Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. If you try to make "what the market wants" rather than what you want, you're going to make garbage and further saturate a market that is already filled with garbage that was designed to cash in on "what the market wants". And you're not going to be good at it because you're not a large corporation that has perfected a soulless formula so your work is just going to be a worse version of what the large corporations are doing (soon that stuff will probably be produced by AI rather than humans).
You don't turn a creative field into a career or a business until you know that what you want to make is going to be marketable or you are independently wealthy and don't need an income to live. And once you're successful in a creative field, resist the urge to pay attention to marketing data.
A creative who doesn't have the backing of a large corporation needs to lead (i.e. innovate, challenge conventions, etc.) not follow. That's because you can either be better, worse or different than the competition. If you're not different and you have a smaller budget, you will inevitably be worse. That applies to startups and even incumbent underdogs in any line of business.
Eh, at the same time, I think the problem a lot of entrepreneurs have is that they overfocus on "what you are interested in" instead of "what the market wants", and therefore build something that nobody wants.
If you can find a perfect intersection, that's beautiful, but probably uncommon. Some of the most lucrative businesses are stuff like (anti)fraud/security/payments that is pretty darn drab.
> they overfocus on "what you are interested in" instead of "what the market wants"
One sure difference between these two things is that you absolutely know what you are interested in, but your opinions about what the market wants are going to be speculative until you have customers.
edit: i.e. judging what you think is beautiful vs. a Keynesian beauty contest.
I agree with pretty much this whole chain of comments, at least in spirit.
As someone who has turned his interests into his business, it really can be tough. I have always loved infrastructure, and I have always loved maintaining certain applications and workload types.
On the one hand, you do start to understand after awhile what the “MVP” looks like. On the other hand you can eventually fairly well predict what your top feature requests will be right out of the gate.
Integrating the two effectively while actually getting something out the door can be a real challenge. I have criticized many firms and offerings for not having “basic feature X,” but as someone who is building a product that’s effectively never complete, I’m sure someone could say that to me too, about at least a few things. Some come immediately to mind.
And I’m still sort of surprised at times by what my own customers do and do not want or ask for, or even care about. When my interests are aligned with theirs, the product/service can move forward really quickly. When they’re not, it can be a struggle to iterate effectively.
As a fellow someone who turned his interest into a business (that I'm still currently running) I agree it's a challenge but having a career as an employee is also challenging in a different way.
For example I found having to seem like a good employee to my boss by looking busy and not leaving before at least 6pm a sort of stress I don't have now that I don't have a boss - I don't have to pretend I'm working at least 40h/w if I manage to do what I need to in less and go pick up my kids from school in the early afternoon some days.
At the end of the day although I'm more stressed in some ways (and less in others), I've never been as happy as an employee as I have been running my own company. You can even learn to enjoy the new aspects of your work that have to do with running a business and adapting to the market.
Like you I also learned a lot about aspects that I never understood as an employee and I'm now a lot more careful before judging other people's actions without having all the context (sometimes it makes sense from the inside)!
There's something to be said for building out your vision and testing whether others are interested. It was refreshing to see the grandparent post because the usual startup advice seems to be to abandon your vision entirely and build some average SaaS thing that's a composite of other successful things. (a) I don't think that actually works and (b) if people want to do that, why not just get a job, if you're effectively going to be just as constrained. It's much more fun to try and take a risk, if entrepreneurship is the space you want to play in.
I think the calculus changes a bit when you're trying to build a business around a hobby. If the entire point is to see if your hobby is going to make a good business, then you will naturally start with "what you are interested in", and the goal of the exercise will be to see if that matches up with "what the market wants".
That feels like a reasonable approach to me, though -- as with anything -- you need to know to pull the plug as soon as you have some confidence that it's not going to work out, which might be harder to do for a hobby, since you presumably have some emotional attachment to it.
> Some of the most lucrative businesses are...
You don't really need to aim for "most lucrative". If you're trying to promote "hobby" to "business", I think you should just aim for "good enough to pay the bills and give me a comfortable lifestyle without working myself to the bone". Starting out with a goal like "I'm going to turn my hobby into a blockbuster business that gives me FU money in 10 years" is probably unrealistic, but that's ok. More modest goals are just fine.
I disagree with that. If you make what you want, you at least have one user. If you make what you think other people want, you might end up with zero!
Nobody wanted an open-source Unix-like OS, a keyboardless touch screen with third-party apps, a mini hard drive with a display and headphone jack tacked on, maps that could be infinitely panned instead of clicking arrows, etc. But they ended up being some of the defining products of our time.
The worst case of working on your own thing is that you make something nobody else wants. The worst case of working on something you think other people want is that nobody wants it, and you get burned out.
The tricky part is to learn the exact problems and not some confused second-hand ideas about what/where they are. Sure there are people with good consulting instincts, but in general you can only solve problems that you’ve experienced firsthand.
> If you make what you want, you at least have one user
This is it.
This is how I approach in writing software.
99.9% of the stuff I write is going to have one user. But it's one more than zero, and in the 0.1% of the cases where it does have >1 users, well, I call that a success.
I see two conflicting motivations here and everyone has to decide for a tradeoff between these two: Being happy and being rich(er).
Do what the Market wants means making a tradeoff in favor of earning more (and becoming rich(er)).
Doing what you want to do means making a tradeoff in favor of your happiness. You will perhaps earn less, but what you do is more in tune with your values.
A tradeoff is not always required and both of these motivations may become synergies, but in the authors case, I think this is what happened.
For all i’ve seen over the many years in the industry i’m pretty sure founders who make only things they’re interested in are a pretty small club. The vast majority of all the crap and startups you’re seeing here are doing exactly what they believe is „what the market wants“ because that’s what they’re being taught all the time here. Heck, most of Show HN gives me rather „what the market wants“ vibes let alone YC applications.
There's a reason those are lucrative businesses, regulation around them (correctly) prohibits new entrants. Probably not a great idea for a small team to try and enter those markets unless you genuinely have some secret sauce / niche.
I do agree 'what you are interested in' is often wrong, that's a good starting point for ideas but after that you need to see if there is an actual market there.
I never really saw this. But I always noticed if a product follows a sharp vision of an individual/dev team, and not sales/research. Even if the product was no fit for me, it immediately felt to be more sympathetic, and even of better quality.
They are lucrative because they are drab. No one wants to build the unsexy stuff such as enterprise tax systems. It’s also normally one that requires deep technical knowledge outside of tech
His mistake was more basic. A hobby is done for pleasure. The idea is that you can focus on any part of it without any pressure. Business on the other hand is the opposite. You need to focus on what the market wants and the business needs, not always what you want, and there is lots of pressure to get it right. Anything less will put you out of business.
