So maybe you’ve got a side hustle of your own. You’re reading this and thinking, “Sounds great. But where do I start? How am I supposed to find 1,000 true fans in the passion economy if I don’t even know what my passion is?”
Before he became a best-selling author with a long career of accomplishments, Kelly had to ask himself the same thing.
Photography was one of his first passions. It never did become his career. But it did teach him to pay attention to what he was interested in. And it helped instill a core belief that the most important skill to learn is the meta-skill of how to learn.
Finding your niche in the passion economy requires you to keep learning about yourself by having the curiosity to explore and experiment. If you’re laid off, you might not feel like you have that kind of time and freedom. But Kelly says the key to discovering the one thing you can do that no one else can is to pay attention to what you do in your spare time.
“Marc Andreessen, the well-known VC guy, says that when he’s scouting around, the thing he likes to ask entrepreneurs is what they do for fun,” says Kelly. “What do they do as hobbies? That is usually where some of the best stuff is coming from, because they're doing it for fun, for play. They're doing it for free. They're wasting time. They're inefficient. Those are the qualities I think that you want to pay attention to in your own life. Where am I spending a whole lot of time—the more time, the better?”
It’s in those moments you’re likely to notice the tasks you find easy that other people find hard.
“Maybe you can move what you're being paid to do in that direction from what you learn by when you're not being paid,” says Kelly.
It’s also possible that the job you’re born to do doesn’t have a name yet. So if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, what can you do to futureproof a new business venture?
“If you’re trying to do something innovative, it's the brand new that has the most potential,” Kelly says. “You're not going to win with an existing occupied vertical or occupation or game. If your ambition is greater than that, you have to head out into the place where there isn't even a game being played right now. If you're willing to do something there isn't a name for, you're much more likely to have greater success.”