Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow—Mostly Not
Understanding Entrepreneurial Fallacy #1
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Work you love can be a gift or it can be a short road to poverty. It is tempting to think that a really good business always entails work that you love, but that is not necessarily so. Many people are making a substantial income with little time, rather than through work that they love. The income that they generate finances other work they love, but the work they love is not the core income source.
Many other people are doing work they love, or working toward that, and it is a huge part of their ultimate goal. Their income is increasing and they are working toward a different kind of business. While possible, the challenges to profiting from the work you love are enormous. It leads to two significant difficulties.
First, when you do work that you love, you will tend to devalue your work. The fact that you may love your work inevitably leads to this feeling of disbelief that you are being paid to do the kind of work you love, which almost always means an inappropriate discounting of price and minimizing the need for income. Few things have led to the failure of more businesses in work you love than this sense of privilege at being able to do the work and get paid for it. The discount kills. Eventually, you conclude that you cannot make enough money for the rest of your life, and that's when folks give up.
Second, the work you love will tempt you to focus on the wrong kind of work and to engage in the lowest-value activities first—never getting to the high-value things only you can do. Here is an example. I've had two organic farms, and I went into them because I absolutely loved the work. The gardening and growing of vegetables was fascinating, exhilarating, fun, amazing—everything I could want in work. I especially loved working outside nearly all the time, the strength in my body, and the ability to eat virtually unlimited amounts of food and sleep solidly all night long.
Here is the problem. The work that I loved most—planting, tending, harvesting, and presenting my production—is handled in most of America and the world by the very lowest-paid people in our society. Because similar work is ultimately valued in similar ways in all places, the value of my work financially as a grower was minuscule. Yes, I could find a way to work extremely hard and make $40,000 a year, but only if everything worked out. I would have to spend extra time on the weekends at markets and utilize the free labor of my children. All that energy spent on growing was giving me the "win" of a low-wage, high-risk self-employment venture which offered little opportunity for prosperous abundance and no room for error.
Work we love is and should be a birthright. But our world is strange, and it seems to take the most unique kinds of discipline to engage in the work you love. I am not saying that doing the work you love is impossible—it's not. But it is difficult, and for some people, because of the type of work they love, it will be impossible to achieve a successful business in the work they love. The abundance won’t simply materialize.
The problem with work that you love is not the work; it is the assumption that the money will follow. Sometimes it does, and most of the time it doesn't. When it does follow, it happens because the entrepreneur drops the assumption and replaces it with a laser-focused strategy. The money follows because the artist or entrepreneur is just as savvy and strategic about their business as they are about the work. Until you can cross that threshold, don't assume the money will follow.
—Anthony Signorelli
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