Even as a career you have a similar problem. You have to do what your employers want and it needs to be done right the first time.
A hobby should not be turned into a business or career unless you can only focus on what you like.
I disagree with such blanket statements. I would phrase it as - know what you're getting into, starting a business will mostly have your running a business rather than doing the "individual contributor" work.
If you still want to do it while knowing that, go ahead- just keep your eyes open. And for those of us blessed to work in fields like software development the risks aren't even that high - most likely if your business fails you will have no problem getting a (likely higher paid than you had before) job afterwards.
> Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it.
If you want to make a business, you must make what the market wants. Making your own stuff and trying to make money from it is possible, but it's no longer a business.
I'm a professional software developer and a hobbyist software developer and while I could have sold some of my hobby software I explicitly choose not to. The reason is that selling something immediately creates responsibilities that, for my hobby, I just don't want to have. A business is something of it's own beast.
If you want to make a business, you must make what the market wants. Making your own stuff and trying to make money from it is possible, but it's no longer a business.
Right, we get it - but it's not binary, and in turns out there's considerable room for nuance. In fact some of the happiest and most genuinely successful people I know got there from figuring out how to navigate this valley, and knowing when to trust their gut.
It also has a lot to do with taste -- specifically for stuff that is awesome and cool, but just a bit below the radar, as it were.
I wonder if there's a distinction between doing what you love as work and doing what you love as hobby. I love software development and I especially love software development as work. I actually prefer to solve other people's problems than my own.
Perhaps some of this discussion is just talking at cross-purposes because the fundamental thing that we're discussing is not the same.
I dont really think you are disagreeing with each other. The first poster is saying find a niche where you can stand out. I'd agree with that - never fight a superior adversary on ther own turf. But it doesn't mean totally throwing market concerns to the wind.
But you don't know what the market wants. I would think that a primary goal of turning a hobby into a business is to answer the question, "is my hobby something the market wants?"
And sure, the answer might be a resounding "no", but you can change your focus once you figure that out. And that change in focus might make you hate it, which sucks.
You doing your hobby is never what the market wants. There might be a 10% intersection? Unless your hobby is business itself or you change what you want to what you actually need to do to make money.
I made an account after years of lurking to say. This is it.
I use to make and sell a very specific piece of hardware. The only reason I started a shop was to sell my surplus. It cost roughly the same for 1 as it did for 20. So I started selling them for $2 more than I paid and sold out. Then I did it again, and again. I sold about 100 units all together and never once did I hate my hobby during this time. At the same time, it never paid my bills. Nor did I ever think of quitting my job.
Is there a name for flipping a hobby into a full blown career? Does Flanderization fit?
I had to stop after the whole shipping shitshow during covid. Prices in my country have not recovered yet.
You have to trust your own taste. If you do what you love you will know if it's good or not.
If you are very good at something besides singing (everyone can hear if someone is good at singing or not) there is no audition you can go to, you have to be your own judge.
The reality is that people will only read the top 10 books, or play the top 10 games, there's like a normal distribution curve where the most people gravitate towards the best sellers.
Embrace and welcome any good talent in your niche, they will grow the market for you, and even if you only get the scraps, you could still make some money just by being in the same niche as someone extremely talented, because if people really like the nr 1, they will also try 2, 3, 4 next best in that genre.
> PASCAL: may I say something that I learned, without being too big?
>
> PASCAL: A guy goes out to eat in the evening...
>
> PASCAL: after a long day in the office, whatever. Go ahead.
>
> PASCAL: He don't want on his plate...
>
> PASCAL: something that he has to look and think, "What the fuck is this"?
>
> PASCAL: What he want is steak. This is a steak.
>
> PASCAL: I like steak, you know?
>
> PASCAL: Mmm, I'm happy!
>
> PASCAL: Do you see what I mean?
>
> PASCAL: But don't get me wrong.
>
> PASCAL: I think that your brother is good, goddamned chef.
>
> PASCAL: Maybe the best I ever see.
>
> SECONDO: He is the best.
> PASCAL: Yes, but,
>
> PASCAL: this is what I have to say to you.
>
> PASCAL: Give to people what they want.
>
> PASCAL: Then later, you can give them what you want, eh?
>
- Big Night (1996)
It's a bit of a trope, but real success often comes giving customers not what they want, but what they need.
As another poster noted, just chasing market fashions is a crap existence, better left to soulless corps that can burn workers in pursuit of the dollar.
The good thing is that those same soulless corps will very seldom invest in something visionary, something that no one has done before. So the field is wide open to the pioneers.
(Caveat: while I believe this strongly for software, I'm not sure how it translates to fiction writing, the OP's domain).
This comment is a summary of everything I used to believe which I had to unlearn the hard way.
I had a similar experience as the author, I worked on passion projects (in software), some for many years. I had some success in terms of traction and also some success financially related to a different project (though that proved to be short-lived). Initially, I thought to myself "How lucky am I that I appreciate efficiency and modularity since that's exactly what the market needs." WRONG. What a brainwashed moron I was. The market does not necessarily want the most efficient solution; especially in the tech industry which is founded on monopolies where the money will come in no matter what the efficiency is; efficiency is irrelevant, so long as a solution just works and you have the right social connections a company might pay 100x more than it's worth; will barely make a dent in the balance sheet. Unfortunately, I didn't have any social connections.
So yeah I can fully relate with the author of the article. DO NOT FOLLOW YOUR PASSION IF YOU WANT TO MAKE MONEY. FOLLOW THE MARKET AND EXPAND YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK. If the market cares about adherence to some fickle trend, make sure that your product adheres to that trend and make sure you get involved in the money-oriented community which inevitably forms around that juicy cash-rich, "fickle as a squirrel at a nut convention" trend!
Worst case you can sell your hot startup to Google for a few millions and they will shut down the whole thing later when they realize how crap of an idea it was but who cares. You got paid and now you can use the money to fund your next financial scheme and make even more money while all the passionate morons rot in their poverty and comment on HN about how shitty everything is because their time is worthless in dollar terms.
> Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it.
People think they can get more cake by appealing to everyone but in the result make products that appeal to no one.
The main problem I see over and over again with creatives when it comes to marketing is not being specific enough. Nothing appeals to everyone.
You got to know you target audience. What age range, gender, general demographic are you aiming for? What other books are in the niche you are targeting? What do your reader like about them? What is your unique selling point?
You might think that marketing a book with broader appeal would be easier. No. The more specific you can get, the easier it will be. People will gladly throw their money at you for finally scratching their specific itch, you just gotta find them.
