Thinking about Turning Your Passion Project into a Business? Read This First.

The Question You Need to Ask Yourself

If you’re in America, you know that we are smackdab in the land of hustle.

Not opportunity. Hustle.

As a business student, I had a lot of people tell me and assure me that I could turn my passion into a business.

That way, I could make a living doing what I love and have total control over my life!

And that’s great!

But… I’m still working a day job.

I have for years after college.

In fact, I don’t know business/work outside of this template.

So before I considered turning my passion projects into businesses, here’s what I learned.

Know what you’re asking for

Doctor-turned-YouTuber Ali Abdaal actually said it really well.

To paraphrase the brilliant man, some YouTubers are now realizing that they traded a 9–5 for a 24/7.

I don’t care what it is, a 24/7 is not long-term fun.

It’s the pinnacle of short-term fun absolutely.

But does a 24/7 ever turn out to be just as fun a year later? Or 2? Or 3? Or 5? Or 10?

I won’t pretend there aren’t exceptions. But in general, you can’t run on maximum effort every second of every day.

And there is nothing more heartbreaking than having that apply to your passion.

Because turning something you love into something you despise via burnout is a terrible thing to have happen.

So you have to be careful about what you really want and are really asking for and wanting.

Are you wanting to do what you love for a living or are you asking to trade one frustration for another without realizing it?

So… What Do You Do?

I’d like to invite you to ask yourself this question if you’re in this boat:

You’re working a 9–5 and you can’t wait to quit and do what you love for a living. Once 5:00 rolls around and you clock out, you immediately get to work on your big thing and you keep saying that one day you’ll make this your main source of income and so you’re gonna work twice as hard on this as you do at your day job.

Ask yourself this question.

“What consequences do you foresee if you limited yourself to less than 8 hours a day working on your passion project?”

Here’s why I invite you to ask that.

You need to have time to breathe.

Whether that’s something you love or something you hate, you have to give yourself room to breathe.

As much as we would love to say otherwise, it’s just the truth.

But if you’re truly focused on your passion, what typically happens includes a few things:

• You work harder because you recognize that you have less time
• You prioritize the things about your passion project that you are truly passionate about, filtering out the unnecessary things
• You give yourself time to relax and recharge from the thing you love instead of slowing down drastically.

Plus, giving yourself room to do other things in your life lets you in some ways appreciate your project because that time and effort becomes more valuable in the long run.

To wrap up, there’s nothing wrong with doing your passion project as a business or even your primary source of income. But it’s more important to recognize if this is something that you actually want to evolve into a business and the consequences that come with that.

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