“I can’t believe what people are willing to pay for this” can be either a positive or negative statement depening on what you value.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#43
post #22

I love programming (not just playing with code) and making excellent things with code, and electronics and mechanisms. I get paid to be good at it and help others do so as well, and I love that, too. All that said, the author’s warning is well heeded. There are things I’ve built and run at my own expense. They could be commercialized, but that bit doesn’t seem like fun to me (I don’t need the money, so there isn’t a…

What do you do where you get paid to make things with code, electronics, and mechanisms?

I've built puzzles for escape rooms but there's just not enough money in escape rooms for it to be worth it.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#44
I think there's a way about going about these things that can make you hate it or enjoy it. I'll share some of my story as an example of how I compartmentalize my different activities.

I code for myself, I have been since I was a kid. Often they're little utilities that I find fun, interesting, or useful. Sometimes they're tested, if for instance it's something running part of my house. Most of the time they're not because testing is arduous at times. I feel very attached to what I create for myself; it's often creative or exploratory in nature. I enjoy this kind of code and share it freely, usually without a warranty.

I code for a large firm. The way I code there is entirely different. I'm very unattached to that code. It receives lots of criticism that I learn from but at the end of the day as soon as I put hands on keyboard that code is their code. I'm talented so I get to work on things I find interesting, but this job is a paycheck where I'm paid for meeting delivery deadlines at a standard of quality. As a result the code I write here is of a different nature, it's easily maintainable, testable, and quite rote. This money funds my day to day life and savings account. I enjoy my coworkers and select them carefully to the best of my ability but it's a job at the end of the day.

I also have a consulting business. I build solutions for clients or help them attain their goals. This job isn't just a paycheck because I often work with small and medium businesses who don't know what they need or how it needs to be done. I get more agency than I do at my FAANG job, but I'm still working to get paid according by meeting the clients goals. The code I write here is less rote than my enterprise code, but not as creative as my personal code. This money usually funds projects around my house or trips. I enjoy helping small businesses, but it's a job.

I also have some for-profit ventures I work on with friends. I have much more agency here, but I'm working to serve the needs of potential and current customers. My quality standard is higher but it's not enterprise code; it's not quite as rote as my enterprise code but a little more on the creative side. The goal here is to eventually replace my corporate job. I have fun doing this because it's with people I enjoy but it's a job.

Compartmentalizing my commitment and knowing my desired outcomes has greatly helped balance this whole act. Outside of those things I have other serious hobbies: biking, gardening, camping, festing, recreational hallucinogens, spending time with my dog and my partner. Many of these overlap.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have it reversed, a lot of fun things suck when they make you money.

"a lot of fun things suck when they make you money" That has not been my experience...they become more fun.

It depends on your personality and your motivations. If you're intrinsically motivated to practice your hobby, you may not want extrinsic motivators. On the other hand, if you're naturally a business/entrepreneurial type who is extrinsically motivated (motivated by money), then yeah you may really enjoy turning your hobbies into businesses.

I think it's unusual though. Hobbyists in general seem to be intrinsically motivated by their interest in the hobby itself. I know I personally am not motivated by money at all, seeing it as a necessary evil to survive in this competitive society. My goal is to earn enough money to have a stable and secure lifestyle, with enough free time to pursue my hobbies.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#47
post #39

Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you try to make "what the market wants" rather than what you want, you're going to make garbage and further saturate a market that is already filled with garbage that was designed to cash in on "what the market wants".…

Eh, at the same time, I think the problem a lot of entrepreneurs have is that they overfocus on "what you are interested in" instead of "what the market wants", and therefore build something that nobody wants.

If you can find a perfect intersection, that's beautiful, but probably uncommon. Some of the most lucrative businesses are stuff like (anti)fraud/security/payments that is pretty darn drab.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#48
post #3

This is why I never attempted to find a programming job. I am the typical nerdy polyglot, having dabbled in a two-digit amount of programming languages. But I somehow always knew, if I had to do this 8 hours a day, for projects I am likely not intrinsically motivated to work on, I'd likely hate it after a few weeks. I envy those which managed to make this passion into a paying job without loosing the love for it.

pretty much. I sometimes vaguely remember when I used to like programming.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#49
Let's think about what it means to "make money". The phrase itself is already misleading because no one can make money, money is "made" by the central banks by changing some numbers in mainframe databases. These mainframes are connected to some local distribution banks like credit unions which then enable economic activity by business loans and other kinds of "investments", e.g. local government services like street cleaning, trash pickup, churches, schools, electricity, sewage, &etc. On top of this you have peripheral financial engineering like PayPal and credit cards.

At least that's the gist of it anyway. So no one can actually "make money" but what they can do is figure out how to tap into the flow of economic services that will get them indirect access to some of the numbers in the database managed by the central banks. At this point there are one of two things you can do which is either do something that enables governments to manage their populations by moving people around and keeping them clothed, housed, and fed (essential services) or you can provide non-essential services like keeping people entertained when they're not working and informing them of what's happening in the world at large, e.g. podcasts and newsletters. The problem is the following, there is no way to get rich from doing any of this because all of these things are saturated with enough people such that the overall money pie is already split between them pretty evenly so none of them are going to end up rich in any meaningful sense. This means the only way to truly get rich is to operate on a scale that no one has thought of before, e.g. Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon, Salesforce, SpaceX, Dell, Nvidia, AMD, Arm, Raytheon, Saudi Aramco, &etc.

Most of the time people are just fighting over scraps and the best they can hope for is some steady source of income that pays their rent and affords them some basic luxuries like visiting Las Vegas and watching a few acrobatic shows.

The people that are truly rich like Klaus Schwab operate in an entirely different world. Similarly for the executives at big pharma and big tech.

I'd say the game is inherently unfair but it still doesn't prevent people from playing it to the detriment of all the players involved.

Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it

#50
The problem isn't that you started doing it for money, it's that you didn't get much money in return. Your "business" has failed, but if you had managed to make money, you would've been satisifed.

Turning passion to business doesn't sound right, as if you're selling your soul, if you looked at it like "I tried to make money doing it but the ROI wasn't good" like any other project, I feel like it'd have been more graceful.

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