Chances are if you like something, there are other people out there who also like that thing and are willing to pay for it. Sure, there is a tradeoff, as smaller niches mean a more limited market and some niches can be too specific to be economically viable but let's be honest people overestimate how unique they are most of the time.
But yeah, marketing sucks and not everyone is or wants to be good at it.
> Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it. I
The author did try.
From the post:
> And yet, in spite of my passionate “passion”, I never made enough money to quit the day job. I followed my passion and all it gave my was wrist pain.
Writing for the market was their second attempt at trying to make money.
I agree, but the problem is how to avoid this. Once your livelihood depends on the thing you do for fun, it seems quite likely that you will start thinking about how to make it sell better. And after a while this may start to infect your inspiration... is your artistic integrity so strong that you can choose to do things that hurt your income?
Of course the solution is to be financially independent already... but then you're not actually living off your art anyway.
>Where the author made a mistake was in trying to make "what the market wants" rather than just making stuff he/she actually wanted to make and trying to see if it was possible to make money from it
It doesn't sound like that's the case. This specifically talk about stories that they wrote for fun and for themself.
I think the story is a little bit more interesting because even if you make something exciting for yourself, that doesn't mean it sells
I think people who have never run a business believe that running say, a bakery, involves baking all day. Anyone who has ever run a business should know that is false. Running a business involves doing all the stuff around the main task (marketing! accounts! infrastructure! customer support!) so that the people doing the main task can get on and do it.
If you understand this you won't turn your hobby into a business and be disappointed.
Yup. By the time you've gone around and meticulously picked up anything that might upset the Roomba you might as well have just rolled a vacuum behind you and done it yourself.
With hobbies the expectations are usually limited to your own ability. You account for the limited external influences and you are on it for the ride. With a business you can't avoid being hopeful. You can't avoid being subject to luck as the core factor of your success. It is a miserable experience to see that thing you are most passionate about isn't yielding any success.
I read a comment on hacker news that I cannot find now, but it resonated deeply with me. Don't try to answer the question "what do you want to be?", answer the question "what do you want to do?"
I answered the wrong question, I said "I want to be a musician". And what I did was teach music I didn't care for, perform music I didn't care for, work for people and gigs I didn't care for, made a salary I didn't care for. I had high skills and expertise that wasn't being used; I was never paid for playing one of Bach's lute suites, I made a lot of money off of really simple wedding music.
What do I want to do? Play music that I'm passionate about. Make enough money to not be uncomfortable. Work in a field where expertise and knowledge is useful on a regular basis. I'm very happy now to pick up gigs for free because I like the gig. And as a side gig, I'm a full time programmer.
It's the difference between an "identity" and a lifestyle. An "identity" pretends to be what you are, but it's really how you want people to see you, and 99% of the time is based on people that you admire (which I'm pretty sure means "look at" in Romance.) To me, it's a sort of self-hypnosis.
A lifestyle is what you do every day. Good news: If one likes to play music every day, it's a lot easier to do that to become whatever a "musician" currently represents in the society of the spectacle.
I had a coach recently frame this as "what impact do you want to have?" and relatedly, "how big an impact do you think you can have?"
In your case the impact might be something like "to inspire others who hear the music I play". Or it might simply be "to increase my own wellbeing by taking joy through playing."
After all, there must be some underlying reason why music is important to you. So this framing can help unearth that and thus allow you to focus your efforts on those goals.
The issue is that that “main gig” dominates your time. I get up early in the morning to commute to work. I spend 8 hours at work doing what main gig requires. I commute home. If I’m super lucky, as well has having no family or social obligations, and I don’t do any cleaning or chores, I get 3-5 hours to both relax and work on side gigs. Then I’m getting ready for bed or doing one of the other things I have to do to sustain life.
While the person working the other gig full time, while they do a lot of stuff they don’t want to do, all that stuff is in the same vein as the stuff they want to do, and practice like that has value. Maybe you’re not playing beach’s lute suites, but the playing/performing/writing/networking you’re doing has more value to that thing than being a programmer.
It’s not straightforward which one is better if you really want to take the side gig forward and advance.
To some extent I agree. I taught guitar while I was in undergrad for my music performance degree, and having a guitar in my lap and reviewing the absolute basics with kids was way better than making pizza or pouring beers to make a paycheck like the other guys in my studio were doing. It gave me an edge that I'm grateful for, and being able to practice between lessons was insanely valuable.
But I have to reiterate that for me it translated into unhappiness when I got to the playing/performing/writing/networking loop. Those between-lesson practice hours became directed at making more money and not making myself better in a way that fulfilled me. So I kept grinding on my programming career until I had the work/life balance that I needed and now I don't feel too drained to enjoy my passions when I get home. It sounds like we have different goals though, because my definition of "taking the music gig forward and advancing" is probably unconventional. I'm not telling anybody what to do, I'm just saying that I had the same experience the article describes and it was a great growing experience to learn from.
"As a side gig" -- I like that -- it reminds me of I had a friend who played in a band that claimed they were just rock musicians to make ends meet until their programming careers took off.
While I somewhat agree with the premise of this post, I think it is exacerbated by the fact that the author was trying to turn something like fiction writing into a business.
When I think of businesses that suck in terms of economics and chances of success, fiction writing is one of the first things that come to mind.
In general, you like things more when they make you a lot of money. A lot of fun things suck when you don't make money...
> The authors synthesized the results from 128 controlled experiments. The results highlighted consistent negative effects of incentives — from marshmallows to dollars — on intrinsic motivation. These effects were particularly strong when the tasks were interesting or enjoyable rather than boring or meaningless.
It's amazing that society still puts so much stock into these types of impossibly confounded studies.
Ok, so they found that people who are top earners are no more satisfied with their jobs than bottom earners.
Might this be because top earners tend to be the types who neglect other aspects of their lives? Or who are hypercompeitive and are unlikely to be satisfied at any level, otherwise they would have stayed where they were?
Or maybe the higher the pay goes, the higher the concentration of high self discipline people willing to endure things they don't like for money. Etc.
And we are supposed to wave away all of these confounders because of controlled marshmellow experiments done on random students?
I'm sure Harvard meta studies do the best job possible distilling insight from these studies. The problem is how insightful these types of studies are in the first place.
> It's amazing that society still puts so much stock into these types of impossibly confounded studies
That particular example was a meta study of over 100 other studies
But sure, I'm sure your expertise in study design and statistics is enough to invalidate their work and the work of hundreds of other researchers simply because you don't agree with the conclusion.
This whole discussion reminds me about the conflicting studies around the correlation or lack thereof of money earned and happiness. There was recently another paper about it that re-analyzed the data, so not a meta analysis, but an interesting example of study design and statistic interpretation: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120#executive-s...
