How to Make Your Hobby Your Profession

Many of us dream of packing in our day jobs and turning our passion into our career, but few of us take the plunge and do it.

If you’re serious about turning your hobby into your profession, then it’s important to realize that it’s going to be a long road ahead and there may even be times when you wonder if it’s all really worth it.

However, when you start to see the shape of your life changing and the first dollars rolling in, you’ll quickly realize that this investment in your own happiness is one of the best investments that you could possibly make.

Play To Your Strengths

There are some hobbies that lend themselves to becoming a profession. If you’re a green thumb, starting a gardening business is an obvious side hustle that could become a career path in the future.

On the other hand, if you’re really great at chess, it can take a lot longer and a bit more financial backing to start seeing monetary returns from your skill.

Of course, times do change, and there are certain hobbies that could absolutely be careers now that would not have been only a decade or two ago.

The gaming world is a notable example, where the best video game players in the world can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

If you’re planning on joining these ranks then knowing your gaming personality is essential, which brings us to the second part of this point. It’s crucial to know your strengths and weaknesses when setting out to make your hobby a career.

If you’re a great gardener when it comes to your flowers but have never managed a successful vegetable harvest in your life, then branching out into growing for the cut flower industry might be a better move than market gardening.

Playing to your strengths doesn’t mean that you’re not bettering yourself, but rather that you’re focusing on the elements of your skill set that you can make the most improvement to.

Set Concrete Goals

Once you’ve worked out in which direction, you’d like to take this new adventure, it’s time to work out how you’re going to get there.

Some people find it easier to work backward from this point, drawing out a timeline in reverse. Begin with where you’d like to end up, to use the gaming analogy, perhaps you’d like to be earning $100,000 a year playing poker.

The closest step before that could be to win a major tournament. Before that, you might aim to be the overall winner of any tournament at all.

Before that, a goal could be to win $10,000 in a single tournament. You could work all the way back to winning your first poker game or qualifying for a major tournament.

The important thing to remember is that your goals need to increase in difficulty in relatively steady steps and be tangible goals.

It would be no good to go from winning a poker game against your friends to winning the World Series of Poker.

Similarly, getting better at poker is not tangible enough. You need to be able to be definitive about whether you have achieved your goals or not so that you can keep making and celebrating your progress.

Schedule in Time

Before you hand in your resignation at your day job, you will need to make sure that your hobby is already making you some money.

The first few months of this transition are going to be hard, because juggling a job and a side hustle means you would not have a great deal of spare time.

However, you will become a master at time management which is a skill that will save you so much time and energy in the long term.

Timetabling is one of the greatest time management skills to have, yet so few of us use it properly. Build your timetable around your working day, factoring in any of the non-negotiable tasks that you need to do.

Once those blocks are in, look at the rest of the time and work out how much time you can afford to dedicate to your hobby.

If you can sneak in an hour a day then that’s a great start, any more than that is a bonus. With your time distributed, the next step is to work out exactly how you’re going to use each of those hours to get you closer to your goal.

Spend Your Hours Wisely

Once you have your hours blocked in, you need to work out how to spend them. All too often we stick to our timetables only to spend half of that hour session working out what to do.

If we go back to the gardening example, you might have one hour a week for sowing seeds, two hours for working on your online presence, a further hour for networking, and a final hour for tending your garden.

Depending on your hobby, your working week could look different, but try to be as specific in your timetable as possible, to avoid wasting even one precious moment.

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