Monetizing A Passion
It’s an age-old question, and one that I’ve been personally mulling over for the better part of my adult life now: Can a labor of love remain lovable if it’s chosen as one’s profession? Or does the pursuit of profit (or influence or some other end goal outside of doing a thing simply for the sake of doing it) by definition disqualify the endeavor from “passion project” status? I don’t mean semantically, but in actuality, does a joyful thing inherently turn into a grind — or at least become considerably less joyful — once it’s been assigned some exogenous utility? Clearly, the answer lies somewhere on a sliding scale, but I believe the answer for most people is more yes than no. As for me, I’ve been extremely reluctant to scale my hot sauce brand into anything more than the spare-time hobby it’s always been because, even though it may show lots of promise as a business opportunity, I’ve been afraid of killing my love for making hot sauce.
But I’ve been starting to view that prospect through a different lens lately. A great deal of that shift in mindset I’d attribute to good timing on a few fronts, but what’s really driving the change in perspective is a calling I’ve heard with increasing clarity over the last year or two. There’s something I can’t put a finger on that keeps tugging on my shirtsleeve to remind me it’s there and it’s not going away. Intuitive inklings aside, it’s hard to ignore the texts and emails I’ve received from so many fans of the sauce in the last several months, many of whom I barely know. I’ve always gotten a lot of positive feedback over the years, but there has been an outpouring of unprovoked, heartfelt praise for the sauce that just keeps coming and coming lately. It seems like the universe is sort of beating me over the head with the message, “Do something with this!” And I think I’m finally in a position, over twenty years since the very first batch was attempted and almost ten years after the Ezra Louie brand was conceptualized, to listen. And to act.
But the question remains, will I still love it if I turn it into a business pursuit? Almost certainly not in the same way over time, but maybe that doesn’t matter nearly as much as I’ve believed. I have loved the (long, slow) process of getting things to where they are now. LOVED IT, pretty much everything about it (most of all the cooking of the sauce and the constant striving for improvements in the recipe). And I am well aware that the stresses of growing a business from the ground up will change that story dramatically, but I’m okay with that. I will change and grow as the endeavor does and that’s really what it’s all about, right?
Should one refrain from marrying the girl, metaphorically speaking, for fear that the romance may die? Perhaps that’s the more relevant question to ask, rhetorical though it may be. Of course your passion project will lose some luster if you get down and dirty with it day in and day out, year after year. Everything looks prettier from a distance. But is that where the good stuff happens, the stuff that actually matters? We change what we engage with and, more importantly, the inverse is also true. I don’t want to keep my little hot sauce hobby safe in its bubble forever. I want to share it with the world and grow with it, even if it doesn’t make my heart go all a-flutter every day as we’re grinding it out together in the trenches. And — if I’m taking a real, honest inventory of everything that’s kept me in a holding pattern to this point — even if that means I might fail with it, too.
When the universe stoops down to call you out of your cave, you don’t come up with justifications to stay inside where it’s comfortable and you get to downplay your effort as “just a hobby, no big deal.” You step on out there. Onward and upward. You fully engage knowing it will change the whole works when you do. A passion worth your time at all is worth going all in with, and worth the risk of failing with, too.
Two quotes are coming to mind as I attempt to land the plane here. The first is Teddy Roosevelt’s famous “man in the arena” speech, which must be mentally read in Morgan Freeman’s voice with an accompaniment of the theme song from Rocky slowly building in the background: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but…who, at the best, knows…the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” And the second, which applies more broadly to life in general but is certainly relevant here, from Hunter S. Thompson, a man not exactly known for subtlety or half-measures: “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow what a ride!’”
Thanks for reading my first entry here, and thanks for being a part of my story.
-Steven