I agree with this sentiment. I started taking sponsorships for my blog and it very quickly sucked the fun away from it. I now felt like I couldn't do whatever I wanted because I needed to optimize the sponsor's time and post content to make them feel like it was worth it. In other words, it became a boring job.

> the whole adage about "do what you love and you'll never work another day in your life" doesn't apply to running a small business.

Is that because when you turn a hobby into a business there are lots of non-hobby tasks and requirements? Like sales, marketing, etc, etc?

Or because of the pressure of delivering the result?

Or for some other reason?

Hobbies are almost by definition not mandatory activities. Earning money to eat and pay the mortgage is not really optional. Making the hobby activity mandatory will make it feel a lot more like work and a lot less like a "fun" activity. It might not be as bad as working in an Amazon warehouse, but it'll be a job all the same.

Worst case, if you get burned out on the new job you will not only no longer have a job but also won't enjoy your hobby anymore.

My experience as someone who loves drawing and does often delightedly remind herself that her day job is sitting around a park drawing shit:

basically, yes, all of these reasons apply.

I'm good at drawing, not at selling myself; my work sells itself to a certain degree but that only gets you so far. Not everything I'm paid to draw is a thing I love to draw, either. And sometimes even a thing I love to draw becomes less fun when it has to meet someone else's approval; going back and forth with a client is a very different feeling than "I start drawing and I fix things I don't like until I'm happy with the piece".

Deadlines suck and I mostly arrange my work so as not to have any. Yes, this is a luxury. It probably means less money but I make enough to get by.

Most hobbies doesn't have sales, marketing, taxes, regulatory mandated recordkeeping, deadlines, people yelling at you, or "regular business hours". Businesses have most if not all of these.

>Or because of the pressure of delivering the result?

It's mainly this. It's not a hobby when the customer needs their product delivered by Thursday, not is it a hobby where you need to maintain a certain output to pay the bills.

Sales and marketing are just a thing that you get used to.

> All three times it has become lucrative, but none of them are hobbies any more.

I regularly wonder how to balance the intrinsic pleasure with extrinsic value. I keep thinking that people could meet on the point where both find great pleasure in this venture. Something rare in the current economy it seems.

It's hard because extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation (see Drive for some of the behavioural science here). Once you start putting a monetary reward on things, people in general lose the interest in doing them for their own sake.

So I think for this to work, you have to go full collectivist: gather up a bunch of people interested in different things, produce stuff for each other and divide equally with no money being involved in the transaction.

One way to do it have the hobby be something that’s entirely yours (you carve intricate models of Vietnamese railway cays say) and someone else sells them, almost without any communication as to “what is selling etc”.

Never take orders.

kinda like agents and artists ?

The hard part is finding an agent who will not try to convince you to do things to increase profits.

But yes, some artists have famously gone through intermediaries such that there isn’t a feedback loop possible.

A hobbie with dates isn't a hobbie.

I also successfuly monetized my hobbies.

Interesting tidbit that obviously has plenty of objections. However, I do feel that this is the biggest barrier to my progress in one of my hobbies, jiu-jitsu. I have plenty of time to dedicate 10+ hours a week to fitness, but it is the aspect of having a set time that seems to limit when I can, or want to go.

Which hobbies did you monetize? I'm curious. I'm guessing EspoTek Labrador is one of them (which I'll be sure to remember when I get back into electronics)

I’d love to know what they all were.