The modern trap of turning hobbies into hustles (2019)
repeller.com
repeller.com
Somewhere along the line, tech students got the idea that the key to success is to have many side projects and side hustles going at once. While it is true that in very narrow, specific cases something like a GitHub project could fill in gaps in a resume, it's rare that companies even look at GitHub work as the deciding factor in a hiring decision. It's too easy to let your energy, attention, and motivation get diluted across too many side projects. The problem is amplified when people start entering relationships and eventually having kids, further diluting their limited time and energy.
Some of the worst offenders are things that don't necessarily feel like a side hustle but nevertheless drain inordinate amounts of time. Daytrading stocks and cryptocurrencies commonly traps people into constantly checking their phone, Twitter, and portfolio to avoid losing money or missing out on breaking news. The pocket change most people make (or lose) on day trading is lost in the noise relative to a successful tech career.
The best advice I have for career success is to pick one thing at a time and focus intently on it. Use your off time to do anything else: Social activities, physical activities, or even simply relax and recharge for the next day.
It's better to do one thing well (usually your job) rather accumulate a lot of half-finished side projects or side hustles that are constantly stealing attention.
The second part of your argument is not the same. Trading stocks has nothing to do with programming, so much so that you can’t even use it to lie to yourself that ‘yes indeed, today I have chipped away at being a better programmer by trading these stocks’. It certainly can steal your attention, but it can never ever be used as a form of self manipulation (therefore, not a problem if you do it in moderation, like everything else in life).
It’s the first type of distraction that can destroy your soul if you indulge in it.
Specialization is great, if the specialty you choose ends up being important or highly in-demand. For example, everyone wants to be the Geoffrey Hinton of the 21st century, a luminary in deep learning. Not too many people want to be the Geoffrey Hinton of 1986, publishing back-propagation into an AI winter and subsequent decades-long disinterest. It's hard to know which one you'll be (or in the above, both!)
Side projects and hustles allow you to broaden your toolbox and see potentially interesting crossovers. "It's like [X] for [Y]!" is a cliche startup pitch at this point, but it's true that a lot of cool ideas arise from applying principles of one field in a widely disparate area.
I don't think that it's particularly wrong to choose one route or the other--I admire the specialists I know, even as I know that's not something I can replicate. I'm too enamored of the possibilities, and cognizant of the brevity of my lifespan, to be able to commit like that.
In my experience working for a huge company makes it very easy to broaden your skills. You can change teams, take on mentorship and recruiting, lead teams, lead initiatives, switch from front- to backend at different times, and learn from a large number of people - all from the "comfort" of the company you are already in.
That's the theory behind side projects, but it's a false dichotomy.
Side projects are, by definition, something you do on the side. Your primary day job requires attention whether or not you do any side projects. Side projects are additive on top of the work of your day job, but subtractive out of your pool of free time and energy.
Side projects always start with good intentions of broadening horizons, but people generally realize that they only have so many intensely productive hours in a day. Do you allocate your most productive hours to your job? Or to a side project? It's tempting to say "both" but in practice that will spread someone's finite energy too thin across both domains.
Students tend to go wrong when they think that side projects are the key to unlocking their next big job opportunity. When they start to burn out in their dayjob, they think they're just a couple of side projects away from qualifying for an opportunity that will make them happy. The trap is that being burned out at a dayjob and adding the additional work of side projects only worsens the burnout. They get stuck thinking they need to finish the side projects before they change jobs, but they can't complete the side projects because they're too burned out from jobs and a side project. In these cases, I encourage people to drop the side projects and just apply to jobs. It works better than most people expect.
On the other hand, I do find a lot of enjoyment in fields that, today, are dominated by "winner takes all" dynamics and extremely low probabilities of (financial) success (e.g. most creative fields). I don't mind diversifying my time between a primary job that, while not burnout-land, is also a bit boring and reliable, and a secondary that, while incredibly unlikely to "strike gold", is rejuvenating of my creative energies. I do have to be careful that it does not drift into the maladaption that you note though.
