How to Fulfill Your Passion for Design Without Starving: Networking

The advice, do what you love, is actually completely crap advice. Sure, you should do what you love, but you can’t do it all the time. And you usually can’t get paid for it. And all of this is okay.

The hardest part of life is figuring out what you love, first of all. There are things you know you love, but you would never think of doing it as a career. Sex for example. Who doesn’t love sex? But do you need to get paid for it? Probably not.

And there are a lot of things we do that we don’t love, but we are happy we do them. The gym comes to mind. The tricks I have to do to get myself to the gym are amazing. And expensive. I need Lulumon pants for my butt, I need new songs each time to distract me, and I need chic-chic salad fixings after to keep me from eating donuts as a reward. So I hate the gym. But I go. Because my body feels good after I go, and I do better thinking if I go to the gym regularly.

If I took the advice do what you love, I’d be eating donuts and having sex. Almost all the time.

So how do you decide on a career if the advice do what you love is terrible?

You think in percentages.

You do what you love for part of the time, and you do what gives you long-term, delayed or indirect benefits for part of the time.  So, for example, you need to earn money. And you are not a sell-out for being a banker on Wall Street (are there any of these jobs left???) you are a smarty. As long as you are leaving time for other things. Like sex and donuts.

Or your second job. Maybe you love making light fixtures. Did you ever notice that you can customize light by painting the bulbs with Cray-Pas? But you can't paint the lightbulbs for a living because you'd starve. And you’re really creative, yes, but, newsflash: People who cannot pay rent or buy food do not have the ability to be creative. People who are starving are obsessed with food and shelter. You cannot make light fixtures if you don’t have food.

So you need to do what you love in a practical way that respects the other aspects of your life, too. We are all multi-dimensional, and the advice, do what you love assumes that one thing trumps everything. Which is not how people are.

You can tell you’re on the right track if you are taking care of basic needs in a reliable, stable way, and you are feeding your need for meaning in life. Meaning doesn’t have to be creative, it doesn’t have to be independent, it doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. But it has to make you excited. Not everyone’s day job is exciting, but everyone’s life should be exciting.

What's the best way to get this life? The reliable stable income is probably harder than the passion that drives you to wake up every day. So take care of that hard part through networking. 

Really. Because whatever sort of life you want -- inside and outside the office -- you'll be more likely to get it if you have a network. Want to switch careers, or make more money, or downshift to get more time and less money? If you have a group of people who know you and are invested in helping you, you'll achieve that more easily.

Building this sort of network takes time, and you need this network to be diverse -- not just in your own industry. The most valuable network to you is about 35 people in diverse industries who are having real conversations with you over the course of months, or years. A great way to build they type of network that helps you build a life is Brazen Careerist. Where your career is a tool for building the life you want.



Check it out.

And when people ask you what you're doing, you'll say you're doing what you love, and creating stability at the same time. And then you can invite them to a networking event, at your house, and they'll say, 'Hey, is that Cray-Pas on your lightbulbs?

October 28, 2009

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Member since: 10/22/09
About:   My career never had a straight path, but I am always learning and trying...