There Might Be A Good Argument For Selling Your Soul For $$$

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 305

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time ever listening to the show, so glad to have you here. This podcast is for you if you are a creative, you're trying to make more money from your creative skills without selling your soul. That sounds like you, you're in the right place and the wrong episode. Because this episode, I'm gonna actually be making the opposite case of maybe why you should be trying to sell your soul for more money.

Every episode for like the last hundred and some episodes, I have started the show with that phrase of making more money without selling your soul. So I thought it would be kind of fun, maybe enlightening and some food for thought for those creatives out there who want to make more money from their creative skills by following their passion.

And so you might be surprised by some of the arguments I'm making today as I play the Devil's Advocate, calling out some of the creatives out there that are simply just following their passion without taking into consideration some of the things we're going to discuss today. And those creatives who just follow their passion, they tend to be constantly broke. They're probably searching podcasts like this for some sort of magic solution to their problems. And maybe the reality is, and this is Devil's Advocate, Brian, this is a tough first episode if this is your first time listening to the show, but Devil's Advocate, Brian says, maybe the reality is nobody wants what you're selling.

In this episode, we're going to explore the path of selling your soul. We're gonna go down the dark road, AKA doing what makes you money instead of following your passion. So let's dive into this. This whole episode came up because I just had the thought, what is the argument of selling your soul as a freelancer? Is there any argument that can be made that feels valid, that feels like it's something a path even worth taking? And I see all the time, and I've seen this in myself, and I've seen this in many people that I've worked with and talked to and consulted. We tend to let the emotions and the feelings and the creativity and the path to perfection and doing what we want get into the way of actually building a freelance business that makes money and is sustainable. And this brings up something called the passion paradox. The passion paradox is the paradox of choice, essentially. If we go after the thing that we're really passionate about, the thing that's just the full creative route, we tend to be broke. The starving artist is the trope here. And then the other side is if we go straight after the money, where we're just going after the thing that's gonna be the most profit, we tend to be unfulfilled. So I just want to say at the very beginning of this, this is not a black and white. This is not a one or the other. This is a spectrum. We all have a different place on this spectrum. But if we are too far on either extreme, we will likely not make it as a creative freelancer. So I want to take a minute to just compare the stark difference between the purely passion-motivated freelancer and the purely profit-motivated freelancer. So let's go to the passion-motivated creative freelancer first. What is the passion-motivated creative focused their time and attention and their energy on? It's just doing what lights you up. And when you're just doing what lights you up, you tend to ignore what the client or the customer actually wants.

And the result of that is, when we get to the money category, is you're always broke. You can't make a cent doing what you love.

Or if you can make a cent, it's just this big peaks and valleys of the feast your famine cycle that freelancers go through when they're trapped in creative world and ignoring entrepreneurial world. So on the flip side, enjoyment, fulfillment, that category, boxes are checked. You love what you do. You're fulfilled by what you do. However, you hate your business.

So you don't have enjoyment or fulfillment in your business, only in the things that you do day to day, aka you have a hobby and the hobby you love. But the business, the thing that you're trying to make money from, the thing you're listening to this podcast for in the first place, that's a point of stress, a point of contention, a thing that you're likely not fulfilled by. Now let's go to the time category. What is the passion, motivated, creative, do with their time?