I guess what I'm saying is: hobbies are good, too.
I certainly know people who do similar things around open source projects.
For most people doing the side-hustle thing (and basically all of them doing it successfully), the calculus is "Put in the minimum amount of effort in my day job, get my R&R in the remaining time at work, and spend my mornings/nights/weekends working on the side hustle" vs. "Remain fully engaged mentally for the 8 hours I'm at work, relax when I come home, don't do the side hustle." That's why many employers hate side hustles.
I can't say which one is a better strategy, because it depends on the circumstances. Certainly the bulk of my lifetime income & assets comes from giving my all to my projects at Google, delivering successfully on them, and getting promoted a couple times. But before then I worked at a couple of startups and there was basically zero opportunity for a raise or promotion, because the company wasn't growing and there was no money to be had. And I got the Google job in part because of side projects (non-monetizable, but they showed I knew my CS and could work with a modern tech stack) done after work.
Maybe the principle is different though (not startup can bigco)... I did a bunch of side projects in school and at bigco before concentrating focus, so in a way we both went broad then had success going deep.
Just thinking out loud, I think we agree.
Nope. I actually developed two products for the second of the startups, which was the time period I was working on the side projects. The CEO (my boss) and I are still on good terms, and he knew about the side projects while I was working on them.
Startups usually fail because nobody wants what they're building, i.e. the startup should never have been founded in the first place. Certainly this was the case for this one: we were doing a platform for hedge fund algorithmic trading, but hedge funds are usually very resistant to running their code on someone else's platform, both because of lock-in/competitive reasons and because their code & algorithms are their crown jewels and they're very sensitive about running that on other people's infrastructure.
Yes, this is the real problem.
Side projects for fun and learning is fine. Nothing wrong with exploring new ideas as long as you're having fun.
But somehow side projects have become synonymous with compensating for misaligned careers. I see too many people working all day (or avoiding work all day) then coming home to work all evening and weekend. Then they wonder why they're burned out and not getting promotions at work.
Side projects can be a springboard to career advancement if executed carefully, but for every 1 side project success story I probably see 10 other people with side projects that never do anything other than drain their free time and add more mental work to their TODO list every day.
And quite frankly it would very likely bore me to focus one one thing only. I am not on this planet to get bored with my life or hunt for some mythical sunlit uplands by betting all my time and energy onto one thing, unable to keep a healthy distance riding it into a ditch because I want it to suceed too much. I want the things I create to be objectively good. For this I have to be able to keep a distance to them. Making them the sole center of my life would prevent me from that.
Apart from that I am easily the most productive person in my social environment, parts of which are of the "only focusing on one thing"-crowd. However I don't think my approach works for everyone. There are types who need these context switches and there are types who need that focus.
Failure is likely, success can be huge, that means my emphasis is on learning and have as many at bats as possible. How I imagine the best strategy is:
Try a lot of things learning as much as you can > prune what isn’t working and focus on what is (more and more of your fixed pie of time dedicated to the best opportunity) > continue until you pass your goal of success > then diversify again to maintain that level of success
You don’t focus on something too much until it’s proven itself, otherwise you’re far more likely to waste too much time on failures. Once you “really have something validated” (this is its own conversation), then you focus more and more on it driving it to its potential.
Diversification finds the potential winners and learns the fastest, focus makes that winner reach its potential.
By the way, many businesses have been built like that. Take Nike, for example. Phil Knight, the founder, worked as an accountant during the day for many years while building his shoe empire.
When I was working on side stuff all the time, I was getting better rapidly, finding new ideas, solving problems in better ways and just always out of my comfort zone. I stopped because I did get burned out a bit. The focus was never resume filler though.
Of course the most successful people you mentor are the ones who are only doing what you are guiding them to do and aren't distracted by life, it doesn't mean they are better.
