3 Thoughts on How to Turn your Passion into Your Career

3 Thoughts on How to Turn your Passion into Your Career – Tips how to do what you love as your primary day job and source of income.

You hear it all the time – that the ultimate pinnacle of any professional path would be to reach the point where you are finally able to “pursue your passion” and do what you love as your primary day job and source of income.

Certain business authors have rejected this idea, and have argued that “passion” is a dangerous and fickle basis for your professional goals, and that the best thing to do is simply to work on developing a skill to a high degree of proficiency, and then staking your career on that – thus allowing “passion” to come later.

That suggestion is all well and good, but there’s no denying that we all have particular pastimes and activities that inspire us and motivate us, and that being able to make a proper living by indulging in those pastimes would be a great thing, and in many cases, a dream come true as well.

Clearly, turning your passion into your career isn’t an entirely straightforward or intuitive process – or else everyone would already be doing it. But, nonetheless, there are certain tips and suggestions that may increase the likelihood that you will be able to do so.

Here are a few thoughts on how to turn your passion into your career…….

• Get a sense of what you want to achieve, but then focus mostly on establishing and entrenching productive habits and systems

It’s one thing to get a clear sense of what it is you want to achieve in life, and it’s another thing to become completely obsessed with your “goals,” to the point where you spend every waking day in a state of moderate anxiety, yearning for the moment when you finally “make it.”

In fact, these anxiety-provoking aspects have earned goals, themselves, criticism from writers such as James Clear, author of the book “Atomic Habits.”

According to Clear, not only does being goal-focused in this way lead to negative emotion – as you are always yearning for the next accomplishment, and never contenting yourself with the “here and now” – but it also is likely to be an unpredictable and inefficient way of actually ensuring that you are able to move your life in the kind of direction you want to move it in.

For example, Clear points out that just about everyone in any competitive field has a very precise sense of the goals they want to accomplish – and it would be naïve, at best, to suggest that some of them just “want it more,” than the others, and that this is what separates winners from losers.

The difference isn’t in the goal itself, or how much the individuals in question “want” that goal, but rather in the specific everyday habits and systems they employ in order to get themselves closer towards the goal.

Among the various examples he lists in his book, Clear cites the case of the British cycling team, who went from deeply mediocre, to winning the Tour de France for the first time in their history, and then several more times in a row, as a result of tweaking and adjusting relatively small and focused elements of their training, equipment, and routines.

No doubt, their “goal” had been the same before and after their meteoric rise – the difference was in their habits and systems.

In order to make your passion into your career, you also need a sense of what it is you want to achieve, but you shouldn’t allow yourself to get too caught up in reflecting on the “goal” itself. Instead, you should focus on identifying and implementing the kinds of daily habits that will realistically help to move you in the right direction.

• Use smart working strategies and tools to help free up the time to spend developing your passion project

Time is, of course, a finite resource, and easily one of the most valuable resources that any entrepreneur has at their disposal.

Money comes and goes, and can be amassed and spent. Time, on the other hand, is uncertain, and once it’s been spent, it’s gone and you can’t do anything to recoup it.

In order to turn a passion of yours into your career, you simply have to find the time to work on it regularly and consistently, day in and day out, until the benefits begin to accrue.

But, if you are chronically busy as so many of us are, it might be difficult for you to figure out a way to get that necessary time freed up.

An excellent approach here can be to use smart-working strategies and tools to help make you more efficient in your day job, and so free up more time to spend on your side projects. Document templates software may save you a deceptively large amount of time, and so may many other assorted productivity-boosting tools.

• Enjoy the process of doing what it is you do, and don’t get overly caught up in the “strategic” stuff

Perhaps more than ever, the market is increasingly looking for authenticity, rather than just flashy branding, and ambitious promises.

Many people are essentially jaded as a result of the ubiquity of advertising, email and newsletter campaigns, and all the rest of the ways in which businesses generally try to grab people’s attention and make a positive impression on them.

One of the chief benefits of doing something that you’re passionate about, is that “authenticity,” and “enthusiasm” should come as a given – and, when you allow these features to “shine through,” you can expect that your prospective customers and clients will take notice, and will be predisposed to view you in a more positive way than they might otherwise have done.

Unfortunately, though, people often get in their own way when attempting to market and “create a brand” for their passion projects and dream businesses. Perhaps this is partly a result of the fact that they really want the venture to work out, and so can easily get up overly caught up in the “strategic” stuff, and can come off as insincere as a result.

Don’t get too obsessed with presenting a certain brand image to the people you interact with. Instead, do what you do, be honest, and let your passion speak for itself.

*Collaborative Post*