That's a different question. People like money. People may like the activity and the money combined more than just the activity. But the studies show that they like it less than the activity and the money not tied to one another.
If Bezos wrote me a large enough check to never participate in specific hobbies again, I would take him up on it. I would be happier than before I took the offer. But I would clearly be even happier with a check that wasn't tied to ruining a hobby.
I don't take it that way, and I'm deeply fortunate to be living the life suggested by GP. If I get to do what I'm passionate about even if it includes the closely-related grungy part to make it successful (not an altogether different job like marketing) and I am paid enough money to not have to worry about my daily needs and retirement savings, then I have a chance to spend a solid part of my productive day on it, engaging deeply, and building a deeper intuition, all the while not having the personal worries of stability at the back of my mind. My passion no longer needs to compete with my work for my mental energy. And I get to work with talented people who complement my skill, doing the part they enjoy and I don't, to make what we collectively build successful.
That being said, I'm a software engineer, and that's a really fortunate occupation to be passionate above due to the breadth of its applicability (e.g. allowing one to work more closely on my topic of interest) and salary potential.
John Carmack learned this the hard way with Armadillo aerospace. When the team went from hobbiests to employees, productivity either stayed the same or declined despite their hours effectively doubling.
It depends on your personality and your motivations. If you're intrinsically motivated to practice your hobby, you may not want extrinsic motivators. On the other hand, if you're naturally a business/entrepreneurial type who is extrinsically motivated (motivated by money), then yeah you may really enjoy turning your hobbies into businesses.
I think it's unusual though. Hobbyists in general seem to be intrinsically motivated by their interest in the hobby itself. I know I personally am not motivated by money at all, seeing it as a necessary evil to survive in this competitive society. My goal is to earn enough money to have a stable and secure lifestyle, with enough free time to pursue my hobbies.
I get a dopamine hit when I make money because of a hobby, but for me it just continues to "develop" until it stresses me out. I don't realize I have crossed the threshold from "fun" to "stressful" until way after it happens.
Needing to extract money to live from hobbies that don’t pay is stressful and awful. If your hobby does that easily, good on you. Having agency — money to live and freedom/time to indulge in hobbies is the ideal.
There seems to be a virtuous cycle with making money doing something, where you learn to be passionate for things because they make money. The opposite seems to happen with passion projects trying to make money, and I wonder if it comes down to reality vs expecations and being on the wrong side of dissappointment.
“I can’t believe what people are willing to pay for this” can be either a positive or negative statement depening on what you value.
I would say that the issue is really one of time. A lot of hobbies are leisurely, but running a business, meeting customer deadlines requires time management, and it doesn’t help that a lot of hobbies are labor intensive.
There is a difference between knitting a scarf for a Christmas gift and making enough scarves, all the time, so that you can afford the roof over your head. And even more so if you have clients anxious about timelines.
"A lot of fun things end up sucking when you expect them to also make you money
…but then don’t. So you are forced to do sort of related unfun things instead that make a little bit of money for a lot of work.”
I play a musical instrument for a long long time, nowhere as good as a very good players, but sometimes I get a small paid gig and it is actually a fun thing to do. My life doesn't depend on the income from playing so I just enjoy opportunities when they come and go.
Yes, exactly. It's not that adding money to your hobby per se makes you not enjoy it. It's that when you have to make money from a hobby, you lose agency over how you practice the hobby.
It turns out the freedom to practice the hobby how/when/where you want, isn't just a nice to have, but an essential part of why you enjoyed the hobby in the first place.
You might enjoy being with your wife, but if she controlled every aspect of how you were allowed to, or must, engage with her, on pain of starvation and homelessness, you probably wouldn't enjoy her anymore. You'd resent her as a slave resents his master, even if she is a relatively good master.
Agency is essential to enjoyment of literally anything.
But the author did make money?! So I’m not sure your final paragraph really represents an appropriate response. The author made money, but they were unhappy because they weren’t doing something they enjoyed.
> As if the only value anything has is by how much dollars it makes.
Thanks for highlighting this corrosive attitude right up front.
The current US frenzy in this attitude started in the 1980s (remember Boesky, portrayed by Hollywood as Gordon Gekko: "Greed is Good") and went into overdrive over the last two decades. But it's certainly been popular in other times in US history, as well as elsewhere.
I feel like this isn’t so much a 2 decade thing but a 1 decade thing. 10-20 years ago, the open source and maker movement was at its peak. Even stuff like cryptocurrency was often motivated by interests other than money but instead ideological idealism. I think that changed a lot after a boom in startups and people just getting insanely rich for silly things… powerful fear of missing out killed a lot of the ideological idealism, and that created endless crypto scams and killed the impetus among much of the open source and maker movements.
This includes the drive to monetise everything. Hobbies, interests, skills - everyone now thinks: “how do I turn this into a side hustle? Must monetise all the things…”
Am I the only one who detests the term 'creative' as a noun? It seems to have come into being in the last few years and I just hate it. It feels like if you're not a creative then you're not creative. We're all creative in some way, so calling yourself 'a creative' is just daft.
I'm also not a much fan of 'creative' as a noun for much of the same reasons. I feel this way about how we commonly use 'talent' to mean - "They are magically gifted in ways that are innate", as if they rolled 18's in all their stats, and not "This person has achieved a level of skill that is remarkable."
I think the Anders Ericsson “10,000 hour” theoreticians would agree with you. And yet there are studies that point to a smaller effect of practice than Ericsson proposed. (Rather, practice may explain a smaller amount of the difference between cohorts that are divided by some measure of ability.) Very likely it’s a nature _and_ nurture phenomenon, particularly at the highest levels of certain fields of pursuit.
Sure, while I'm skeptical I'm not going to act like there isn't some unknown secret sauce that bends a person's abilities in a direction. But as far as I know, there is no baby that has ever been known to pick up a paint brush and give us the Mona Lisa. I think when we start the "Talented" conversation with the premise being, "if they rolled different stats at birth, they wouldn't be capable of this ability" we're flattening a lifetime of not only focus on a craft (10k) but their home life, did they have community, did they have supportive people in their life, proper nutrition, socioeconomic status, the technology at the time (I mean, more skilled peoples exist today than have probably ever existed), the education they were able to receive, were they born standard, etc etc.
If talent was decided in a way where talking about 'something innate', as in we could go so far as to say... 30%? 40% 50% nature accounts for aptitude.. wouldn't we actually have reason for a caste system? Is it specific - This person is wired to code - what does that even mean? There are so many skills and subskills.
I'm sure it exists, its just funny/frustrating that the word is used to describe what appears to me as the minority factor instead of the majority.