This sounds like propaganda given by the CEO to have more effective employees. There is no doubt that focus can help you improve and get there faster, but at what cost and with what life goals?
Side hustles can be fun, profitable and life changing. We've got at least 3 that has allowed my partner to reduce her work hours to 4 days a week and generates half of her salary. We can buy fun stuff and business expense it and if we continue to improve we can gain more control and freedom.
Original post was about having hobbies and not feeling guilty about not turning them into side businesses. It would be better if our culture was set as a default to say "that's awesome, it's so good you could sell it if you were so inclined, but feel no pressure to do so, I just want you to know it's that good", instead of saying "you should make a store/service to sell your hobby" and make people feel bad, even though it's just a compliment.
Or, work toward finding a job and career that you enjoy.
Doing occasional side projects for fun is fine. Doing side coding projects as a form of escapism because your job isn't aligned with what you actually want to be doing all day is a fool's errand. The time is better spent searching for a job that comes closer to what you want to do.
> Side hustles can be fun, profitable and life changing. We've got at least 3 that has allowed my partner to reduce her work hours to 4 days a week and generates half of her salary. We can buy fun stuff and business expense it and if we continue to improve we can gain more control and freedom.
Of course - If you're starting a small business then that's something else entirely.
The vast majority of side projects that I see aren't profitable small businesses, though.
In my opinion, it's better for your mental health to treat your job as a job and get as much as you can out of it in terms of money and improving your skills. I think with enough time in the industry, you eventually figure this out.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing side projects as a form as escapism if your job isn't aligned to what you want to do. Life is what you make it. There's no "correct" way to live.
I think that this dismisses the joy of learning things that are unrelated to your day job or any hustle. I enjoy woodworking, turning it into a side hustle where I need to justify expenses would suck the joy out of it. I do something that is not work, recharge, and it is intellectually stimulating even if it is nothing like my day job in software.
I don’t know if side hustles are the answer, but I know from experience however hard you work, there is a limit to awards at your job. Plus, employers do not care about their employees in general. Anyone who believes they care is just delusional.
Focusing on one thing is good, the trick is picking the right thing to focus on.
I would say intense focus on one thing reaches a point of diminishing returns. The key is to recognize when you have mostly tapped that vein and develop something else. That doesn't have to be a github project, often you want something far afield, especially to avoid burnout. it can be speaking classes, or improv classes, or even fitness, or electronics, or whatever, anything that helps your stack.
Yep, this is huge for me.
My "real job" is as a software developer, like most of us here. My side hustles are many and varied: portrait photography, vinyl decals, custom garments, metalworking, leather working, drone stuff (photography, photogrammetry, volumetric, even FPV and racing), etc.
I've had a few instances where I've found myself suddenly without employment for one reason or another. It's stressful, but it's not the emergency that it would be if not for all of my hobbies/hustles. I can spend a couple of days refreshing contacts and easily expect to be making enough money doing drone stuff alone to pay my bills and put food on my family's table.
For me, I've realized that I dont have it in me to be 100% focused on one thing, which is great - then I can manage my expectations and goal, however I still try to be mindfull and not try to do to much.
The best possible thing that could happen by totally dedicated to job would at best be one more promotion to keep working on same mediocre stuff or manage a team doing that for few thousand dollars more. And it is not even blaming management as there are only limited opportunities in saturated industry and far more folks are chasing them.
Even those half finished projects have given me more knowledge and experience than mind numbing "next generation technology" training that corporate got a great deal on by some discount instructors.
Now it could all have been different if I joined a hyper-growth industry at right time. I might have gone far by just knowing one thing. At that point I could be proselytizing younger people that "you've got to focus on just one thing and you will make it big"
I saw exact example of this by listening to a SVP in my office who apparently rose through ranks by "sheer hard work, grit and focus". However to me it was pretty clear he joined company just at the time when industry as a whole about to enter massive growth. Of course he isn't gonna say how stars were aligned and he just got massively lucky. It is for others to see what it really was.
