Getting Paid to Do What You Love Is a Lie

Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that this is going to be controversial. The ideas I’m sharing here are going to upset many writers…

Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that this is going to be controversial. The ideas I’m sharing here are going to upset many writers, musicians, and artists. I know that.

I’ll just say now that it is not my intention to kill art. In fact, I hope this article liberates you to create your best art.

Now, I’ll just come right out and say it…

Getting paid to do what you love is a lie many of us have been sold.

To many, this idea of ‘getting paid to do what you love’ is the zenith of achievement and self-actualization. It’s the dream so many subscribe to. How can so many of us be so wrong?

The truth is, not many people have actually been successful in getting paid to do what they love. Which is why not many have made the discovery that this dream is not the promised land. It’s a special kind of hell.

Getting paid to do what you love is a polished pair of golden handcuffs.

There is so much uncertainty in life, that we slip them on willingly. We only naturally assume that our safe haven in the storm of life — our creative center — is going to be our salvation. Our rock. That if we were to simply keep creating each and every day, one day our creations themselves will finance us and put a bigger and better roof over our heads.

We visualize ourselves in our studios. Sitting at our writing desks, or behind a blank canvas, working for others waiting for the day when there’s no more work and we can freely create without distractions. Without obligations and without nagging responsibilities. A day without courage.

We don’t think about the clients, that always suck. Even when they are amazing — they suck. We dig deep into our creative reservoir and pull out our best for them. We capture inspiration and bring it down from that high place and put it on the page, only to hear remarks of ‘It’s great, really. Truly inspiring. But it’s not quite what I had in mind…”

That’s because it never is.

Art is about expressing yourself. But when you get paid to show yourself off for other people, to use your skills and spend your time creating their visions you aren’t honoring yourself.

You’re selling yourself out. Peddling your most valuable and precious gift.

Your Gift Is What You Love to Do

Every person has a gift. A set of skills, a calling, or an array of inspirations that are uniquely them. And it goes without saying that every person should be creating with their gift.

If it’s writing, you should be writing. Creating businesses, painting, inventing, designing, pottery — you name it. You probably already even have an idea of what your gift is.

But don’t make the mistake of selling your gift.

No matter what price you put on it, you will be selling yourself short. Because there is no price higher than time, than increments of life. Which so many people sell freely to anyone willing to bid.

You create with your gift, because it feels good. It feels like progress, the joy of accomplishment and the sense of creating value where there was none before, then giving it away freely and abundantly. Not only to yourself, but to everyone else who gets to experience your gifts vicariously through you. Your gift is an infinite wellspring of creativity, and generosity. But if you make the mistake of trying to sell access to your gift, it’s a well you won’t even want to walk past again .

Creating with your gift is a selfish sort of joy that only a creator can experience. It’s pure in its expression. Blissful, even. The trouble only comes when you complicate this simple pleasure, by trying to sell your gifts.

Don’t Sell Your Gift, Because You Might Lose It

I can give you several examples, but the one that is hardest of all to share is my own story.

When I was young I would bottle up my emotions.

Things would happen and I would be so calm and cool on the surface, but inside I didn’t have the operating system to process what was happening. Eventually I would explode. I’d have outbursts, say what I don’t mean, and burn bridges — just because I didn’t know how to handle the situations I was in.

Then I discovered drawing. I used graphite and charcoal. I drew every day. I’d come home from school, jump off the bus, run into my room, close the door, put on a new rock-record and I’d draw. Over the course of the year I’d have hundreds of drawings. Sketchbooks full of them. I’d leave charcoal handprints around the house that my Mom would later find, as I’d leave my room only to get food.

Eventually, my emotions stabilized. Instead of outbursts I became compassionate. I put all the emotions on the page, closed the book, sealed it and that was that. Later, I would give away my drawings to friends and family. I was better for it and so was my life.

Until I turned 18. I received responsibilities. I had to move out, get a place of my own. Pay bills. Find a job. The usual.

Without college in my life at this point, my main skill-set was my drawing. So, naturally I looked for opportunities to sell my skills in exchange for cash to pay the rent.

Huge mistake, because I was so good at drawing that I got a job after the first few weeks of looking.

I was hired to design a magazine. I made the covers, designed the inside advertisements, the whole works. I became a one man design agency creating an entire magazine from cover to cover. I was good at it and the pay was awesome for being 18, but I didn’t realize I was dying an artistic death of a thousand paper cuts.

I stopped drawing in my sketchbook. It became a once a week, then once a month ordeal for me. I still drew daily, but it was advertisements and article covers. Things that were so uninteresting to me, but paid so well, I gladly did them — with the discipline of an artist.