There is a lot to that thought. Perhaps the author just needed a book agent, someone who would take their creative output and find the publishers that wanted that sort of material.
In my experience mentoring folks, when they hate what they are doing it often comes down to "not enough money" or "because someone would pay me to do it." The money discussion is always interesting because people often goal "lots of money" without asking themselves what they would do if they had "lots of money." I know a bunch of engineers who, through fortuitous circumstances got to the "lots of money" stage, decided to "retire" and do only what they wanted to do, only to find themselves going back to work because after you take a year off or so the lack of mental stimulation and challenge (the whole thing that attracted them to engineering in the first place) was missing in their life. They learned late that setting a goal of "interesting problems which challenge me creatively" is much better for them than "lots of money."
I personally love programming, always have. But I have come to hate programming something again that I already have, in a different framework/abi, because some third party had to re-invent the wheel and forgot that all wheels need axles and attachment points Etc.
Agreed. As soon as the post pivoted from doing the writing, to all of the other aspects associated with running a business, I lost interest. The author would do well to understand the power of delegation.
I'm not sure delegating would have saved him either. I think his boredom about marketing shows a missing essential curiosity about things. Boredom kills!
I used to do programming projects on the side for almost 10 years now. Programming has been my hobby, passion or time-pass whatever you could call it.
At the beginning, these projects was my vent from the day job to learn new tools/tricks, try out random stuff, nothing specific. And I mostly don't finish it, I just move on, because I didn't have to complete those. Some were open source, many weren't.
And then one of my project that I spent hardly few hours on got some 1000+ upvotes on ProductHunt. So many emails, new follows, it was exhilarating. It pegged me into submitting my next project to PH as well. Though it didn't get as much recognition, it was covered by few tech journals, then some more followed. Suddenly I had users who were using something that I've created and I started charging for it. When it started making money, albeit little (i think at the most it was $100/mo), it changed things.
A thought arose, "I like building sideprojects, what if I get to do this full time!". It was exciting!
After that, I could never go back to working on my projects for just "fun". It always had to have some business reason. Can it work? Is the idea worthwhile? What is the revenue potential and so on. Suddenly, I'm not just programming, but doing customer support, marketing, trying to promote the project, etc.
Eventually, I wasn't doing the thing that I enjoyed and by pursuing it for commercial motives, it had become something else entirely.
I think many of us fall into this pit either by chance or being egged from outside. In my case, what I enjoyed was just programming. I conflated it with building a business. Unless you are famous or successful, almost anything that are pursued by passion alone, had to morph into something if you want it to support your life.
I just went full-time a month ago to try and build some profitable products. And I'm trying to get that "fun" part into the full-time thingy again. Can I truly work on things I enjoy, try new stuff and still make money out of it? Only time will tell. If the results don't come, so be it.
The person who said this article should have been titled "Started doing Marketing for My Passion and It Appeared I Don't Love Marketing" is right on.
I've met musicians who were totally uninterested in going to see anyone who wasn't "happening." You can't blame them, since they're trying to make a living.
I always thought about programming: "I like it OK. Sometimes I like it a lot, but it's a living. I don't do it at home for fun."
If you don't mind writing what sells, then that's a living. F. Scott Fitzgerald tried selling out in Hollywood, but he's not remembered for that non-passion part of his work:
I can't help but quote Terry Pratchett in Equal Rites, where he's talking about the Zoon tribe, who genetically cannot tell a lie. Some Zoons figure out a way to twist the truth and they develop great respect for him.
"It must be understood that while the majority of Zoon cannot lie they have great respect for any Zoon who can say that the world is other than it is, and the Liar holds a position of considerable eminence. He represents his tribe in all his dealings with the outside world, which the average Zoon long ago gave up trying to understand. Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars.
Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like “diplomat” or “public relations officer.” They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing."
Funny, I bet many of us actually do do programming at home for fun! Also the day job. However I wouldn’t do the day job type of programming at home for fun, so I guess it is a similar concept.
I think there's a way about going about these things that can make you hate it or enjoy it. I'll share some of my story as an example of how I compartmentalize my different activities.
I code for myself, I have been since I was a kid. Often they're little utilities that I find fun, interesting, or useful. Sometimes they're tested, if for instance it's something running part of my house. Most of the time they're not because testing is arduous at times. I feel very attached to what I create for myself; it's often creative or exploratory in nature. I enjoy this kind of code and share it freely, usually without a warranty.
I code for a large firm. The way I code there is entirely different. I'm very unattached to that code. It receives lots of criticism that I learn from but at the end of the day as soon as I put hands on keyboard that code is their code. I'm talented so I get to work on things I find interesting, but this job is a paycheck where I'm paid for meeting delivery deadlines at a standard of quality. As a result the code I write here is of a different nature, it's easily maintainable, testable, and quite rote. This money funds my day to day life and savings account. I enjoy my coworkers and select them carefully to the best of my ability but it's a job at the end of the day.
I also have a consulting business. I build solutions for clients or help them attain their goals. This job isn't just a paycheck because I often work with small and medium businesses who don't know what they need or how it needs to be done. I get more agency than I do at my FAANG job, but I'm still working to get paid according by meeting the clients goals. The code I write here is less rote than my enterprise code, but not as creative as my personal code. This money usually funds projects around my house or trips. I enjoy helping small businesses, but it's a job.
I also have some for-profit ventures I work on with friends. I have much more agency here, but I'm working to serve the needs of potential and current customers. My quality standard is higher but it's not enterprise code; it's not quite as rote as my enterprise code but a little more on the creative side. The goal here is to eventually replace my corporate job. I have fun doing this because it's with people I enjoy but it's a job.
Compartmentalizing my commitment and knowing my desired outcomes has greatly helped balance this whole act. Outside of those things I have other serious hobbies: biking, gardening, camping, festing, recreational hallucinogens, spending time with my dog and my partner. Many of these overlap.
I see a lot of similarities in us. I feel the same way about my main job, though at a smaller firm. I also consult with small businesses on the side and have had very similar experience.
What I don't have are any for-profit ventures (of my own or with friends), and I've almost totally stopped coding for myself. I used to write code for fun all the time, and would wonder that many of my classmates/coworkers didn't do this. But I'd like to recapture it. I'd also like to take a few risks without quitting my job. I can probably spend 10-15 hours/week between all side/personal ventures combined. Currently I have all of that going towards the same consulting project, and I've found it somewhat unpalatable to "spend" the opportunity cost of working for myself instead.
