Are you picking the right goals? (And my quick foray into competitive Counter-Strike)

Jessica Abel in Growing Gills:

For example: While making a living as a cartoonist will definitely include making comics, there may be a lot less of this than you might imagine and a lot more entrepreneurship, including building your audience, marketing, and sales.

Something that’s stuck with me from listening to many hours of Tim Ferriss’s podcast is the notion that you might want to think twice about turning your leisure into a job.

“But I’d never work a day in my life!”

Maybe. You might also never do that thing for fun again in your life.

Tim’s example is that someone interested in surfing might want to make a career out of surfing. If they’re not good enough to be a professional surfer, they might end up teaching various vacationers how to surf day-in and day-out.

If you like teaching, great. If you don’t, well…

I experienced a small version of this. In high school, more and more you’d hear about people getting paid to play games. Streaming wasn’t a thing yet, so it was through sponsorships and tournaments. I did a tryout for a Counter-Strike clan that was in CAL-IM. Think of this as a good rec league. We’re not even talking minor leagues.

I did one scrim with the team and played pretty well. Then the guy said okay we’re going to do this tomorrow but it’ll be 4 scrims. Each was about 45 minutes.

I was out.

Getting paid wouldn’t really increase the amount of fun that comes with taking something fun very seriously.

It applies to more than surfing and games. It also applies to more traditional work. Let’s say you want to write. (I do!)

Jessica’s book has a lot of great questions you’ll want to ask when thinking through your creative goals.

What do you want to write? Do you want to get paid for it? Would you do it if you weren’t getting paid for it? How does getting paid for it affect the content you’ll make?

I’m thinking through some of these now. Lately I’ve felt a lack of focus. There are a few things I’m working on which means most of them aren’t the most important things to work on.

Quick things this reminded me of: In Designing Your Life Bill Burnett and Dave Evans take this idea of envisioning your life and turns it up a few notches. You essentially create a prototype of your future life to try out. In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport writes about the opposite case of this. I wrote about growing out of love with something you’re passionate about because you turned it into work. He writes about becoming passionate about something you didn’t love at first by becoming very, very good at it. Derek Sivers talks about a great way to make money and do what you love: don’t mix them up.