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Your Passion Projects

Your passion projects I love this quote the work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life jessica hey sh I love this quote we're saying michelle okay china I said how do you get paid for screwing her on facebook you become an expert, I teach creative life classes on facebook and how great facebook is and you teach it online and there are lots of people who do that and get paid well, all right, so this stuff that you do love to do there are ways to make money from it often not always I mean, if you love to just sit and eat pancakes, probably maybe not, you know, but lots of times you can see that the stuff that you do when you procrastinate is the stuff that you should be building into your business. One of the things that I do when I procrastinate is read and so I love to bring that part into my business anyway that I can so I often quote a lot they use quotes in my block posts and I used them and courses like this and I share wi...

th people what I'm reading I have blocked posts on my top ten favorite books for productivity or my top ten favorite books on marketing I've posts like that that I've written I sometimes share what I'm reading on instagram or twitter, facebook and so I've brought that into my business and made it a part of my business is well because it's something that I really love follow your passion never follow your passion we've heard both of these right like you should never follow your passion that it's the worst advice ever and then which one is right? Can you actually make money from your passion? Well, your business ruin your love for your passion the's there a lot of questions that come up when people are thinking about should I build a business around what I really love and I think it is I think it is important to know yourself really well and if for instance you love painting but if painting for ten hours a day or eight hours a day or six hours a day sounds like it's gonna ruin it for you, then it's probably not the best thing to build your business off up. Maybe you turned that into some sort of digital product and so it's selling for itself and so you get teo kind of control your time in your hours a little bit better. There are lots of things that you can d'oh now my advice is follow your passion and build a business around that and malcolm gladwell recently said that passion and desire is the single most important factor to business success yes yes, if he said that people are going to be more likely to believe it when I say it and it's really true when you see creative entrepreneurs who are succeeding you khun tell that they're loving what they're doing you can tell and it's pretty darn clear when someone isn't passionate when you feel like all they want you to do is buy and that they don't really love what they dio and you can almost see as people kind of stop loving whatever they're doing in their business and they're kind of just going at it now for the motion and that's when I would say tweak it, figure out how to fall in love with again how can you transition? How can you update? How can you evolve? Because there are ways to do that and one of the examples I like to use our the grocery suits store sample people, the people who are really excited about the sample and they're like this cheese is going to melt in your mouth and it's so creamy and delicious and you have to try it and they seem really excited you're more pulled to it or we were recently walking past somebody in the grocery store and they were just like I have a sample and I didn't I didn't even we just kept in here we just kept going and that's a silly example but it's something that I can show you that we we know and when you're passionate about something it's contagious, it catches on, people get excited about it, too. When I'm talking about this stuff, it probably gets you guys more excited about it because you can tell that I'm really excited about it, and one thing that I think is really helpful is that I've seen passion trump experience time and time again if somebody is more experienced or somebody is more passionate, often the person who is more passionate is actually going to do better, and they're going to grow a loyal following, even the people with lots of experience, if they don't have that desire behind it, kind of lacking something. So if you're worried that you're not an expert, but you've got all the passion, don't worry anymore you you're gonna be fine, you're also more likely to finish stuff like everything within your business. If you're excited about it and you really want to do it, you're much more likely to finish it. I have people that I work with all the time that say I get, like, halfway through the project and then I stop and I'm like, what, were you really excited about it to be getting wealth? And there they said, well, I thought that my customers would really like it. I thought that it would sell really well is often the answer, so the answer is I wasn't really excited about it. I just thought it was going to sell really well, well, I say don't go with that stuff and then also follow the moment um when you're excited do your work so what are the things that you'll always do no matter how much time and money you have so let's say you have very little money very little time whatever things that you're gonna dio anyways, what do you feel pulled to dio share this stuff in the chat room as well? What if you had all the time and money you could ever want? Then what would you d'oh? I think this one's a really fun one if I had all the time and money, what would I d'oh right? One of the things that I would do is spend more time writing fiction actually because I really enjoy it so I often make time just for me to do it. It has nothing to do with my business. However, I do believe it helps my writing immensely the fact that I also take time to write fiction even though I don't think it will ever go anywhere maybe maybe someday I will be a famous author and you can say back when I saw her own creative lives but I'm not planning that out, right? But I make time for it because I enjoy it, and it really does help my writing. So what are some of your answers to these questions? Anybody want to share? Anybody have any good answers? Were shell if I had all the time and money, I would travel around the united states in my tiny trailer and write about it because that's, how I love to do and how much time for that do you make now, actually quite a bit, yeah, I always see updates and I am still, and I like to see your updates on that actually, I think we scared a lot of time campaign I am not a camper or if I I mean, I I'm just I'm just not a camper and I'm not big on travelling either. It has to be something that I'm really excited about to get me on an airplane and or to even get me to spend eight hours in a car. However, I love to read your stuff, so I think you have an audience that even if they aren't travelers or campers, they get excited. I feel like I'm kind of living vicariously through you when I when I read it, yeah, yeah that's what your trying todo awesome, well it's happening to anybody else again like one of the challenges when you do have something you're passionate about is giving yourself permission to just go for it so I started this year rebranding my wedding and photographer bye wedding photography and cinematography business and this summer I kind of accidentally fell myself in this project where I was filming a grandmother teaching her granddaughter how to make chicken dumplings the secret family recipe and one day I had this idea what if I travel the world and filmed this happening a different countries that its food is a universal love language and one morning when I was writing in my