Unfortunately I was unaware at the time, that I was tainting the one thing that was special to me. I wasn’t capturing my inspiration in my sketchbook. I was bringing other people’s ideas to life for them.

Worst of all, I was associating feelings of resentment and disdain with my art.

I thought I had found a patron who would finance my creations on an ongoing basis. But what really happened was I got paid to develop a complex and a lot of psychological money blocks along the way.

Even when I saw signs of what was happening to me, I kept at it. Until, my paycheck came late one week. Then two weeks in a row. After awhile of this I’d get one paycheck for every late three. Next thing I knew the company I worked for shut down.

And it was tumbleweeds.

What Makes You Money

Luckily for me, the company I designed for taught marketing. Since I was financing my own education I decided I better take advantage of my perks and study those courses, if for nothing else to gleam a better understand of what I was designing.

Turns out, I was good at marketing too.

I began running campaigns for clients and became the marketing manager of a natural healing supplement company by the time I was 19. Then, I started my own company by the end of that year and I was well off. But my sketchbook grew dusty. And I grew up quick.

I’m sharing this cautionary tale with you, because I don’t want you to repeat my mistakes. I don’t want you to assume like I did that getting paid to do what you love is a good idea.

I learned much later that there is a difference between what you love to do and what makes you money, for most people. What you love to do is your gift. But what makes you money is always the same for everyone.

It’s trade. An exchange of value. And it’s important to understand that that value does not have to be your precious gift.

It seems like a good idea to sell your gift at first, because you know it’s valuable. It can make you money, but any price you put on it will be too low. And if your work life and your creative life are one and the same there becomes no separation. You have no time away, no time to reflect and think, which is essential to the creative process.

In short, what makes you money does not have to be your art.

There’s a few schools of thought on this, but here’s my take.

Sell Your Skills. Give Your Gifts.

It’s that simple.

If you’re good at writing, then write. Write a lot and give it away for free. Same goes for any other gift. Live your gift and give it away. But don’t put a price-tag on your creative expression.

Sell your skills. If you don’t have any skills, they’re easy to come by.

The truth is making money comes down to entrepreneurialism. It’s about providing value in exchange for value. And there are a million ways to do that, that don’t involve selling your gift. Plus, many of those ways to make money require far less time than your gift, which will leave you with a lot more cash and a lot more time to do what you truly love.

Not for anyone else, but for yourself.

I call this idea, self-patronizing. And in my opinion it’s the highest aspiration for a creative. Plus, by far the most achievable.

Self-Patronizing: The Biggest F*$K You To Society

Self-patronizing is what happens when you realize there is a difference between what you love to do and what makes you money.

It allows you to be professional, effective, disciplined and well-paid for things that people are happy and eager to pay you for. And it allows you to write yourself a check to do what you love to do, when you want to do it. With no clients. No rules. Nothing but you and the purest expression of your gift.

The truth is, when you’re selling your gift out what you’re really doing is trading time.

You’re trading some time to clients, so you can buy some time with that money to do what you want to do.

Listen up, trading time for time is a losers game.

You only have so much and it’s worth far more than anyone is going to be willing to give you.

Instead of trading time, the best thing you can give yourself the dedicated runway to learn entrepreneurial skills, marketing, sales and be so well-off that you can self-patronize and give yourself the runway you’ve always desired.

These skills are essential for living in the 21st century and can be learned very quickly. But even if you don’t take the time to learn them, the dream of self-patronizing is still achievable for people who don’t already know these essential skills.

For instance, you could easily batch clients, or work, for a couple of months, then give yourself 6 months of runway to finally write that novel.

Or work your job as you are now and grab a secondary source of income. Live this way with your goal in mind, day dreaming about it in your spare time. Then, after 3–6 months of this, hand in your two-weeks notice and disappear off the face of the Earth to produce that album you always dreamed of. To paint that collection that will go in the gallery down in the CBD. To live your dream.

You get the idea. Do what you’ve got to do now. Cash up. And spend that f*$k you money in the best way possible — by buying yourself time. Calculate how much it takes to live off of in your city for a month, multiply that by six, and get to work.

By the end of your creative endeavor you’ll have that novel, album, or collection you always wanted to create and you can worry about selling your works of art later if you feel like that’s what you want to do.

My point is this: don’t try to trade time until you get there.

Once you do, you can spend a weekday morning you couldn’t care enough to know the date of, in your underwear, writing a post on medium using your brand new macbook, before you even have to check your email.

It’s the dream, my friends. And it’s achievable in this lifetime.