Turning my hobby into a job made me hate it. Wish I'd become a plumber.
Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
111–120 of 193 posts
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#112Am I the only one who detests the term 'creative' as a noun? It seems to have come into being in the last few years and I just hate it. It feels like if you're not a creative then you're not creative. We're all creative in some way, so calling yourself 'a creative' is just daft.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#113Where 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".…
I made an account after years of lurking to say. This is it. I use to make and sell a very specific piece of hardware. The only reason I started a shop was to sell my surplus. It cost roughly the same for 1 as it did for 20. So I started selling them for $2 more than I paid and sold out. Then I did it again, and again. I sold about 100 units all together and never once did I hate my hobby during this time. At the sam…
I hope you’re not lurking on some network switch with that nick ;)
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
"a lot of fun things suck when they make you money" That has not been my experience...they become more fun.
You're an outlier. Studies have shown repeatedly that monetary compensation undermines intrinsic motivation: https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv > The authors synthesized the results from 128 controlled experiments. The results highlighted consistent negative effects of incentives — from marshmallows to dollars — on intrinsic motivation. These effects were particularly strong when the tasks were in…
It's amazing that society still puts so much stock into these types of impossibly confounded studies.
Ok, so they found that people who are top earners are no more satisfied with their jobs than bottom earners.
Might this be because top earners tend to be the types who neglect other aspects of their lives? Or who are hypercompeitive and are unlikely to be satisfied at any level, otherwise they would have stayed where they were?
Or maybe the higher the pay goes, the higher the concentration of high self discipline people willing to endure things they don't like for money. Etc.
And we are supposed to wave away all of these confounders because of controlled marshmellow experiments done on random students?
I'm sure Harvard meta studies do the best job possible distilling insight from these studies. The problem is how insightful these types of studies are in the first place.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 want to make a business, you must make what the market wants. Making your own stuff and trying to make money from it is possible, but it's no longer a business. I'm a professional software developer and a hobbyis…
If you want to make a business, you must make what the market wants. Making your own stuff and trying to make money from it is possible, but it's no longer a business. Right, we get it - but it's not binary, and in turns out there's considerable room for nuance. In fact some of the happiest and most genuinely successful people I know got there from figuring out how to navigate this valley, and knowing when to trust t…
I wonder if there's a distinction between doing what you love as work and doing what you love as hobby. I love software development and I especially love software development as work. I actually prefer to solve other people's problems than my own.
Perhaps some of this discussion is just talking at cross-purposes because the fundamental thing that we're discussing is not the same.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#116The only way to avoid this is to make the business a hobby too.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#117I used to do programming projects on the side for almost 10 years now. Programming has been my hobby, passion or time-pass whatever you could call it.
At the beginning, these projects was my vent from the day job to learn new tools/tricks, try out random stuff, nothing specific. And I mostly don't finish it, I just move on, because I didn't have to complete those. Some were open source, many weren't.
And then one of my project that I spent hardly few hours on got some 1000+ upvotes on ProductHunt. So many emails, new follows, it was exhilarating. It pegged me into submitting my next project to PH as well. Though it didn't get as much recognition, it was covered by few tech journals, then some more followed. Suddenly I had users who were using something that I've created and I started charging for it. When it started making money, albeit little (i think at the most it was $100/mo), it changed things.
A thought arose, "I like building sideprojects, what if I get to do this full time!". It was exciting!
After that, I could never go back to working on my projects for just "fun". It always had to have some business reason. Can it work? Is the idea worthwhile? What is the revenue potential and so on. Suddenly, I'm not just programming, but doing customer support, marketing, trying to promote the project, etc.
Eventually, I wasn't doing the thing that I enjoyed and by pursuing it for commercial motives, it had become something else entirely.
I think many of us fall into this pit either by chance or being egged from outside. In my case, what I enjoyed was just programming. I conflated it with building a business. Unless you are famous or successful, almost anything that are pursued by passion alone, had to morph into something if you want it to support your life.
I just went full-time a month ago to try and build some profitable products. And I'm trying to get that "fun" part into the full-time thingy again. Can I truly work on things I enjoy, try new stuff and still make money out of it? Only time will tell. If the results don't come, so be it.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The technology currently exists to do away with all wealth disparities and achieve a true meritocracy Can you name that technology?
Give every child a library and see what happens. It could be electronic or otherwise.
They play games and watch mindless YouTube videos. This isn't a very good argument.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#119Malcolm Lowley writes on The Literary Situation (1958; first published 1947):
"Aside from the hard-working authors of textbooks, standard juveniles, mysteries and Westerns, I doubt that two hundred Americans earned the major portion of their incomes, year after year, by writing hard-cover books".
This was before television took over.
Re: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The technology currently exists to do away with all wealth disparities and achieve a true meritocracy Can you name that technology?
Give every child a library and see what happens. It could be electronic or otherwise.
Aren't there libraries everywhere already (in developed world at least)?