The interviewer asked each of them to write down the one thing that contributed most to their success. Both independently wrote "focus".
https://www.inc.com/marc-emmer/bill-gates-warren-buffett-rev...
I remember reading the book The Goal in business school. What impressed me the most, was that the most efficient path to achieving a goal, is often non-intuitive, and sometimes even involves making destructive choices - choices that outside observers would find absurd and distasteful.
https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0...
It's not only about choosing a singular goal, it's also about meticulously calculating your path there.
Don't follow the herd. The pack is FULL of jack-of-all-trades that have a smattering of random skills they picked up. Make literally every life choice with directionality and planning.
But it got me thinking: what does it mean to me to have listeners? It's great when people 'like' my music, but in a lot of ways, it's just numbers on a screen. What difference would it make if I had 10,000 or 100,000 listeners instead of 1000? Maybe it would be cool if I were in a store and hear a song of mine playing on the radio or watching a movie and it was playing as a sound track. The validation I've felt from similar successes is great but it is fleeting. Ultimately, the most joy I get out of it is being able to sit down and create music that I myself enjoy and respect.
I've been making music on and off for about 25 years. Have worked with different vocalists and other musicians. Now I do most of the songwriting myself but have another songwriter I sometimes collaborate with. I do most of the production myself as well but I typically hire a session vocalist or other additional musicians such as a guitarist through soundbetter.com or airgigs.com. I'll also hire professional mixing/mastering for each song.
I also am an amateur photographer/videographer. I make my own videos but have also hired other people to make some videos as well. The first video is mine: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYMdaRwwvf8ToJSSU1sIAng
It is amazing that now you can hire people online to do almost everything a professional record label can do--or do it yourself. Of course, paying a few hundred dollars for services like I do typically doesn't yield the same results as a record label investing $100,000 for it. But unlike decades past, there is no longer a wall out there preventing me from getting worldwide distribution and hiring professionals to assist in every way.
Once you actually know how to get followers, engagement, and likes, the value of that currency decreases. Sure the dopamine is the same and you still have the chance to gauge how one piece of media performs against another. But there is no difference or point unless you are aiming to sell the profile (which is a decently sized market if you werent aware).
okay that's not it. forget everything you think you know about instagram, especially anything about vanity, anything that bothers you about the pursuit of vanity or your assumptions about it. you'll also be re-assigning what you think you know about instagram follower growth systems.
buying an instagram profile is more similar to a merger and acquisition deal, in the sense that you are actually buying all the direct messages (DMs) - the customer rolls. A popular profile does business through DMs (you also are buying the "og email account" to pass security measures, so if anyone emailed you get that too). They've done business with people that want to do promotions on their profile, business with entire networks of profile buyers and sellers. Buying a profile buys you that whole customer list. The customers are even the innocuous empty private accounts with 0 followers that are the point of contact for heavy traders. Things you may not have known existing. This is your way into a steady stream of unlisted accounts that are for sale. You can repeatedly just ask them what else they have.
when you choose an account for rebranding, you are looking for something similar to what you will rebrand to with certain levels of engagement and reach, and ideally with similar demographics although it will already be heavily correlated. wealth and motivation can be rebranded to some playboy guy, women's fashion can be rebranded to baby stuff, rinse repeat.
the general profile is targeting the whole world, so none of the "lets normalize this super progressive thing" matters at all. traditional gender roles are in vogue.
congratulations you've skipped the rat race of growing a profile. all the apps and systems to grow a profile are more expensive and time consuming than just owning an already grown profile.
you break even by doing promotions. promotions are people paying to be tagged in one of your posts for a few hours. then you delete or archive the post. or you do it on the story.
now lets go back to the apps and systems that are targeted to people trying to "grow" instagram accounts. you can use them, but its only to offset the attrition. when you rebrand you lose followers when they notice they are following something they don't remember following and don't want to. your goal is to just slow down the unfollowers, the banned, the deactivated, by having new followers replace them. But not to actually "make numba go up".
