How to make a living doing many things?
Two skills every multipassionate must learn.
I get it. You want to sing, paint, write, meditate, do graphic design, and become a motivational speaker.
Many people will tell you you’re delusional.
That you have to choose. You can’t have it all.
I won’t.
But I’ll tell you that you have to become excellent at time and priority management, and get interested in boring things like money.
You’ll need to learn how you budget both your time and your finances.
So let’s do it. Consider this your short guide to prioritisation and budgeting.
What prioritising looks like for multipassionate folks
Let’s say you have the abovementioned array of passions: singing, painting, writing, meditating, graphic design and public speaking.
You might feel like you’re equally interested in doing all of them. But I’ll argue that once you start to look at the tradeoffs each one requires (if you want to make a living out of them), you’ll notice that some are more or less attractive than others.
For example, getting paid for writing often requires that you write on commission, i.e. according to someone else’s content plan. Whether it’s writing for a company, a journalistic outlet or advertising, you’ll likely have to hand over some of your autonomy to an external partner.
Sure, you can also get paid for publishing your diary via platforms like Substack. But even then, your writing often starts to follow the desires of your readers. What you want to write about must match with what your readers are willing to pay for. And before you get to 1000 paying subscribers or whatever you need to make an income, you might have to write for someone else in the meantime.
And to ensure work, you’ll have to be excited about whatever it is you write about, deliver consistent quality, stick to deadlines and write even when you’re not inspired. Some months you might be so busy you have to write on evenings and weekends whereas other months you might barely have any work.
These are some of the tradeoffs of a career as a professional writer.
Another example: Becoming a motivational speaker often requires developing one brilliant speech that works as your business card. You’ll be the “guy who speaks about how to fight depression with intelligent city planning” or the “chef-turned- interior-designer who decorates houses with food-inspired art”.
Getting other people to talk about you in this manner and booking you for gigs means you have to do some free or low-paid gigs to start with. You’ll use these gigs to iterate on that one speech so that it becomes pure gold. You’ll speak to audiences who might care a lot about your subject but also to audiences who aren’t that interested. They’re only sitting there because their boss booked you for their annual team-building day.
To get gigs, you’ll introduce yourself to anyone looking for a speaker, make Youtube videos that showcase your talent, and try to get your face on a speaking agency’s website. You end up giving the same speech until you get bored with it. That’s when bigger audiences start to notice you exist. So you keep repeating yourself again and again.
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The point is that if you want any of your passions to pay the bills, you’ll be asked a certain level of commitment, effort and sacrifice. In other words, you’ll have to accept that it’s not just for fun anymore, but it’s a job.
So if you want to keep loving something, you might not want to turn it into an income stream.
It’s okay to have hobbies. Writing for your own pleasure doesn’t make you any less of a writer. There’s no shame in keeping things small in order to protect them.
But if you want money from your passion, accepting the tradeoffs is a big part of it.
Prioritising in a nutshell:
The key to prioritising your passions is to spend some time imagining what life would look like if you decided to go big on them. That will help you cut the weeds and decide which passions are worth focusing on.
So, ask yourself:
What would it look like to make money from XX [insert your passion]?
How attractive does this path seem in the real world, i.e. how unpleasant are the most demanding bits against how enjoyable are the most rewarding bits?
Budgeting doesn’t apply merely to money but also to time
Once you’ve prioritised your different passions against one another, it’s time to budget your money and time accordingly.
Now, we're often told that where the energy goes, the money flows. But I think there’s more nuance to it.
What you spend most of your time on doesn’t have to be what gives you the best income.
Let me explain.
Some jobs pay better than others. For example, a graphic designer may bill thousands per month, whereas doing singing gigs at pubs and parties might pay only a fraction of that (perhaps only free beers).
There’s no real logic to why some jobs pay better than others. It’s just a silly capitalist game, really. So let’s not get stuck at why a graphic designer drafting McDonald’s ads makes so much more money than a nurse working in three shifts and saving lives. It’s just the world we live in.
So, to benefit from the world we live in, it’s smart to become highly efficient in a highly-valued skill.
A very skilled and experienced graphic designer can complete jobs in a matter of a few hours. They can also ask for higher fees. This frees up their time to do something much less lucrative, such as singing gigs at weddings.
However, those gigs might be a much harder earn. They might require hours of practice, meetings with the wedding planner, and spending a whole day at the venue setting things up. Once you break it down to an hourly rate, they might look less than worth it.
The intrinsic value of each passion, i.e. how much you love doing it, can be equal. But the external value has a market price.
So, the real goal isn’t how to make an equally good income from different things, but how to make a total income from different, more and less profitable sources and also to have time to invest in the things you love.
Budgeting in a nutshell
Budgeting means understanding what other people are willing to pay for and how much exactly they’re willing to pay for it. Once you get an idea of the average income in any given field, you can start to budget your time accordingly.
Ask yourself:
How much is an hour’s worth (or project’s worth) of work in X [fill with your passion or desired field] on average? How many hours/projects will I have to do in a month to land the income I need?
If I become really good at X, how much money could I be making? How much of my time would it take? Would I then need other income streams, or could I spend the rest of my time having multiple hobbies instead?
What does it look like to become really good? What do I need to do to get there?
In practice, what would I want my week to look like and which of my passions need to be included in some form?
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Have a think about all the above and tell me if it sparks any new thoughts. I’d love to hear.
I consider it my job to help you make the most of your creative skillset and have fun doing so. So, let me know if this raises any questions.
Keep doing whatever weird and random things you have going on.
Remember that your weirdness can be a source of inspiration and hope for someone else.
I’ll be rooting for you.
With kindness,
Aurora
