(Today is a guest post from Casey Lewis! He’s a regular contributor to this site and is awesome!)
As I write on Acuff.me about dreaming and pursuing passions I haven’t made it a big secret that I have a full time job and also am building up a coaching and consulting business. I’m excited about a new project I just started working on and was recently telling a mentor of mine about it.
One of his first questions was, “How are you going to make money from this?”
It almost caught me off guard. We were talking about business, and he asked me a very logical and practical business question, and I didn’t have an answer.
If I had to classify this project I’d put it in my dream category. It’s what I love to do. I love helping people and small businesses put their financial situation in a position that they can chase after dreams and go win. I’ve been in the trenches for years now, getting first hand knowledge of how to do this and I’ve found that I love teaching other people how to do this stuff.
So it’s my passion. It’s my dream. And apparently I’m supposed to find a way to monetize it.
But what if you can’t monetize your dream?
What if you’re not supposed to make money from it?
What if you don’t want to make money from your passions?
Does it mean that your dream somehow doesn’t really count?
I think this dreaming conversation has been skewed so much that we feel we have to turn our passions into a paycheck and we are forcing unnecessary expectations on our dreams. And that causes unnecessary frustrations. And those frustrations cause us to lose hope. And when we lose hope, we quit.
Your dream matters. We need it.
Yes, you need to make money in life. Bills take money. Food takes money. Clothes take money. But don’t put the expectation that your dream has to make money or it’s not worthy of being a dream.
A 5 year old doesn’t paint because they’ve decided they want to sell paintings. A teenager doesn’t spend hours learning to play guitar because they want to sell thousands of records. A novelist doesn’t spend years writing an epic trilogy solely because they want to sell books. They do it for the art. They do it to create. And maybe that should just be enough for us too.