Now back to gen pop. the general population likes popular shiny things. I was just at a party yesterday where an adult woman was fawning over this "famous" person who "is really famous" and "has, like, 25k followers on instagram". This is a nearly perfect currency that doesn't actually get spent. "Oh my god, someone has an advantage with women I hate this let me find something wrong with it, aha! fraud!" nope. Notice that these are real followers, real engagement, real views, less or different work. Brands, companies, anyone wanting promotion or attention actually do offer things for free or pay. Worry about the people that are doing less effective things. But if you must be bothered, selling an account is against Instagram/Facebook's terms of service, so you have that going for you. The terms of service.
I've been aware of this, from sporadic participation, for half a decade now. Brand accounts, influencer accounts, you name it, just when you think its oversaturated and nobody will give them time of day, another year goes by and it still is interesting to people and the trading networks are more refined.
With multiple profiles you can also more easily grow your other profiles. Basically giving yourself free promos, or anyone you like. They are real human followers, after all.
Efficiently having real views involves having an already popular account
Being in that creative flow state is the best feeling. If someone else appreciates what you made, that's just the icing on an already tasty cake.
I post my silly art projects on Instagram for 30 or 40 likes. Would I love more? Well, yeah. Endorphins and all that. But I can't stop making this stuff because I just really, really enjoy the moments of making it.
Promotion is a different story, though... I don't think it makes sense to throw real money (aka more than like $20 on Submithub/Labelradar, which I consider more paid feedback than promotion) for a release unless you're planning to get an actual return on investment there. At which point it crosses the line into "hustle," for me.
A hobbyists can focus on extremely uneconomical aspects of a thing, precisely because they don't need to think economically about it - a business person doing so will likely fail at both their business, and tragically, their hobby...
For anyone interested in a deeper exploration of this theme, I will shamelessly plug my podcast on deep, obsessive hobbies, "When The Work is Done": https://www.whentheworkisdone.com/
Only managed to put up one episode yet (an interview with a very successful neuroscientists who spends almost all his spare time tailoring...), but am hoping to have many more episodes in the works soon.
Feeling the need to be constantly "productive" is, I think, really a separate issue.
I also differentiate between wanting to do something vs wanting to have done something. It's easy to want to have written a novel, to have learned to play piano, or to have painted something. But if you don't enjoy the process (the actual writing, the practicing, etc), then you may just be torturing yourself for the sake of self-image. Find something enjoyable in the actual process and you won't need to force yourself so much, you'll gravitate toward it naturally for its own sake, and you won't feel guilty if you decide to just watch TV or phone scroll instead. (Plenty of books and articles out there on forming new habits.)
'obtain by forceful action or persuasion'. "the brothers headed to New York to try and hustle a record deal"
Why is the word hustle suddenly used all the time to describe work? I blame Gary Vaynerchuk, the born wealthy marketing hustler who was a big influence back in the days when 'social media' was cute and new. It just sounds shady and seedy to me, and not something I'd want anywhere near any of my interests or hobbies
You only listed one definition.
'The Hustler' is a good example of people making a buck out of their hobby https://youtu.be/bpc3TKhS6MU
Which is itself a hustle per the definitions GP quoted! Probably one of the oldest-going ones. That is, promoting the image of some lofty qualities of a perfect athlete, to give additional meaning and allure to what's otherwise an exercise in competitive showmanship, an entertainment business.
The nature of the swindle becomes visible when one considers that: 1) the role-model athletes, whether today or in ancient past, are people entering large championships - i.e. professional athletes; 2) every player in professional sports is driven to get better, but there's a silent, implicit "but not too much, lest the game becomes too easy, too boring for the audience, and we the spectator money" attached to this.
I’m not one to defend GV, but I don’t think I would call being born in Soviet Belarus in 1975 and coming to the US in 1978 at the age of 3 as being “born wealthy”.