journal I was like I don't have the time of money to do it but what if I did it anyway and so mostly because of you and my and being in that league of supers this summer it gave me and I'm shaking again hey gave me the confidence to just I'm going to try and I'm going to make a kickstarter to do this project and I'm calling it project stir and I'm gonna launch that next spring and the worst that can happen is I can just not fund the project but nobody is going to kill me and eat me wait there's no monsters will come after you and you don't fulfil a kickstarter project right and it's called project stir like isn't project stir thoroughly and it's that sure stare a shot's dot com if you're interested okay, perfect. And so you've got that. You thought I can't do this right? My first reaction when I had the idea was no, you can't do that. You can't that's a silly idea don't do it, and it just kept coming back up and coming back up, and one day I was like, why not? I love that you said it kept coming back up and it kept coming back up because that's the stuff that you should pay attention to, those air, the projects that I invest a lot of time in that when I wake up, I'm thinking about it again, and I'm thinking about again, and I'm working on something and I can't stop thinking about this other thing that I want to start and I want to work on, and those things tend to be the most successful for me. That was how our trip anura membership site that I had I think it came to be and that I finally decided, yes, I'll do this is because every morning when I woke up, I thought about hell great with this b if there was this one stop shop for makers and artists and it just kept, I just get thinking about it no matter what I was working on I was thinking about how great it would be to do that and I kept thinking is going to be too hard it's gonna be too difficult it's gonna be too hard to find a photographer for to find a web designer to get people on board it's going to be too hard to start a membership site I don't even know really how to do this what what's it going to entail? I'm not a tech expert but when you are so excited about something you figure it out you somehow figure it out like you're doing yeah now what if you haven't figured out your passion it's okay it's okay because you were you were doing other projects right when you came on to this idea came to me it just kind of like jumped on me was like you're going to do this thing yeah, it could happen at any time so it's okay if you don't know exactly what you want to dio right this very second that's okay too and often you'll have more than one, so don't box yourself in if I thought that I could only be a business consultant there would be so much missing from my business it wouldn't be a ce fun it wouldn't be as fun for me I don't think it would be it's fun for my customers and I don't think I would be attracting the right people and at first when I started out I thought I just have to be a business consultant and I was more like I'm going to be professional and put on my blazer and that kind of person and that doesn't work for me start with what you enjoy now and see yourself enjoying over a long period of time so start there I don't don't make it so specific that you can't grow with that, so give yourself plenty of room to grow if you're not absolutely sure that this is what you want your business to be, open it up, give yourself a little bit of room so instead of selling instead of selling handed in mittens because that's what you like but you don't know for sure that that's what you're always gonna want to dio sell handmade guts just say that you sell hand made good so don't start to box yourself in to a place where you feel like that's the only thing you can possibly do give yourself room that's what I tell people clients who I've worked with that say I don't necessarily know just the one thing yet so let's go a little bit wider so that you have lots of room because your business will evolve over time just let it just let it has anybody felt this that their business has evolved over time and has become something else I really have in an enormous way, when I started, I was a teacher for years, and then as a lot of people in helping professions do, I completely poured myself into it and burnt out, and I needed to stop for health reasons, and because my kids were, like, way, need you to stick around for a while, please, s o I, when I decided to go into writing, which was, has always been my other love that I felt like I didn't, I wasn't allowed to do because it's creative, and for some reason, we think, ray, we think that we're not allowed to creative people like a real thing, yes, which is such a terrible yes, top teaching people that, okay, so I thought that I wasn't allowed to be a writer and that real people weren't, and at this point, I see like, no, I really can, and I thought that that's all I could do and that to do that, I had to be a business like copywriter or person, and then ran into one of my old students or her parents, actually, and at the grocery store, they're like, oh, no, she needs your help, and so I agreed to just do a little bit of like one on one hang out with her lover to pieces she's real awesome, and I wanted you to do well and remembered how much I love teaching and how much I missed it. And so I totally changed back to this, like a place where I could have all of it together at the same time, and it made it so good, and I feel like I'm just myself in it all the time and it's amazing. So let me ask you a couple of questions first, was it hard, teo, do any of the transitions to make any of the transitions? The first transition was unbelievably hard going from being a teacher to not being a teacher was heartbreaking, and it was so completely necessary because I was really at a crisis point, and I needed to stop everything that I was doing, and I've talked about this with a lot of the ladies here that I've gotten to know really well, and I'm working on a book, talking about this first year, um, it's called pajama year because I literally spent most of that year in my pajamas like hiding under the blankets, certain that I had ruined my life in the life of my children by stopping this the right thing in the smart choice, but as soon as I started to allow it to be all of the things it was the easiest transition, like I didn't even know it happened until I suddenly was completely comfortable. And then I looked back and was like, wow, that was a huge change. I don't know when it happened, and yes, so it was like the transition of taking away something that I loved was really difficult, though he needed to do it in order to see that I could put them both together. And then that transition into the place where it was right was just seamless was so easy. And how did you know when it was right? Um, when I when I left, I met up with this young woman in a cafe nearby. My house, and I hung out with her for a couple hours and helped her write a paper. And as soon as I left that cafe, I walked out the doors, and I felt like that that's, what I'm supposed to dio. And it was like there was no question if I feel emotional about it. There's, no question in my mind that this is what I need to be doing in some way, shape or form, and it doesn't excuse me. It doesn't need to be teaching someone in format so that they can pass there julius caesar, paper or whatever, and it doesn't need to be a woman who's writing a story about how she went into business. But it needs to be, ah, woman who needs help to tell you something, and I need to be there doing it. Oh, can we get her, you, teo, you're making really make out the face so much time on. Thank you for sharing and being so open and honest with us is going making other people tear up tio, I can see it.