Episode 112: Hobbies. Don't let them become jobs.

What happens when you love your hobby so much, it becomes your job? 

You no longer have a hobby! In today's gig world and everyone having a side-hustle (is that really a hobby?) this conversation warrants some thought. I do it for you in this episode.

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Transcript

00:00 - Speaker 1
Hi, this is Ed Goldman with the Goldman State Podcast. My dad wasn't a big advice dispenser, preferring to have his sons make up their own minds by doing the right thing, but he'd help guide us to a decision point by being Socratic, asking questions rather than dictating dogma like do you think something could possibly go wrong if you were to drive all night with your friend to Arizona to go camping, since you got your driver's license only a month ago? My dad could have added and do you realize? You don't know anything about camping, but from what I've read, socrates rarely engaged in deliberate snark. Nor did my dad. He did, however, give me one piece of direct advice when I was in my teens Don't turn a hobby into a profession, then you won't have a hobby anymore. While I didn't really mean to, I'm pretty sure the details of my life would establish that I ignored him meaning. Just about everything I've done in my life to make money began as a hobby, compounding my transgression. During the eight or nine times I went to work at real jobs with start times, mandatory coffee breaks, w-2s and withholding taxes, I thought about them as hobbies. When I feel bad about having disregarded my dear old dad, I try to remind myself that his hobby when he worked as a firefighter was working as a freelance furniture refinisher. Before or after work he'd visit his clients, take their chairs or tables back with them to the firehouse and, when not dashing out to save lives and property, ply his craft in a little work area in the building's basement. All of the guys in his station had their own little work areas where they did that fixed bicycles or refrigerators, restrung violins, replaced the tubes and radios and later TVs. None of the men thought of these efforts as anything more than hobbies which provided a few extra bucks, and I imagine the municipal powers that be were happy to look the other way about city employees doing side hustles on city time and at a city facility, especially when their own refrigerators or radios went on the fritz. I also don't think that any of these guys, given the chance, would have made their second careers doing the things they now did between emergencies. I suppose they could have set up genuine businesses, but most of them simply found it relaxing to have a pastime which also allowed them to have a few extra bucks when a holiday or family birthday approached. 

02:18
As a kid, writing and drawing weren't yet obsessions of mine, they were just things I did when the weather or my mom got inclement, weren't yet obsessions of mine. They were just things I did when the weather or my mom got inclement. This would give me an excuse to stay inside and even close my bedroom door. What I thought would become my actual career was acting on stage television, or what we used to call the big screen. But as the years slid by I became less and less convinced. I wanted to be in a field where, if I landed a role in a successful play, I'd have to recite the exact same lines as many as eight times a week. 

02:49
Tv and film intrigued me, but I couldn't envision myself in either medium, even when I was trim and young enough to have seemed marginally presentable. Because when I started catching myself looking at my own reflection as I passed store windows, I realized that I'd quickly tire of being in a profession that not only allowed me to preen but more or less required me to. And then one day I'd glance at myself and realize I'd gained a few pounds or years and think my work life was terminal. So I dug in and wrote more and more every day, and from the time I became a professional writer in June of 1970. Until now, what began as a hobby has been my career. So sorry, dad, I want you to know that I agreed with you about not driving all night to go camping in Arizona. That was a bad idea. Oh, I did it all right, but it really was a bad idea.