When I worked in an office this was difficult. I had to assign values to certain activities, sometimes subliminally. For instance, being that my personal coding was a lot more creative it sometimes taught me concrete enough patterns that I could take to work. That made it a higher order of value. I was making enough money at my day job that consulting wasn't needed, but I took less time off as a result. Gardening was a higher order of value because I find it very cathartic, and I'd end each day with a bike ride through San Jose.
Now I work from home and it's much easier. If I need time to think I'll go pull weeds; weeds are a weekly activity and gardens rarely require huge chunks of time commitment unless you're making something new. I do my day job 8-4 and use breaks to garden or ride my bike. In the evening I work on my other money making ventures. I don't need to do so many decompression activities later in the day because they're spread throughout the day in between work.
At least once a month my partner and I reserve a weekend to do something together. It could be restaurant or camping, sometimes a show. This, I think, is key for maintaining healthy relationships as a busy person.
> What I don't have are any for-profit ventures (of my own or with friends)
This took me a while to find. I was always willing to work on new things, but it took my friends getting to stages in their lives where they wanted to do this. Working remotely taught me skills to make this more possible as well.
> Currently I have all of that going towards the same consulting project, and I've found it somewhat unpalatable to "spend" the opportunity cost of working for myself instead.
I found a purpose for my consulting. It funds projects or trips that I already know that I want to do. Knowing that it's a budget extension tool and having a toolkit I can draw from to avoid situations where I have to learn while consulting has helped me a lot.
> I've almost totally stopped coding for myself.
I usually work on stuff where I'll continue to get value out of it day after day. Offline home automation is where I used to sink a ton of time but I yield benefits from it every day. When I got into kombucha brewing I built a system to help me journal batches. Then when I felt confident in that system to produce reproducible results I turned it into an app. It's a shitty Django app with frontend framework but it's actually immensely fun to hack on and it yields delicious kombucha every 10 days.
Ha, I started a little kombucha brewery as well, and ended up ditching it because it was too much work to "always have kombucha". The supplies instead now sit in my cabinet and mock me. Thanks for letting me peek into your routines a little. I think I see a couple things here I can implement myself without totally upending my life.
Take it day by day! None of what I do was planned overnight. I just began incrementally incorporating new things in as I saw opportunities and potential commitment.
Kevin Kelly recently published a link to "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" which is about making a sustainable (but not massive) living from your hobbies.
The author of ISMM, Don Lancaster, just passed away earlier this week.
He was also an electrical engineer by trade, and made a good chunk of bread in the 70s and 80s by self publishing books like The TTL Cookbook and selling them by mail order.
shrug I turned one of my hobbies that I like into paying for other hobbies I like. The key thing I was relatively good at it so finding people to pay me to do it on good conditions was easy.
I might do that hobby far less in free time but it is far better than doing something I hate for a living.
So I guess key point here you need to also be relatively competent and the hobby has to be marketable. I'd be miserable if my ops jobs would just be managing someone's shitty Wordpress instances all day.
As article's author showed being mediocre in market with a lot of competition probably won't get you all that much money, passion or not.
Also, it is sometimes worth to leave the "business" part to someone else and just find a job. I absolutely hate anything around a business so it is fine tradeoff for me to have someone else manage majority of it, find customers etc. rather than be whole one man shop.
The problem isn't that you started doing it for money, it's that you didn't get much money in return. Your "business" has failed, but if you had managed to make money, you would've been satisifed.
Turning passion to business doesn't sound right, as if you're selling your soul, if you looked at it like "I tried to make money doing it but the ROI wasn't good" like any other project, I feel like it'd have been more graceful.
My hobby is board gaming. I often see people on board game forums asking questions about wanting to open up a board game store/cafe. My thought is always, "Do you want to hate board games? Because that is the path to hating board games."
I mostly agree with this, but there are some people who very happily run board game stores.
But they’re the kind of people who love the process of running a store, and who also happen to love board games and decided to sell them.
Put another way, I think there’s a common mistake people make that “I love <this>, so I’ll do <this> + business and it’ll be great”, without considering what it takes to do the business part.
But I think the other mistake is assuming that working on something you love will automatically make you hate it. That really depends on your business acumen and mindset about the non-<this> factors involved.
That's when people who homebrew coffee talk about opening a coffee shop. When you open a shop, even if it's a shop about your favorite hobby, 80% of the work is unrelated to that hobby and is now about running a business.
When I was in Pigeon Forge, TN, they had a puzzle store. I thought it was the coolest thing. Tons of different puzzles. Niche. I couldn’t see having one in every town though
I wish more people would write about “subsidizing” your hobby business with a more reliable source of income. If you’re a remote worker with some schedule flexibility, for example, you can probably run a low-contact business like a bookstore or art gallery without much interruption to your work day.
Just set up a desk in your shop and take a break when the occasional person wanders in. Not having to worry about your hobby business being profitable enough to pay the bills immediately - or ever - seems like a nice way to maintain your interest in it.
I got forced into retirement, but have since learned that’s one of the best things that ever happened to me.
These days, I do software for free, that is better than most commercial software, partly because I don’t need to make the types of compromises that profit-generating companies do.
I love programming (not just playing with code) and making excellent things with code, and electronics and mechanisms. I get paid to be good at it and help others do so as well, and I love that, too.
All that said, the author’s warning is well heeded. There are things I’ve built and run at my own expense. They could be commercialized, but that bit doesn’t seem like fun to me (I don’t need the money, so there isn’t a problem there to solve). I could give them to someone who would commercialize them, but that would create problems for the new owners and old users - so again, not fun.
Perhaps there is room for both - pure fun and enjoyment without obligation or commitment, as well as the commercial tangible benefit to others (i.e. paid for).
I rarely get to work at all three. I think that is a manifestation of my principles - when getting paid I don’t feel like what I want to do comes into play as much as what my employer needs. When they do, it’s awesome.
Right now it’s two of three (SaaS + embedded) and that’s cool with me.
Same thing happened with me and music. Granted, I was a teenager and nothing too serious, but loved writing some songs, getting known songs in new arrangements.
It naturally progressed into forming a band, then we started doing small concerts. Before I could realized, most of my time was in spreadsheets to register the costs, the supplies we needed, transportation, on top of getting everyone to learn the same songs.
In the end I got so burned out that I stopped playing almost completely. Went from 3-4 hours a day to 0 over years.
Not the same as the author, but same case of trying to monetize a hobby completely killed the hobby for me.
In this case, the author chose to Self-Publish the book (amazon), and so they'd have to do their own Marketing, Networking, Editing, on-top of writing (the fun, creative part). If they'd had a Literary Agent, it may have worked out - Agent does the heavy-lifting i.e non-writing tasks.
The writing business (books) is extremely competitive - keep a main job, write on the side (hobby) until sales / Agent / Publisher pays enough for you focus on writing full-time.
