A Calling at the Intersection

Good work is often found at the intersection of four things: what a person finds interesting, what he is able to do well, what people will pay for, and what daily routine he is willing to put up with.

The last point matters most.

An amateur photographer imagines shooting interesting places. A professional also sorts files, agrees terms, waits for payment and photographs an object the client wants to see from an angle three degrees further left.

A home cook chooses the dish and the guests. A restaurant cook makes what was ordered, at the time it was ordered, many times in a row.

Turning a hobby into a profession really can reduce the pleasure. An external deadline, a client’s requirements and the need to earn change your relationship to the activity.

It does not always happen.

For some people, going professional brings more time for the thing they love, access to tools, deep mastery, a community and the chance to work on hard problems.

So there is no need either to turn a hobby into a job or to protect it from money at all costs.

A trial crossing is useful:

• a small commission;
• an internship;
• part-time work;
• a project;
• a conversation with a professional;
• a few weeks of the real routine.

A calling also does not have to last a lifetime. Interests, markets and abilities change. A person can assemble a new intersection several times.

Specialised knowledge reduces competition, but a narrow field creates dependence on a small market. A broad skill is easier to carry across, but harder to sell as something rare.

A good professional structure usually combines depth in one field with the ability to talk to the neighbouring ones.

Music and acoustics, drawing and chemistry, construction and programming are not magic pairs. It is simply that at the borders between disciplines there are often fewer people able to understand both sides.

A home cook and a restaurant cook do different things covered by the same verb. At home a dish is made once, for people who are grateful in advance. In a restaurant it is made two hundred times with the same result, and the sameness is what is paid for. The test of whether a hobby can become a profession is not “do I like doing this” but “do I like doing this for the two hundredth time, when nobody is watching, and it has to come out the way it did the first time.”

Repetition is exactly the daily routine you will have to put up with, and it is exactly what you cannot see from outside: what is visible from there is the dish, not two hundred identical portions. A hobby rests on the first time, a craft on the two hundredth.