Why Following Your Passion Is Bad Advice

In this business of blogging, one of the most common pieces of advice that you probably hear is that of following your passion. And usually, when people are talking about starting up an online business, it usually starts out with the idea of brainstorming what your passion is and starting out with your passion.

Basically you just keep on hearing this word “passion”.

And I’m here to tell you that it could be very well be that that’s very dumb advice.

Now, let me put this in your perspective. Am I telling you not to build a business around something that you love? Absolutely, not. But what I am telling you is that – just because your passionate about it does not make it into a business.

It just so happens that most of us have a lot of passion that just don’t turn into businesses very well. It’s just a fact of life. So, what you need to be thinking in terms of business is… you want to be thinking in terms of solving a problem. You want to solve a problem for a target market. You want to really get into the minds of a problem that they’re having and you want to provide the solution to it.

It’s that simple. That is actually far more important in terms of building up a real business than basing it around your passion. In fact, there are many, many examples out there of very successful businesses that are not based around the passion of the owner. They simply created a business which was just designed to solve a problem.

So, with that in mind, let’s look at this world of blogging. Let’s look in terms of creating an “information based” online business. Instead of starting out with what you personally find interesting or starting out with your passion or your hobbies or something like that, why don’t you throw all that out the window and instead, start brainstorming problems that you can help people solve?

It’s that simple!

And really, if you start into this with that mindset, you’re probably going to put yourself a lot further down the road toward monetization because you now have the basis of providing real solutions. People are out there buying things usually to find a solution to a problem.

So, to summarize this, it could very well be that your passion and solving of somebody else’s problems… align. If what you’re passionate about also solves a big problem for people, then that’s awesome. Ideally, that is exactly what will happen.

But, in the cases where your passions and what is going to create a real business don’t align, get on the side of fixing somebody’s problem for them. If you could be really, really, really good at finding problems and really starting to learn about the problem, all the ins and outs of that problem, really what the pain points are of the market and really almost to a point where you can outline and understand that problem even better than they can, THAT is something that you can then go out and find a solution for them and build a business around it.

And it could be quite frankly be that blogging isn’t really what you want to do. Maybe creating a piece of software to do that might make a lot more sense. There are a lot of things that can be done here. But the thing is, it all needs to be based around solving a problem for a target market. Just because you’re passion is about it really doesn’t matter all that much.

So, whenever you hear some professional blogger like hammering home “start out with your passion”… take it with a grain of salt. It’s an incomplete story.

A passion does not create a business. Solving a problem for people who are actively looking for a solution… that creates businesses. And if you can combine the two – that’s where you’d really would like to be. But sometimes it doesn’t work! But solving people’s problems, that always does!