Stephen King, "On Writing" covers this well, and it's a joy to read.
Did PhD in a topic. Still like the topic. My advice: people over generalize from their n=1 experience of doing a PhD. There are so many differences between fields, universities, supervisors...
This was my experience. My advisor said, "You can do that, but no one will hire you." I decided I'd finish my dissertation on a topic that interested me then become a programmer. And here we are.
I only did a Bachelors in Engineering - super passionate about electronics when I started! Had zero interest when I finished - something to do with academia (and I come from a very academic family background)
I firmly believe that if you follow your passion and create something that solves a problem you're passionate about, that no one else has solved yet (i.e. with the features you care about, at a price you can afford), you'll find others with the same passion who want what you're selling.
That's not the same as saying you can sell "anything", or that you can definitively strike it rich doing so.
My simple math is this. There are 8 billion people on the planet. If you can create something that appeals to just 1 out of 800,000 people (or 0.0000025% of the population), you should be able to attract 10,000 people who at least follow you online. It won't happen overnight, but if it's something you're passionate about, there are at least 10,000 other people who share that passion and are looking for what you're offering.
If you can't find a way to monetize 10,000 followers, you're doing something wrong.
But if you're not solving your own problems, and if you're not pursuing your own passion, there's no reason to assume others are passionate about the thing you're just doing for the money. Even if they are, they're likely to see through the facade.
Pretty much my driving force. And it's not about getting rich. I'm solving my problems and looking for people who feel the way I do about how it should be solved. Since “there is nothing new under the sun” and I'm not special, the odds are in my favor.
Thank you. Today was the best day for the reminder.
These potential users must have connection to internet, speak your language, have free time to interact to watch you, have free money to spend on your product.
This is why I never attempted to find a programming job. I am the typical nerdy polyglot, having dabbled in a two-digit amount of programming languages. But I somehow always knew, if I had to do this 8 hours a day, for projects I am likely not intrinsically motivated to work on, I'd likely hate it after a few weeks. I envy those which managed to make this passion into a paying job without loosing the love for it.
I find my job as a software engineer and programming for fun to be extremely different, to the point where my job hasn't damaged my passion for fun programming on whatever I want.
It's like if you had a passion for painting and got a job that consisted of 50% deciding what solid colour to paint walls and 50% painting walls solid colours.
This varies a lot. I could imagine a game dev whose hobby resembles their passion a lot more.
This is exactly why I'm pursuing programming. I hate it with a passion. I'm an artist at heart, so programming is a great fit because, not only does it pay much more than art, it's completely artless, so it won't ruin my desire for making art at the end of the day.
Strong disagree - although it depends on how you define art
Is adding form to function artless? Is architecture artless?
If you use a highly choreographed engineered process for creating a piece of art - does that make the outcome artless?
One way I categorise artists I have met is engineer-type artists versus discovery-type artists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981875
i also think art is defined by the perception of the viewer (and has far less to do with the creator than is usually presumed!)
Can you elaborate a little on why you think programming is "completely artless"? I hear many coders making comparisons of their work with art, so this kind of contradicts my intuition.
For me the key is just having other hobbies. I do less of that (which is vaguely defined ops work + some programming) as hobby because I do it at work, but it's not like I lack other hobbies.
I usually go back to it when the job takes me away from it (say we're speccing project for the client or other non-work that is required to get work later down the line).
It's essentially sacrificing one hobby for another. Sure I no longer tinker with penguins all day but I can afford stuff for my other hobbies and still not hate my job.
Yep, I loved programming when I was introduced to it in 6th grade or so. There was an after-school program where we could go to the high school and use their TRS-80 computers. I was instantly hooked.
Fast forward through a career of doing it, and I am sick of it. When I retire I want to de-tech my life as much as I can. I'll probably keep a smartphone but I don't think I'll have a computer in the house.
> But I somehow always knew, if I had to do this 8 hours a day, for projects I am likely not intrinsically motivated to work on, I'd likely hate it after a few weeks
You just play with programming languages on the surface. Programming is something different and chances are you won't like it.
>I envy those which managed to make this passion into a paying job without loosing the love for it.
Wait, I have never said anything about my supposed abilities or self-perceived performance regarding programming. How come you are diagnosing overconfidence from afar, without knowing anything beyond the few lines I've written? Being slapped with that link without any further comment feels quite out of place to say the least. Besides, this posting was about deliberately having decided to not become a programmer professionally. I am having a hard time to understand how you diagnose overconfidence from that, quite the contrary actually...
>Wait, I have never said anything about my supposed abilities or self-perceived performance regarding programming
How come? You said you are a ‘polyglot’.
Human language polyglots are geniuses who know several languages on a decent level. If you checked several courses on Duolingo, chances are you are not one.
The same applies to programming languages.
Maybe, stop calling yourself a synonym of ‘genius’ to avoid receiving references to Dunning-Kruger effect.
>How come you are diagnosing overconfidence from afar, without knowing anything beyond the few lines I've written?
Few lines are enough to see inconsistencies in your words and realize that I was in your shoes.
The only difference is that as a script-kiddie “having dabbled in a two-digit amount of programming languages“ I decided to give it a try and shifted to programming in my career. It’s not what I thought it was, so I cleaned out my closet from amateurish illusions, focused on 2 languages and I’m quite satisfied with my job.
The relationship between paid work and unpaid work can be complicated.
I make a living doing something I would still do if not paid. I know this is true because I do in fact voluntarily engage in a lot of unpaid work of exactly the sort I am paid for. The kind of work I do is training. I train software testers.
Working without pay is nice because it is lower stress. I generate new training material in this way.
Working with pay means I have customers. Customers deserve value for money. So, it’s more stress. Still, I only teach what I believe. It’s fun for me. I have agency.
But I rely on people to sign up. If not enough sign up, that will be the end of my business. I don’t know what I would do, then— except I know for sure that I will continue teaching until a few days before my death.
My hobby/passion became my day job. I'm no longer passionate about it, nor is it a hobby anymore. On the flipside - it's a great job, pays well, and I still find the work interesting (just not enough to spend my free time on it).
I was passionate about music in high school, but went to college and majored in math and physics, while learning electronics and programming on my own. Now it turns out that those things are hobbies too. ;-)
I'm glad that I didn't pursue music as a career. I actually make money playing, but not enough to support myself. I also do a lot of programming, but on my own terms, not as a software developer.
One problem that I think doesn't get enough attention, is that most businesses fail. And most people hate working for failed businesses, especially ones that they can't escape from.
