If there’s one giant BS line that clogs up the internet, it’s this:

Turn your passion into your job.

Uh, what a shyt idea.

Unless you’re the kind of person who, like me, knew at the age of five that you were put on earth to write, and you followed that by instinct all the way down the line, it’s possibly the worst advice you could ever accept and follow.

Here’s why:

Your passion becomes your job.

I’m going to talk about writing here, because that’s what I know.

I’m passionate about writing. I am into publishing so much that friends of mine have said to me, ‘Man you just can’t switch that publisher brain off, can you?!’. They’ve said that to me after thinking idly aloud, and me turning their thought into a robust and sellable book product.

Like my good friend in Spain to whom I suggested she ought to publish a book about her sex life. (She thought it was a great idea, by the way; so did all my lady friends who lined up wanting to read it…)

What happens when you turn your passion into your career is this:

You work long and hard at building your empire.

You work for other people, using that passion of yours, all the time.

At the end of the day (or week), when you’ve finally got some time in which to deploy your passion for yourself, you seriously don’t want to stare at a screen all day. If you do, you’ll have no life at all, much less any vision.

This is why, when my cousin approached me saying she was going to do a PhD because ‘I want to write’, I retorted, ‘f**k the PhD, pick up a pen’.

It’s also why, when kids tell me that they want to write, I tell them to get a physical job to counteract it.

If you’re using your best energy for other people all the time, you have no space left in which to ponder, to wonder, to allow your creative bucket to open up to the pixies. And you absolutely require that time, otherwise your battery gets empty and stays empty.

Therefore, if you’re considering becoming a writer, or gamer, or animator, or illustrator, or some other kind of content professional ‘because you love it’, don’t.

Just don’t.

Get a job outside, and do your passion in the time in which you can pour your soul into it.

You’ll be more motivated, you’ll produce better work, and you’ll be itching to get back into it.

All the best writers, for example, never wrote full-time. They wrote around their boring-a$$ jobs, and their boring jobs gave them the space in which to come up with genuinely brilliant works.

All the rest of us scramble to find time, then sit and stare and sigh. And what we produce is professional, at best.

Without this turning into a doom-and-gloomery, I want to point out that you can shift from professional to masterful.

And if you want to get on that train, best you do it with someone who can give you the support you need.

Like this: https://brutalpixie.aweb.page/content-athlete-coaching

~ Leticia “think before you werk” Mooney

PS. The 5-Minute Journal I’ll gift you when you sign up as a content athlete will really help you focus on the right things to move you forwards. Go go go.