There’s an interesting discussion happening over at Neville’s blog.

He wrote a post about his ideal income. In it he quoted one of his commenters who said: “The first $50,000 is tougher than the last $5 million.”

Great quote. Multiplying money is always easier when you have options.

Then he made an interesting statement:

I am more proud of the $5.43 I made from my water experiment than the $3,121 I have made from working at my job

I can totally attest to this. I used to earn about 50K/year in my job as a Server Administrator for a large hospital. I took that position because I no longer enjoyed my previous position as the Director of IT for a major international charity. I took that position because I disliked the work environment at a dotcom startup.

I moved from job I didn’t like to job I didn’t like to job I didn’t like. Constantly. I was making okay money, for someone my age, but I wasn’t enjoying life because I didn’t enjoy where I spent half my day.

So early this year I struck out on my own. I now work as a blog consultant for my company, InsideBlogging. I advise companies on how to leverage blogs for their businesses, and so forth. While the income can be good from this, it’s also not necessarily steady. So I also write articles for various magazines and websites, I’m writing a book and I produce a variety of blogs.

I love what I do.

But sometimes it doesn’t make very much money. Right now is one of those times. In fact, I haven’t had any new money come in in nearly 6 weeks.

Which is why one of the comments on Neville’s post really irked me:

Do what makes you happy and the money will follow.

I’d love to say this is true. But the harsh reality is that sometimes it isn’t. Every decision you make carries risk. And that risk isn’t in any way mediated by the fact that what you want to do may be something you’re passionate about.

A far truer saying is: You’re more likely to be succesful doing what you love than just doing what you do.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 7th, 2005 and is filed under Financial Management, Income. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.