Maybe their family had some connections. Maybe his family turned those connections into a healthy (upper?) middle class life ($3m of sales at a discount liquor store in NJ is not “wealthy”).
Anyway, regardless of how one views GV, seeing what his family did and what he did ($3m to $60m annual sales in 5 years) is impressive.
Let’s give credit where credit is due.
Writing a program just for personal seems like just work. Those programs tend to be shoddy and barely function.
I enjoyed a lot that Boeing made money off of the 757. I enjoy watching them fly, it's my favorite airplane to fly on. The newspaper once ran a photo of one being cut up for scrap, and it was like someone was cutting me up for scrap.
I hate it when my employer would cancel a project I was working on, I didn't work on it just for the paycheck. When I work for myself, nobody cancels my project but me.
Just finished Billion Dollar Loser about WeWork, and one extreme hustler that stuck in my head was Masayoshi Son (Masa).
Have you ever seen any of his "300-year horizon vision" slides? They are horrible: https://www.businessinsider.com/13-slides-softbanks-vision-f...
If anyone else popped these slides out, they would be asked to go back to elementary school, while any designers in the room would pour acid in their eyes to unsee those.
What I am saying is, some people are not particularly brilliant (and IMO, Masa is not), and even the analysts at SoftBank saw the WeWork pyramid con from 100 miles out. Masa is a special kind of nuts, however, deciding to come up with one implementable idea every day, when he was at UC Berkley. He is a breed of hustler with a nuclear motor up his butt that never stops running, throwing shit at the wall until something sticks.
But again, very few people have the perseverance and the energy, so know yourself.
And when I spend a Saturday morning out doing what I enjoy, it truly does energize me for everything else going on in life. I doubt I'd get that energy if I started trying to figure out how to make this return monetary value.
If all you have is passion, and you're not able or willing to closely examine the step-by-step process for how your passion translates to cash, and how that cash makes its way to your bank account, then of course you won't enjoy a hobby as a career or business venture. You need to actually enjoy the business aspects directly if you want to be happy with a hobby-turned-career.
Fortunately for me, tax deductions are one of my favorite interests and talents.
Almost every kind of consumptive spending can be filed as a business expense, when every kind of your hobby is also rationalized as a potential business.
All the endorphins and dopamine of spending on things I like go to me, and none of the money goes to the government!
Eventually you have to shift hobbies or stop deducting if you arent making a profit, after like half a decade. Not hard.
In the mean time, understand that despite the popular understanding of taxes, the outcome is that the government is seeking to incentivize transactions.
So from their perspective, its not really about revenue collection and people pulling a fast one on them. They want you to spend in the economy. They want money flowing in the economy. The remainder of the hoarded money that isn’t spent is being subject to tax, so the government can figure out how to keep it moving instead. Its up to you to find transactions that reduce your tax burden, but they don't care if you choose the right or wrong transactions. They've set up a system to have a high velocity of funds flowing to all sectors of the economy without the state needing to steer it.
Understanding that can help you understand why it isn't hard to create these deductions.
People set up a business name and register it in a state and create a business bank account partially for separate accounting to make it simpler to pass an audit, and simpler to make it more convincing that an audit wasn't needed to begin with.
No, you're not, because you are getting all kinds of benefits from living in a rich area of a rich country (you name a number of them in your post) that don't appear explicitly in your income but have a huge positive impact on your quality of life. Try living on the same income in a much poorer area or a much poorer country where none of those benefits are available and see how you like it.
I've lived in areas of grinding poverty and hated it, but I'm more interested now in how William Gibson's quote "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." Silicon Valley is the future. Those other areas of deprivation are in the past. In the future, many of our needs will be taken care of, freeing us up to be creative.
You are right, I am lucky to live where I live.
