How to follow your passion and turn your skills into lasting financial success

There’s never been a better time for the truism, “follow your passion”. With hundreds of YouTubers and other social media content creators making crores and college dropouts raising millions, no longer can it be said that financial gains are reserved for the well-endowed, highly qualified and rightly connected. The ones with passion can write their own script.

Let’s try and figure out the economics of passion.

What is passion? Here are two working definitions. First, something you do without any external motivation, and second, something that doesn’t leave you exhausted.

We all have experienced moments of “flow”, where the clock doesn’t tick and the means are the same as the end. That’s your passion. That’s your “groove”. Most people go through their entire lives heeding others’ calling, never discovering their own. The lucky few unearth their passion (or passions), but it is only to others that they seem lucky. They have earned it the right way.

How do you discover your passion? By experimenting. While keeping a day job—which secures the food on the table—you experiment voraciously to discover what excites you. You give it an earnest shot, persist for a while, then pivot. As you go through the motions, you occasionally hit the resonance frequency, and then you needn’t exert yourself.

When I was working in a large corporate in the early 2000s, I spent my weekends teaching, experimenting with subjects, colleges and more. Soon I realised that teaching is my passion. I also experimented with writing, photography, travelling, camping, managing events, singing, comic gigs, poetry, but failed to find my groove.

Once you stumble upon your passion, you realise the futility of the counterfactual. But here’s a caveat: Passion is blind. As much as passion can enable you, it can disable you too.

Investing Right

Once you realise your passion, or passions, you need to invest. Most people don’t take their passions seriously and invest in them deliberately to gain mastery. Passion without mastery is a hobby. It keeps you busy, but not much.

Mastery calls for saying no to other experiments momentarily and doubling down, at least for a substantial period. Since it’s your passion, you won’t mind going deeper, ironing out the kinks, and achieving proficiency. Sans expertise, you will find it difficult to justify your passion, even to yourself.

Upon discovering my passion for teaching, I went on to pursue a full-time PhD. I had to let go of a stable source of income and settle for a humble stipend. It suited my temperament, for mastery doesn’t come easy, especially if you are pursuing academics.

Money Matters

Upon discovering your passion and achieving mastery, you then seek money, which is through the commercialisation of your passion. Why seek money? Won’t that corrupt your passion? No, it won’t. Money is a great proxy for the value the world associates with your passion. So far your passion was in service of yourself—making you feel good, keeping you meaningfully busy, and grinding your way to depth of the trait.

But if you are the only one who finds your passion valuable, then it’s vanity. Somebody must be willing to associate a value with your efforts. I took on consulting on innovation, creativity and design thinking based on my PhD dissertation, converting knowledge into money.

This triad of passion, mastery and economics is virtuous. Passion disengages you from the external vagaries, mastery makes you above average in the chosen realm, and economics validates your efforts. You then plough back the money into gaining mastery, or perhaps starting another experiment, for now you have the financial cushion, thanks to your newfound and mastered passion. An important note of caution, however, is never to burden your passion to pay your bills. It’s critical that while you are experimenting, you are not obliged to cling on to the failing ones. If you reckon that you aren’t making any headway with an experiment, you must have the courage to pivot. That’s possible only when your survival is not anchored to it.

Your passion can, and must, change with time. Don’t feel obliged to be consistent with your past self. Lastly, take a portfolio approach to passion, each with different level of pleasure, mastery and economics. Your passion is exactly what differentiates you when the going gets tough. So keep experimenting.

Pavan Soni is the founder of Inflexion Point, an innovation and strategy consultancy.

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