Can you turn what you love into your job?
For a long time, work was just work and weird people had passion
Most of the people I know believe that work is work and passion is passion. Finding your passion? It might find you if you are lucky, but if it doesn’t you’ll live and still enjoy life...somewhat. Making money from one’s passion? Not a good idea because you will eventually dislike your passion if you make it a job.
When I was growing up in my home country of Korea, the thought of looking for one’s passion or calling was seen as being vain. If you fulfilled the expectations of your community or society to a decent degree - compete fiercely to go to a reputable university and find a job that is deemed secure and recognizable within the society - that’s a life pretty well lived.
Searching for one’s heart’s desire and learning to become that dream is an existential undertaking. But we are not encouraged or taught to do this properly. Do you remember ever questioning who you really are and what you truly want to do with your life? If we’ve ever reflect upon this question, that’s usually when we were still a child or around the time of retirement.
What tends to happen looks like this. We pick up childhood hobbies from seeing what our friends and neighbors do. We choose our studies based on what seems to have good job prospect. We enter a reputable company and try to survive the organization as long as we can. There is nothing innately wrong here, but words like joy, meaning and purpose become very far from the life we lead.
Life goes fast with high decibel of noise and a flood of information. You try to meet the expectations of your family, community, and your own idea of happiness, which again is formed by your information intake rather than your own authentic desire. Unless you are fiercely aware of your own sense of destiny and purpose, you are bound to get swept up by these forces before you even realize it.
Finding what you love - it’s like an elusive treasure hunt
The word passion can be misleading. But here, I am talking about something that started from your own heart - not from what the world thinks you should do, nor from your parents’ wishes. If you haven’t had such a feeling of pure passion in a while, go back to your childhood and try to fish out moments of vivid joy and wonder you felt while engaging in an activity. That’s the feeling I am talking about.
But then we all have a story of how our childhood dream has been ignored or forced out. When I was in elementary school, I craved to learn ice skating and/or painting but I ended up taking piano lessons for the most of my childhood because it was my mom’s passion to make me a pianist. In Korea back in those days, it wasn’t so unusal for a child to be the passion project of one’s parents’. Also, at that time, I adored my elementary school teachers and wanted to become one, but once again, I was told how this wasn’t a good enough career for me. These incidents led me to push my dreams and desires away into a dark corner.
But you know what ? Life is a pretty long journey. The shortest and the straightest road isn’t always the most interesting or inspiring. Detour isn’t necessarily bad and can even give you time and resource to build other important things - like family, some wealth and experience. And this is exactly what happaned to me.
Finding one’s treasure chest
I spent all of my 28 years of full time career in advertising and marcom thus far, defining brand narratives, creating TV commercials, developing digital content and leading many branded events.
Being in advertising kept my connection to the world of creativity to a decent degree. Supporting creative teams and selling others’ creative work gave me some satisfaction but it still wasn’t quite enough. I often caught myself having creative ideas of my own but then feeling like I was stepping on other people’s toes. For many years, I censored myself constantly and refrained from getting my hands dirty in creative execution work, thinking that I was not one of the creatives. But the longer I lingered in the fringes of creative community, the desire to create grew stronger and stronger.
And then the universe gave me a nudge where I could finally pivot to a new direction. Around the time that I started to see flower arranging as a potential side hustle, I was also debating that it was time for me to leave my then employer. The marcom role was significantly shrinking as the company struggled and sold its business units in big chunks. I also had a strained relationship with my manager who was being made redundant. I didn’t yet have a clear picture of what will come next, but I could see that my 8+ years of employment here was coming to an end.
Faced with a clean slate to decide what I wanted to do, I decided to grow as a florist while finding freelance jobs to support myself. Both of these things were very new to me and I had moments of pure fear. But deep inside, I knew such a change was inevitable and that I might as well pivot ASAP to a different lifestyle. Of course, the big consolation came from the fact that I now had a firm grip on my illusive dream and that I finally knew how to satisfy my hunger for creativity and beauty. This was the start of my entrepreneurial and artistic life. It was a path that I was destined to walk.
Sometimes it takes time
Within my floristry business, I do two main things - I create floral designs and teach others how to do it. This echos my childhood dream to engage in art and become a teacher. In a way, my long-lost dreams came back into my life at fifty years of age to show me that nothing had been lost.
It feels wonderful and satisfying to build my life around my love of flowers. I tell myself, I’ve won the biggest lottery in life there is. That empty feeling of not having found an important element in life is no longer there. I am also not bitter or regretful about finding floristry at this mature stage of my life. I needed to bide my time, gain some wisdom and learn a few tricks from the corporate world. Actually, there could not have been a better time.
Wherever you are in your life stage, cherish your own desire. Pay a keen interest to what your heart wants. When doing something makes you feel good, understand what element in that action made you feel that way. Learn about the buttons that give you a desire to get better (as well as the buttons that drive you towards misery and bad habits). This can only be learned by actually trying a lot of new things and observing their effects on you.
The world is your treasure hunting ground. Don’t stop looking for your dream and purpose. And even if you don’t find them yet, do the things you can to prepare yourself, so that when you find your treasure chest, you have the tools to dig it up and enjoy what’s inside.
Just like any important things in life, finding what you truly love is elusive and tricky. Obviously, it takes many trials and errors as well as luck. Get into the mindset of someone going on an adventurous journey. Then you are very liekly to find one or two life-improving activities that bring you joy, meaning and even potential income to enjoy for years and years to come.