OBG: b&b117: What to do when your passion starts to feel like your job
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This week’s Oldie-but-Goodie:
You’ve managed to make your dream come true. You’ve done something that few people can say they’ve done – you’ve figured out how to to make money from your passion.
How can any day feel like a work day when you wake up getting to do what you love?
And yet, you may find yourself waking up one day and realizing that your passion is suddenly starting to feel like a job. What do you do now? This is the dream right?
In this show, we talk about what it means to do something you love and the very important difference between passion and purpose.
Episode Highlights:
Pam: I’ve found that the word passion is a very imprecise way to describe what you do on a daily basis and what your work is.
Dyalekt: You’re not passionate about your business everyday, but you do love your business every day. Just like in a relationship, you may not be happy with your partner every day, you may not even be excited to see your partner, you may wake up and be like “Ohhh, he’s in the kitchen right now making eggs. Uhhhhhh.” That could happen…You love the person you’re in a relationship with, and with your job you may not enjoy every aspect of it, but you can love your job.
Pam: It’s not passion that keeps me going every day. It’s purpose. That’s the big difference. It’s passion versus purpose. You can be passionate about something and keep it a hobby forever and not turn it into anything.
Dyalekt: You can be passionate about something without truly loving it. You can enjoy an action or a thing a lot…How willing are you to take your passion and share it, and engage it with other people, and take their side of it, and make what the two of you do, or the twelve or fifty or six thousand of you do a thing that’s collaborative and happens together?
Pam: It’s so funny that we talked about risk tolerance, but sharing your passion with others is a risk, and sometimes it can feel scary to do that and sometimes you don’t need to do that.
Pam: Passion implies that you’re always gonna love every second of it, and you’re always gonna be excited and pumped about it. (Dyalekt: Well, honeymoon phase like you said. Pam: Yeah, exactly.) And purpose implies parts of this are gonna be hard. Parts of this are you questioning why you’re still doing this and dealing with people who don’t share your purpose, and how to explain to people what your purpose is, and you’re sometimes gonna wake up and be like “Why the hell am I still doing this?” But that’s okay, because purpose isn’t meant to be this sweeping honeymoon phase constantly, purpose is meant to keep driving you forward despite how you’re feeling, ‘cause you go back to why you’re doing this in the first place every single time.
Pam: If you feel like your job has purpose, then stick with it. And it doesn’t have to be this huge “Oh, I’m saving the world” purpose.
Pam: That’s something that I think is very very important to watch out for, is to check in with yourself regularly, understand what the signs are between you just having a hard time and you constantly feeling like you’re fighting every day to do the thing that you’re doing, and is it something that you need to change in the way that you’re serving the purpose? Or is it the fact that the purpose just isn’t serving you anymore?
Pam: It is okay to change your purpose. It is okay to lose sight of why this is your purpose, and it is okay to figure out what you actually need to do next, despite what everyone is telling you, despite people thinking you’re crazy.
Dyalekt: You have to do something that means something to you, and the only way it means something to you is if it means something to others.