I am astonishingly rich compared to what people had 40 years ago, within my own living memory. I have a supercomputer on my desk connected to the world's information. I have a device in my pocket that lets me communicate with anyone on the planet. Long-distance charges no longer apply. My local library has every magazine I'd ever want to read. I'm awash in free music from around the world. I can view University level courses, free of charge. Have an idea for a 3D design? Download Blender for free and 3D print it for very little cost. The device in my pocket is a phone, voice recorder, video camera, still camera, mapping system and much more.
I tend to agree with Louis C.K. - "Everything is amazing, and no one is happy"
I know that. I'm pointing out that it is often not a good indicator of the actual amount of wealth you have access to. As you acknowledge, you have access to a huge amount of wealth that does not appear in your nominal income or your nominal net worth. Your real net worth includes your share of that huge amount of wealth. And the post you responded to with your comment about "poverty level" was talking about net worth, i.e., the actual wealth you have access to, not nominal income.
> In the future, many of our needs will be taken care of
How? By magic? No: by other people creating the wealth you make use of. You have access to all those wonderful benefits in your area because other people built those things. What about their needs? Who is "taking care of" those? Answer: nobody except themselves.
In short, this vision you have, where you can just have all your needs taken care of, only works for some fraction of people. If everybody takes that approach, nobody's needs will be taken care of, because nobody will be creating any of the wealth required to do that.
Some things that money can buy are important in the larger scheme of things. Money can buy you the ability to spend time in person with family and friends who live far away from you. Money can buy you the ability to change where you live if where you live now isn't working for you. Money can buy you the ability to make some problems just go away instead of having to constantly worry about them. All of those things (and many other things money can buy you) can be huge improvements in your quality of life.
In short, money is more choices, and more choices means more freedom. The fact that many people use the choices money gives them to do things you don't like does not mean all choices that money gives you are bad or unimportant. Nor does the fact that some very important things can't be bought with money detract from the value of many things that can.
Do something that might make you happy. If it doesn't make you happy, try something else. If it does make you happy, keep doing it. If the thing that made you happy no longer makes you happy, try something else.
Oh, and, don't take advice on happiness from blog posts by strangers. Friends, maybe, given that they share a similar mindset to you, but not strangers. And yes I realize the irony of this.
I already feel this encroachment in my main hustle; engineering is both a career and passion [1], but doing it as a living drains the reserves of wanting to do it outside of work.
I recently watched an interview with Sofia Coppola right after Lost in Translation came out. She said that she made her living from her clothing company so that she could be artistically liberal in her filmmaking [2]. There's something about the truest "artist" being the one who can escape having to call themselves an "Artist."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai [2] https://youtu.be/nsf7cMjPa2I?t=475
I just finished my fourth project, a set of trays, and immediately I was told I should make them to sell. They're walnut, so just in lumber and resin a set of three trays cost $500. Then I probably spent 20 hours cutting, drilling, rabbeting, jointing, sanding, and finishing these things. I value my time at ~$100/hr. So who is going to spend $2500 on a set of trays when you can get something close enough for $150 at Ikea?
Now the argument I use to shut them down is that it's a hobby. "But you could make money with your hobby." But then I have to deliver. When it's a hobby and a project doesn't go well, or you just get tired of working on it, you can put it down and walk away. If I couldn't put it down because I'm beholden to someone, and I need to deliver it, then it isn't a hobby any more; it's a job.
Because I feel like a portion of people who get pets today expect to subsidize some of the cost with Instagram pages.
I'm currently working towards doing my hobby (gamedev) as the only thing I do. But the way I do it is collect corporate checks while allocating as much of my mind as possible towards improving my gamedev. So far it's not a bad deal - the hardest part is keeping sane in the face of the hellscape that is my corporate employers' other engineers. I have literally spent hours on Zoom calls listening to literal principal engineers discuss naming minutia. That at least gives me hope - turns out you don't need to be smart to be a principal. Easy money if I play my cards right.
So while my goal is to do gamedev as my only income (pseudo-retiring in a sense) - it's fundamentally different.
But why hustle for anyone? We should establish a universal basic income for all, and leave hustling to people who are hustlers by nature.
