Profession vs hobby: doing the thing we love for money

Is there a big difference between profession and hobby? What happens when a hobby becomes a profession and vice-versa? Can we truly be happy with anything we choose to do? I will try to answer from my personal perspective.  More reading here, here, and here.

About me

As you might know, I have a PhD in electrical engineering, more precisely the statistical part of it, with application to financial math. During my formal studies, I became fascinated with computer vision, and while this was not a part of my PhD it was my main job for several decades. Working as an algorithm developer, I met my wife Anna. From Anna I learned speedreading and memory, and eventually, I started to do this semi-professionally. While practicing accelerated learning, I acquired an equivalent of PhD in knowledge and understanding of cognitive psychology but without any relevant degree. As a hobby, I wrote my understanding in a blog. Later came books and hundreds of hours of video courses. In my main job, I am currently the software architect of a successful startup. The bulk of my income comes not from any of the activities mentioned but from my investments.

FAQ

Q: What is your biggest regret?

A: I tend to self-actualize. So far one of my biggest regrets is actually not working enough. I wish I worked more.

Q: Can a hobby become the main profession and vice versa?

A: Yes. This happens quite rarely in the lives of other people, but it is a very common tendency in my own life. I think this is a manifestation of my ADHD facilitated by the accelerated learning skillset.

Q: What is the main difference between a hobby and a profession?

A: We do hobbies because we enjoy the activity. We work because we enjoy the income. The more we enjoy the activity, the better we become, the more likely we are to enjoy the fruits of the activity. Once we focus on the fruits of the activity, we may gain more fruits but some element of joy disappears.

Q: Is formal education like a PhD degree better than self-education like reading 100,000 articles and writing 2,000 articles?

A: With a formal degree it is easier to get hired by others and receive due respect. Formal education tends to generate dogmatic constraints and strong criticism of the “amateurs”. Informal education is better for original and creative perspectives, certain self-employment options, and joie de vivre.

Q: Does a portfolio of skills increase financial and psychological resilience?

A: It is not clear. The cost of the alternatives is considerable. Focusing on hobbies and learning is fun, but not as effective as building up a skillset as a leader or an expert. While chasing after something new, some old skills will become outdated.

How do you transform a hobby into a profession?

1. Become really good at what you do. Professionals are incredibly efficient in their jobs. To become a professional, an amateur needs to generate a similar level of proficiency.
2. Focus on the aspects of the hobby that can be easily monetized. Not everything we enjoy falls under this category. Not all activities can be monetized. Scalable activities (e.g. small cost to access a huge audience) can be monetized by very few people.
3. Be prepared to work hard with very little gratification. Any amateur starts earning less than an intern. Significant income may come after a year if lucky or after a decade if gritty, or never at all if not sufficiently talented.
4. Have patience and be prepared to fail. Transforming a hobby into a profession is a sort of magic trick. It may succeed or it may fail. For example, I tried once to transition to a patent attorney, but I did not enjoy the job sufficiently to complete the internship.
5. If the transition fails, focus the released resources on the main job. Then try something different. Trying the same thing many times and expecting different results is madness.
6. Timing is critical. Creating and leveraging opportunities is hard, but trying to do something brute force is even harder.

Transforming a profession into a hobby

Once the hobby becomes the cool new profession, it is still a pity to lose the investment in the previous profession.  Secondary income and fallback employment options are valuable.

1. Something that is in our personal past is not necessarily less cool than something in our personal future. This is a cognitive bias.
2. Accept lower professionalism. Nothing to do about it. If we do not practice something for years we lose some of our hands-on expertise.
3. Follow up on the activities that used to be interesting in the past. Find new ways to enjoy those activities.
4. Prioritize fun over other parameters. This means doing things differently, exploring innovative options, and discovering cutting-edge trends.
5. Be prepared to monetize opportunities. Fun is not the only source of interest. Prior experience may present interesting opportunities with relatively low penalties.
6. Choose interdisciplinary projects, like projects leveraging both new and previous skillsets.

Can we be truly happy with our job?

It is possible to be happy with one’s job for many years. The novelty factor disappears with time, but it is replaced by deeper intuition and if we are lucky with satisfaction from mastery. The jobs that are deeply enjoyed tend to be strongly gamified. Programming is definitely something people tend to be passionate about, either loving or hating the experience. Since it is a team experience, the team often dictates joy of creation or resentment of empty pursuit.

Another experience I understand is research and writing. Writing can be very bipolar. Sometimes there are years without any worthwhile outcome followed by short periods of amazing insight and productivity. People who love this sort of activities need to be able to withstand common failures for the joy of unlikely success.

Investment is very different. It is about smart people doing very simple things. The level of discipline and simplicity required often goes against our very nature. For example, investors need to check many options and do very few actions. Moreover, each action is weighed statistically and may be both a success and a failure with different probabilities. Yet this is not gambling. Investors are very calculated, and their performance is highly visible. It is quite hard to beat a simple buy and hold of S&P ETF, and much harder to beat a dual momentum approach.

In all of these activities, I have seen people who are truly happy with the gamification of their jobs, sometimes for their entire careers. I have also seen people who are deeply unhappy. So far I have not found any predictive quality.

Is our personality a gift or a curse?

Obviously, both. Especially in the case of ADHD. A person with ADHD will perform exceptionally well in the state of hyperfocus, and not well at all otherwise. The situation is much worse for highly sensitive people, who need to be a part of a good team and may fail to perform in a toxic environment.

People often address stress, as a factor of burnout. This may be true, but stress is usually caused by other factors.  Common factors include toxic management or overly competitive environment, lack of specific professional expertise, responsibility without control.  It is easier to change a workplace than to change the profession, yet both solutions might work.

Unique personality is also one of the sources for our most interesting discoveries and most effective suggestions. It is something we may definitely try to leverage, especially when the opportunity presents itself – be it in the main job or in one of the hobbies.