When a man marries his girlfriend, he immediately creates a vacancy.
Okay, this is not my quote. It is from James Goldsmith. But it doesn’t matter whose quote is it because the point is – it highlights an unpleasantly interesting truth.
The truth is, you like something when there are no strings attached. When strings get attached, you start disliking the same thing!
We observe it all the time but don’t pay attention to this pattern much. Here is a story that affirms this observation.
In 1999, I met with a person called Milan (name changed for privacy).
He had a clerical/administrative job in a school. His work hours were 8:00 am to 1:00 pm and his salary were more than enough to take care of his needs.
But Milan hated his job. His passion was teaching maths to children.
Milan was excellent with academic maths and loved teaching. A lot of students used to come to him to learn maths.
Frustrated with his boring job, he quit his job. Soon he rented a space, ordered some furniture, and open his maths coaching classes.
He got the first batch within just a week of opening the classes.
Within just 3 months, he was running about 4 batches in a day. He was happy with his work and he rented more space, partnered with a couple of other teachers and hired a few more teachers.
They were four people running their coaching classes and gaining a good name amongst young children and their parents because of their quality maths coaching.
More and more students started joining his maths classes. And he was almost compelled to start more batches.
Now, apart from teaching maths, he also had to look after the administrative and operational aspects of running a coaching class business.
It turned out that he just loved teaching maths, not running a coaching class business.
His operational costs were increasing day by day – and the revenues he was generating through fees was not enough to take care of the costs.
His “hobby” shifted from teaching maths to share-market day trading. He started hating maths and started spending more time at a sharebroker’s office.
To make a long story short, after a few months, he shut his classes down because he could not sustain it and got an administrative job again with some organization.
His life went on but certainly, it was not something that Milan and his near ones would have wished for him.
Lessons:
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- Don’t turn your hobby into a business (especially if you are not up for understanding the business aspects of converting your hobby into a business).
- Your boring-looking job gives you time and money to pursue your hobby, be aware of that and find peace with it.
- In business, you do many things that you may not personally like, but you still need to do. That’s normal. If you don’t know how to lead yourself in the face of unpleasant yet important business activities, you will be out of business soon.
- The maths of life is not 1+1 = 2. Its answer could be different in different situations. People do not get that both the digits (1) are defined passively – by many external factors. In other words, in business, one does not represent a constant; it is a variable!
Your relationship with the hobby will remain healthy if you don’t try to convert it into a job – or a business.
