How can you get paid to do what you love?
Posted on Apr 18th, 2007
by 
synonym for light
synonym for light
This is in Response to the Questions and Reflections for April 18, 2007:
I love to read. everything. wired magazine, yoga journal, ode magazine, scientific american, tricycle, nest, the new yorker. the new york times, the aspen times, the aspen daily news, any newspaper in any town I happen to be passing through. a zillion blogs on the internet. books, books, more books. I love to read and then think about what I just read and I love to discuss and then think about what I just discussed. I love biographies and autobiographies. I love historical fiction. and I love science fiction. and I love non fiction. I love to learn new things. I love to investigate, find out how to do it. to grow things and build things and fix things. I love to arrange things and rearrange things. I love to doodle and write. I love to take photographs. I love to play with photoshop. I love to walk along rivers. I love to sing along with music and dance. I love to do yoga. I love to read stories to my niece. I love to go for walks alone. I want to spend day after magical day learning and laughing and playing and loving. I love traveling and finding out about the people and places I visit and their loves and lives and histories. I love working in the yard sometimes. I love to paint things bright colors.
can I get paid to learn everyday? to learn languages and music and art and poetry. to find out about all the great, amazing things from the past and present and future? I have no idea how to get paid to do any of these things and I think thinking about getting money from it spoils it just a little bit for me. I am a little repelled by the business world. I don't want to sell it, I just want to do it. I don't want to create things for the purpose of selling them. sharing, yes. selling- not so much. if someone paid me to read and think and learn and then analyze and share what I've learned -- wow! but not just one subject -- every subject.
Access: Public
flow
August 2008 
Dont look at business and sales the way they are done today. Business is a way to create something physical, as an expression of what you love. Selling is 'buying facilitation'. Dont push, just shine and those who want what you have & share, will be automatically pulled to you.
You get paid for the value you provide in others' life. The amount is proportional to the level of this value and to how many people is it provided. Anything you love to do which is valuable to others will get you paid. And depending on what you do, you dont always need to even charge your clients directly, just your knowledge should be something others like to get. A search engine which lets you search for free has created thousands of millionaires.
Miss Cinamon for Flight
Wrestling with this one too, but like your take on it!
I think, for me, “getting paid” and what it means is going to be the key. Getting paid, and making a living may be 2 different things. Your intrinsic value is priceless, as we all know. I fear that turning what I love into the way I get paid may ruin the very thing I love.
evangelist. I don’t have a problem with business at all, I’m just not sure I want to be or have one.
how? do I get paid for learning and investigating and figuring things out. who will pay me to learn spanish and will it be enough to pay the mortgage? if so – I’m all ears. :-)
george – I’m not sure it would take the fun out of reading and learning and photographing etc, to do it and get paid to do it, but it would ruin it if I wasn’t the one who got to choose which things to learn and when and which things to photograph and when or which things to read and when…. but if I could be completely self directed and still get paid – enough to pay the mortgage and eat and travel now and then – sign me up! :-)
hope you are recovering from graves well. I’ll take my turn in may and june.
One of the more ironic ways I found that I learned, was to teach. How odd was that? Maybe start teaching photography all the while hooked up with Photoshop and Canon as a test junkey! Wouldn't that be fun.
If you stop thinking about how will you get paid and instead think how you can provide value to others and do it, money will come. Money is a result of value provided to others. This is the fault most of us do - before even starting taking action, we first want to be sure and keep thinking how will money come. This stops from moving even 1 step and most of us never even start our play.
I dont know how you can earn by just learning. All of us is learning every moment (ideally). If you put it for others' use, like teaching spanish, doing translations,.. of course you will earn. And as i said earlier, you have to keep improving the value you provide and reach more & more people to earn more.
Geo - its not getting paid which will ruin what you love, its your fear for this & focus on money which will ruin it. The problem is that everyone is so focused on money that even while doing what they love, they are thinking about money. This ruins the fun. My suggestion is - create something of your own from what you love (job will always have limits), be still, thoughtless, fully focused on your work, provide better & better value to more & more people. Let the money just come in, dont even think about it. Enjoy your play.
that's what I do, but the question of the day from questions and reflections WAS “how can you get paid to do what you love?” so just like I said, I don't want to sell it, I just want to do it / share it. seems like this conversation is a bit roundabout. :-)
I have a similar experience - I do happen to love the work I'm paid for, and I also love many many things that I do just for myself. I don't do them with any intention of “providing value”, I do them because of the value they provide to me. I don't care about amassing wealth much, and I do care a lot about my experiences and relationships and the lovely, juicy stuff of every day.
And Geo, I've had the experience of turning an activity that stood on it's own into something less because selling it was never really what it was about for me.
But learning by teaching? Definitely, whether the teaching is paid or not. The best way I've found to really take something in has been to share it with someone else, and just like we are all learners, we are all teachers. Whether we get paid or not.
in some ways it’s almost impossible not to teach what we have learned well and love.
thanks all for the comments.
Evangelist said:
Geo - its not getting paid which will ruin what you love, its your fear for this & focus on money which will ruin it. The problem is that everyone is so focused on money that even while doing what they love, they are thinking about money. This ruins the fun. My suggestion is - create something of your own from what you love (job will always have limits), be still, thoughtless, fully focused on your work, provide better & better value to more & more people. Let the money just come in, dont even think about it. Enjoy your play.
Evangelist,
Your comment on how it may be fear really hit me right between the eyes! Thanks for the insight, and yes, I think you are right on the money. Especially as I get older and time is passing faster and faster. I believe, now that I think about what you said, that it's primarily fear that is holding me back, stuck where I am for the moment. Thanks for giving me so much to think about.
Light - Yes, its a roundabout :) I dont find this question proper. We can never know when will the universe bring what for getting us paid (in monetary terms). So no one can know 'how' we can get paid. Yes, when we are doing a job, almost everything is predictable. The adventure starts when we venture on our own.
Rapunzel - Whatever you do can provide value to others only if they first provide a value to yourself. So yes, thats the first requirement. Money will be paid when we provide value to others.
Geo - nice to know that, my pleasure. Maybe this alternate way of looking at things can remove your fear: What you love to do is something you are very good at (and can keep improving easily). Its something which I cant, your friends cant. Only you can. What you can create out of this love is something that others are waiting for. Since they get value from your creation, they pay you (is that wrong?). Not following our passion is a disservice to self & others. Money in itself is not bad. Its our greed which makes it look bad. When money is used for the sole reason it was created - medium of exchange of goods/services - its a very beautiful thing.
And then its all upto you and universe, how much you wana sharpen the value you provide and to how many people. As long as you focus only on your creation, how that is providing value to others & let money come in as side effect, it will not ruin your fun (Bill Gates still works with development engineers ! )