Image Description

What If Your Passion Doesn't Pay Well?

This lesson is a part of an audio course What to Do When You Hate Your Job by Lindsay Hanson

Is it ultimately true that your passion doesn’t pay well? Is this an objective fact?

Can you think of someone in that industry who is making good money? If so, then the issue is not that your passion doesn’t pay well. The issue is that you don’t believe you can make a lot of money doing it.

What if the amount of money you’re capable of making is actually within your control?

Your passion doesn’t pay you. People pay you. And if you’re bringing value to people, they will want to pay you.

Your belief in your ability to make money doing what you love is the #1 most important factor in determining whether you will make money doing what you love. I want to use an example to show you why this is so important.


  • Person A loves painting. She’s passionate about art, she spends all her free time painting. But she doesn’t believe people would pay her for her artwork. She doesn’t believe she can make good money selling her art. So she just sees it as a hobby. She has some of her paintings hanging around her house, maybe gives some to friends and family. But she never really talks about her art or promotes it, because she doesn’t believe anyone would buy it.
  • Person B loves painting. She’s passionate about art, she spends all her free time painting. And she believes her art is so good that people will want to pay her for it. So she starts showcasing her art on social media. She advertises that her art is for sale, maybe she even sets up an etsy shop. She tries to get into any art shows that she can and she’s constantly looking for opportunities to sell her art.

Which person is more likely to make money with their art, Person A or Person B?

What I want you to understand is that your beliefs dictate your actions. If you don’t believe that you can make money doing work you love, then you are not going to take the steps that are required in order for you to use your passions to make money. It’ll feel like a big waste of time. And so your passions will remain a hobby, and you’ll be doing something you don’t enjoy to make a living. This is probably a pretty good description of where you are right now.

But if you fully believe that you can make money doing work you love, then you will begin to take the steps to make that happen. If Tyler can make money from balancing things on his face, I promise you can make money doing something you love.

So here’s what I want you to do for homework. By now, you’ve hopefully narrowed down one or a few things that you feel passionate about and that you’d love to do as your full-time job. What’s the thing that would be a dream if you could get paid to do that thing? It wouldn’t even feel like work to you.

Take out your journal, and at the top write this question: “why don’t I believe I can do this for a living?”

And then just list out everything that comes to mind. I like to call this a brain dump. List out all the reasons why you don’t feel like it’s possible or realistic for you to make enough money to support yourself in doing the thing you love.

And for each of those reasons, ask yourself “is this ultimately true?” So for example, if you wrote “my art isn’t good enough for people to pay for it,” how do you know that’s true? Have you ever tried to sell it? Can you think of times when someone complimented your art or told you you could sell it or told you that they would buy it from you, but you brushed it off? Is it possible for you to learn more about art (or whatever your passion is) and become an expert at it? Become so good that people want to pay you for it?

After you’ve done that exercise, I want you to imagine that you wholeheartedly believed you could make money doing that thing. And choose an amount of money that feels exciting for you. What if you could make whatever you’re making in your job right now, doing that thing that you love? What if you could make more than you’re making right now? What if you could make a million dollars doing that thing? Whatever amount of money feels exciting and expansive for you, an amount that doesn’t feel completely unrealistic, something that you can get your energy behind and really imagine making that amount of money.

If you fully believed you could make money doing the thing you love – what would you be doing right now? What actions would you be taking? Where would you start?

I don’t know about you, but now seems like as good a time as any to get started. Just take the first step.

In the next lesson, we’ll address the reasons why you feel like you can’t take that first step right now – how to overcome self-doubt.

Image Description
Written by

Lindsay Hanson