A hobby is something you do that brings you joy. It can be a welcome distraction – or even a passion. There is a lot of advice floating around in the small business space that you should follow your passion and turn your hobby into a business.
In a recent post on entrepreneur.com, “Don’t Follow Your Passion: 4 Reasons Why Making a Business Out of Something You Love Is a Mistake,” Carol explains why turning your hobby into a business could kill your joy. She begins:
I may not be the world’s most romantic person, but I am definitely realistic. And in the realm of business, a healthy dose of realism is helpful, especially when the majority of businesses fail.
This means that I have to spend a lot of time countering the idea that you should follow your passion into business. Here are four reasons why you should not let your passion lead you into business ownership.
1. You’ll do less of what you love to do.
If you love to bake, you should open a bakery! If you love kids, you should open a nursery school! Everyone thinks that if you love to do something, by opening a business, you’ll get to do more of it. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
The reality is that when you open a business, you have to run the business. In doing so, you have to do and oversee many functions from marketing to accounting to handling employees to dealing with customer service and more.
So, the hard truth is, at the end of the day, you actually spend less time doing whatever it is you enjoy doing, whether it’s baking, spending time with children or otherwise.
Your responsibility as an entrepreneur is not to do one task — it’s to run a business. If you are excited about wearing multiple hats and want to tackle the challenge of managing all aspects of an operation, and you think you’ve got the chops to do it, you’re headed in the right direction. But, your passion can lead you astray if you think that you will be spending your time focused on that one particular passion.
2. Passion doesn’t pay the bills.
No matter how passionate you are about a product, service, idea or otherwise, it doesn’t pay your bills and you can’t use it as a currency to buy things.
You can read the rest of the post here.
