This post originally appeared here in The Innovation.
3 Simple Steps To Finally Make Money Doing What You Love
Some years ago, someone said to me, that when you do what you love, the money will come.
At that time, it sounded like a really awesome piece of advice. I realized much later that it was painfully short-sighted.
This one phrase will limit you and hold you back from discovering your true greatness and reaching your full potential.
What are some things that people love? Hobbies, sports, coffee shops, the latest tech trend, or being in nature. If you love something, you just go do it. Nobody needs to tell you. You just do it. But if you want money as a byproduct, you need to become not just good, but the best at what you do.
In the beginning, you might not even enjoy what you’re doing until you get good at it. I believe life is simply far too short to be bored or miserable. Therefore, you deserve to have a job that brings you joy for the larger portion of your time. To earn that kind of satisfaction, you need to spend a lot of time and effort to get good at your skill.
The thing about simply pursuing what you love as a job discount the fact that all work involves physical, mental, and emotional effort. It requires that you show up every single day, even on the days you don’t feel like it.
It’s about preparation, putting in the hard work, developing patience, and learning lessons from failures along the way. It could take months, years, and sometimes even decades to become great at something. You can’t just simply pick something and go with it. You need to go do it.
The thing about simply pursuing what you love as a job discount the fact that all work involves physical, mental, and emotional effort. It requires that you show up every single day, even on the days you don’t feel like it.
— purposefullifenow.com
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Photo by Dziana Hasanbekava from Pexels
We’ve bought into the myth that happiness is an entitlement, and that gives people reasons to give up the moment they notice what they’re doing is no longer fun. They feel they must be happy and comfortable in their work, or else they’ll pack up and leave.
Success means completing the task you have committed to work on before you can reap what you sow. It’s good to note that the harvest is never in the same season as the planting. That’s why you need to labor now so that your craft can turn into a profitable business sometime in the future.
That can only happen through 3 simple process, which is continuous learning, improving, and expanding.
1. Learning
If you think you already know enough to get by, you’re sadly mistaken. Highly successful people are commitment to lifelong learning.
Commit to learning the skills that are relevant to your field. Develop yourself to increase your value so you become better in what you do. Over time, this will be compensated in the form of greater knowledge and higher income. Your goal is to arrive at a point where you believe there are no boundaries on what you can achieve with your extended knowledge. You have the option to decide how far you want to go.
Stir up your curiosity to want to know more, attempt challenges, and discover ideas to create a better version of yourself. Learning will help transform your perspective on life, expand your horizons, and move you towards success.
When you recognize fear for what it is, it’s important to push yourself through it repeatedly until you become comfortable being uncomfortable.
— purposefullifenow.com
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Photo by Dziana Hasanbekava from Pexels
2. Improving
Self-improvement is the ongoing effort to become better than who you were yesterday and working towards enhance your existing skills set. It’s taking the necessary actions required to make you a better and more knowledgeable person. It is never about reaching a point where you no longer need to grow and stretch yourself.
It begins with the awareness of your strengths, weaknesses, personality traits, emotions, and habits, and incorporating those into the desire to improve and transform, instead of focusing on weaknesses. The process can be likened to a journey and not a destination. It’s the constant strive for progress to get better, not to reach a destination, and to be fulfilled but to satisfy the thirst for new knowledge.
3. Expanding
As you aim towards continuous improvement, you’ll discover what you truly love about your work. That will inspire you to push through any challenges and stretch beyond your comfort level. You accept the need to address the different limitations that are obstructing your path.
This is an uncomfortable place. Just like you need to lift heavier weights to achieve progress in each workout, expanding your personal space is necessary to shake things up.
Once you get good enough at what you do, you have to find ways to push yourself back out to where you’re uncomfortable and face the challenges on a different level. If you remain stagnant, then nothing will change and you will stop growing.
Photo by Thorn Yang from Pexels
4. The final takeaway
Every person has their own fears. Fear is a real thing that can halt your progress and stops you from giving it your all like you should. It keeps you from improving and growing into your fullest potential.
When you recognize fear for what it is, it’s important to push yourself through it repeatedly until you become comfortable being uncomfortable. Fear may not go away, but if you keep on confronting them, you will learn how to manage them eventually.
Life is a never-ending process of learning, improving, and expanding. It’s vital in helping to enlarge our capacity to adapt to various challenges that life may throw at us. Know that you will make mistakes and encounter failures along the way. But keep your head up and keep moving forward.
At some point you might think, why am I doing all this for?
The answer is because once you had a dream of making money doing what you love and you went after it. You’re finally living that life now.
And that is a dream fulfilled.