I think people have forgotten that the origin of the word "passion" is "suffering"
How funny to say "work makes the man" with that definition. [1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&u=https:/...
I personally love to paint on exotic beaches in summer. My company is barely profitable, there are travel expenses, but I have some regular buyers for my paintings.
Edit: why downvotes? It is not a joke, that is how it works in real life. Author obviously does not understand business. If you love cooking, you do not have to open restaurant and loose money, but once month you can organize "promotion event". That is nothing illegal.
There is a modern obsession with monetizing -everything- that one does, turning -everything- into a "hustle". Why can't people just do things in their spare time for fun without being bombarded about monetizing them?
Maybe you have unlimited funds to finance your hobbies, but others sometimes need to be a bit creative to fund their passion.
Most people's hobbies will never turn a profit -- that's why they are hobbies, after all.
So you form "3d printing shop" company and put some money in (loan, services...). Company purchases 3d printer, but does not pay any taxes on printer, it is an expense. After a few years 3d printer is out of warranty but still functional, can be purchased from company for $1.
Difference $5999. Obviously this is not advice, consult your accountant first.
In reality it is bit more complex. But this is rough picture.
But you already paid the 5k in Income Tax, when you initially earned the 10k that you put in the company to buy the printer. How does that save 5k? I think the business needs revenue.
For example do you put a substantial amount of your own time into the business, is it normal to have large startup costs before coming profitable in your field, is the business your primary livelihood or just a side project,etc
I do the same with one caveat: my tax advisor always reminds me to document not only expenses, but also make sure there is some income, preferably each year, to avoid any problems from the IRS.
A link to a gallery of the painting would have made clear it's not a joke. @GP: Can you post one? Perhaps you can get a few new fans.
I laughed when she asked if she should put her breast implants on the company card. Even I knew that was going too far :)
The questions is how did you arrive where you did? Did you paint for years without any return and then found patrons who buy your works regularly? Did you market and advertise? Did someone you knew send buyers your way?
There are a trillion people on youtube trying to make money selling art, and feeding themselves on other things. There are a much smaller number regularly selling physical paintings.
At the high end you relentlessly self-promote until a gallery takes you on in expectation of profiting from your work. You can make a lot of money at the high end - five, six, or seven figures for each item - but it's insanely hard to get into.
This person does it by cross-dressing and being famous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grayson_Perry
Mid-end you need to find a niche and possibly a physical location. I know one artist who combined demo/live painting sessions for customers.
The work took minutes, but it was cheerful holiday art sold in a tourist location by someone with a good line in friendly and engaging self-promotion, and he could clear four figures a day during the tourist season.
If you're selling online - that's a much tougher sell, and you'll need to create some kind of social media scene for yourself that isn't just "Here's me and my brushes".
It also means you're trying to sell a particular kind of art. Galleries want a particular kind of art. Tourists want a particular kind of art. Art you can make in demo/classes is very limited.
I don't have any interest in hawking my wares to tourists (because it limits you greatly on what you can offer, and how long you can spend on a painting), running classes (of which there are a million more qualified artists doing the same, all with competitive social media already), or praying that some art gallery will find my paintings interesting.
This person said they have regular buyers (what I call patrons) for their choice of exotic beach landscapes, to the point that it subsidizes travel to exotic beaches. How did this person get patrons for their niche without the rest of it?
That's what I want to know. Not generic ways of selling art. Are they selling to rich buddies? Is their mom really wealthy and supporting their hobby?
I think its awesome they are doing what they love and it sort of pays for itself, I wish I could do the same, but there's a huge leap from 'I paint exotic beaches' to 'I have patrons for my exotic beach landscapes'.
These sorts of tax avoidance strategies are only complicated the first time you do them, and then repeating the same thing each year is simple. ...as for selling enough of it to call it a company - again - it's easier than most people realize to register a company.
And on the other end of the spectrum you can run it as a cash only side gig and make a nice little slush fund for yourself.