It's hard to imagine the economy of your hobby and all else that goes into any business. Taxes, marketing, customer service, and if you hire people, management. Very few enjoy these activities, let alone excel at them, especially with a hobbyists's mindset.
The influencer is the closest to a marketing hobbyist, but from the many I've met, it often crosses the line into addiction and narcissism, which some see as talent.
I think writing is a very unique area, so the lesson here may not be generally applicable. Writing fiction is incredibly time consuming, and there’s no where at all to hide - there your work product is, for all to see.
Plus, you can’t scale it with help. Sure, there are editors and some people collaborate, but pretty much it is all on the author to produce.
Other businesses you can hire people to take some of the load off.
The headline is exactly what I've heard in many hobbyist forums for decades. (My particular sin is woodworking.) It's almost inconceivable to me that this would be shocking or surprising to anyone deep into any particular hobby.
> His formula was, in a nutshell: Create training courses and sell them to others, just as he was doing. And at least one of us made big money (hint, it wasn’t me).
There is something special about courses about getting rich by making training courses about anything non-self-referential that attracts a lot more suckers than the “real” training courses.
You don't have to be a sociopath to fall for this.
"Make online learning material about stuff you know" doesn't seem like a shady endeavour.
It is a very recommendable activity, especially if you happen to like teaching.
But I would never bet on getting rich from doing it.
I think it's only borderline scammy; game-theoretically you can say that it's a losing game for certain parties, but I don't think that makers of the kinds of learning material that is profitable are evil, just because it's profitable for recursive reasons. From their perspective they're just having luck because everyone wants to know how to make videos, how to talk, how to structure things, and what sites pay well.
It's like drop-shipping: This is a great idea if it weren't because the profit margins get eradicated by everone doing it.
Some cities arose around healing springs; the traffic alone could sustain roadside businesses that eventually formed cities. Maybe the spring didn't cure cancer, but does that make the roadside hotdog vendor shady?
Turning something you do for fun into something you do to survive has always been a great way to sap the enjoyment out of it.
I've been told numerous times over the years to turn my photography into a business. Or my baking. Or my cooking. Or to start music tuition. I can't think of anything I'd hate more.
Malcolm Lowley writes on The Literary Situation (1958; first published 1947):
"Aside from the hard-working authors of textbooks, standard juveniles, mysteries and Westerns, I doubt that two hundred Americans earned the major portion of their incomes, year after year, by writing hard-cover books".
I had a similar situation with programming, I wanted to make a ton of money with a successful game, but I ended up quitting halfway through. I hated it. Eventually I settled on making a niche wifi app, and ended up enjoying most it. Didn't really make a whole lot of money but I definitely learned a lot.
many years ago, i wanted to turn my passion in photography to my career. I did a few professional gigs and found out that it was turning out to be a job; and i was enjoying less of what i loved. in fact, it was making me hate it. I was wise enough at that time to stop it.
The market often doesn't know what it wants until it taste's something. I'm wary of any true 'formula' for creating art. It must be hard for artists to be heard (ironically given our digital age). Patreon is a good model?
Good to keep in mind for sure but don’t assume it can’t be done either. Currently I’m lucky enough to be managing it but there are two of us. Every day is great and I hope we can do this for a very long time.
Let's think about what it means to "make money". The phrase itself is already misleading because no one can make money, money is "made" by the central banks by changing some numbers in mainframe databases. These mainframes are connected to some local distribution banks like credit unions which then enable economic activity by business loans and other kinds of "investments", e.g. local government services like street cleaning, trash pickup, churches, schools, electricity, sewage, &etc. On top of this you have peripheral financial engineering like PayPal and credit cards.
At least that's the gist of it anyway. So no one can actually "make money" but what they can do is figure out how to tap into the flow of economic services that will get them indirect access to some of the numbers in the database managed by the central banks. At this point there are one of two things you can do which is either do something that enables governments to manage their populations by moving people around and keeping them clothed, housed, and fed (essential services) or you can provide non-essential services like keeping people entertained when they're not working and informing them of what's happening in the world at large, e.g. podcasts and newsletters. The problem is the following, there is no way to get rich from doing any of this because all of these things are saturated with enough people such that the overall money pie is already split between them pretty evenly so none of them are going to end up rich in any meaningful sense. This means the only way to truly get rich is to operate on a scale that no one has thought of before, e.g. Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon, Salesforce, SpaceX, Dell, Nvidia, AMD, Arm, Raytheon, Saudi Aramco, &etc.
Most of the time people are just fighting over scraps and the best they can hope for is some steady source of income that pays their rent and affords them some basic luxuries like visiting Las Vegas and watching a few acrobatic shows.
The people that are truly rich like Klaus Schwab operate in an entirely different world. Similarly for the executives at big pharma and big tech.
I'd say the game is inherently unfair but it still doesn't prevent people from playing it to the detriment of all the players involved.
> Most of the time people are just fighting over scraps and the best they can hope for is some steady source of income that pays their rent and affords them some basic luxuries like visiting Las Vegas and watching a few acrobatic shows.
I'm sorry to react so strongly, but I think it's demeaning to suggest that the life condition you described is one of "fighting over scraps". It's also... (I'm struggling to find the right words) really entitled in a materialistic way to suggest (correct me if this is not what you suggest) that it's unfair that almost nobody can move from the average station to the station of uber-wealthy. Who is owed the life of opulence? And who owes it to them? And how many people actually aspire to this extreme wealth, vs. recognize that there is a heck of a lot more meaningful things to do with life than make money?
demeaning to suggest that the life condition you described is one of "fighting over scraps"
Nobody likes leaving the cave.
GP is not suggesting people deserve to become super-wealthy, but is pointing out that it is very hard to get out of financial survival into thriving without considerable luck or an unusual degree of innovative ability and ready access to capital.
Which part do you disagree with? Money is a way to control the masses and it has always been used that way. The technology currently exists to do away with all wealth disparities and achieve a true meritocracy wherein individual talents are developed to benefit everyone collectively but most people can not conceive of what such a world would look like so they chase money and end up miserable. In the grand scheme of things money is entirely meaningless, it's a bunch of numbers in databases.
That's entirely up to you. I'm just explaining how the system works. Once you realize how the whole thing is engineered the rat race starts to look like insanity.
You don't turn a creative field into a career or a business until you know that what you want to make is going to be marketable or you are independently wealthy and don't need an income to live. And once you're successful in a creative field, resist the urge to pay attention to marketing data.
A creative who doesn't have the backing of a large corporation needs to lead (i.e. innovate, challenge conventions, etc.) not follow. That's because you can either be better, worse or different than the competition. If you're not different and you have a smaller budget, you will inevitably be worse. That applies to startups and even incumbent underdogs in any line of business.