How do you - or, how did you - leverage your hobbies into careers?

For me, software development was one of my hobbies. I studied electrical engineering at school but because of the job market in 2008, wound up in IT as a sysadmin for a Fortune 100 company. I eventually turned that into software development for infrastructure automation and built the rest of my career from there.

That being said, software development is no longer a hobby for me. I don't do it for fun, and I don't do it for free. It's a good career but no longer how I like to spend my free time after a long workday. So just keep that in mind - if you turn a hobby into a career, you might lose a hobby.

I have tons of car work, audio editing, off-the-cuff writing about games, etc things that have to do with my hobbies in gaming, cars, music, shitposting on the internet, etc that I'm happy to make without feeling pressured.

It's worth keeping in mind that a big part of why you enjoy these things might well be because they're just hobbies and you're not doing them for work. There's something to be said for keeping your interests separate from your work so that you can continue to enjoy them. There's a reason chefs joke about going home and eating easy mac and breakfast cereal.

(That's not always the case, of course. I know a mechanic who finishes each day at the shop and goes home to work on his project cars, then goes to sleep and dreams about more cars.)

Anyway - if I may, what I would recommend is instead of trying to figure out how to turn the hobbies you enjoy into a career, identify what the common thread in those hobbies is and then try to do a minor pivot in your career to get more of that.

So, are you not getting to express yourself creatively enough? You might enjoy a job pentesting or doing web design. Are you not getting to do enough "deep work"? You might enjoy being a threat analyst.

I'm not an IT professional so others might be able to do better in identifying specific positions. The overall crux, though, is that I think you'd be much better off taking what you already do and twisting it than to toss it all away wholesale and starting something completely different.

For me, I recognized that while my job did a lot for me, I wasn't getting to stretch my creative muscles. Rather than switch careers, I just started contributing to some professional journals relevant to the field. It let me get some of that energy out and is a benefit to my resume. Jumping ship on my career to become a creative writer would've been the wrong call, I think.

Also - get a certification!

I used to work for a big-box home improvement store (rhymes with 'blows') and picked up lockpicking as a hobby. I ended up getting myself into the hardware department where I learned the absolute basics of rekeying locks. I had co-workers saying I should call up this locksmith they knew to ask for a job, but I was planning to be a linguist and had no interest in cold-calling a stranger to ask for a job.

One day a guy came to the store and had a logo on his shirt that I thought looked like the logo for a local locksmithing school. Since I had an interest (and had been trained from a young age to find common ground with customers through conversation) I asked if he was with the school. This led to me learning that he worked for the locksmith my co-workers thought I should work for and that they were hiring. He told me to come in for an interview and before I knew it I had a job offer.

I was still attending school to try for a linguistics degree at the time, but I figured locksmithing could be a fun job in the meantime. But over time I came to love the work and found (through another fortuitous conversation with a customer who turned out to be the top professor in my planned educational path) that my school's linguistics department had a 20% success rate for masters degree graduates finding linguistics jobs. So I focused on locksmithing and dropped out of school.

After nearly 10 years of locksmithing I started pushing the boundaries of what I could learn within the company I work at and applied for a job at that locksmithing school I mentioned earlier. It fell through (fortunately, since things have changed there and I think it would have ended up being a bad career move at the time) and I one again focused on my regular work, knowing that I couldn't stay forever but that I didn't have anything pulling me away yet.

Then a few weeks ago I received an offer out of the blue from a different school. They'd heard of me and decided that they wanted me to be the next instructor they hire. We're still in talks but it looks very promising.

All of that to say, sometimes things just fall into place if you're a) very fortunate and b) keeping options open. I've of course had other potential career paths planned out in my head that would have required much more retraining, certification or education. But so far I haven't had to pull that trigger, and I'm lucky enough to be mostly skating by on curiosity leading me down paths that have worked out.

I once complained to my dad that I didn't enjoy what I was doing at work, and he told me something along the lines of: "What does liking it have to do with anything? Work is work. You don't have to like it, you just have to do it."

Nowadays I feel like that is considered a bit of an old-school way of thinking about it. In the US it seems we've all been encouraged to pursue our passions since we were kids. Unfortunately, I feel like that causes a kind of paralysis in people. Most of us don't find joy in our work, so we feel like we're messing something up by not being able to find our "true passion."

As I get older, I find myself thinking that my dad was right. I mean, having significant control over what work you do in life is a relatively modern thing, and all our ancestors did fine. So I feel like it's probably best to find work that aligns with your personal strengths and financial interests rather than what is fun for you. Then you take the money from that job and do what you like in your spare time. If you happen to have a good amount of overlap between the two, that's great, but one might be happier if that's not the expectation. They say that expectations are the thief of joy, after all.

All that said, I'm not saying you shouldn't pursue work in different fields. In fact, you should probably try to do it while you have a job. Trying to convert your hobby into a job after getting unexpectedly laid off is probably the worst time to do it if you're the breadwinner.

I always wanted to be a writer. I went to grad school for fiction. In my thirties, with a bit of financial runway, I took the leap and started writing and self-publishing pulp fiction full-time. After 7 years of doing it, I was 40 and broke and burned out. I wrote over 30 novels, which is what it took to make a living writing. The vast majority of writers don't write one novel every ten years and earn a good living. Rather, they write and write and write and still struggle with income.

Before writing, my career path was in tech. I'm a web developer now. It's not as fun or as free as being a writer. But I don't worry about money as much anymore.

I would never stop someone from following their dreams of turning a passion into a career. But my advice would be to 1) have money and 2) have no responsibilities. It's one thing to put yourself through the wringer to try to make some magic happen. But dragging others along for the ride, like a kid, just isn't fair to them. If you're wealthy, hey, go for it because you can easily continue to support your responsibilities. If you're just regular working class like so many of us, it's a hard road.

I consider myself as having been a successful writer. I had fans. I often hit the bestseller lists in my genre. I still make some royalties off my novels. But never was it enough money to really thrive in the modern hyper-capitalism of America. The juice wasn't worth the squeeze. My tech skills are far more valuable in this age and the starving artist thing gets a lot harder as you get older.

Realized while playing Uplink that the game was basically just data entry and really needed some sort of job in the short term so took a position doing that.

Became quickly aware that most people don't even know the first thing about the systems they use (Excel in this case) and started setting up some minor automated tasks.

From there I eventually got to "There's got to be an easier way" and dove into VBA which really lets you do more complex things, despite being older. I'd bounced off programming a few times but decided to try C# again, hated all the boilerplate but modern IDE's made it tolerable (please computer write all this boilerplate for me....). Found F# literally just because it had a neat icon and I wasn't sure what functional programming was and it stuck. Coding in F#, to me, feels how coding SHOULD be.

The rest of my career comes from my ability to communicate and understand across a breadth of viewpoints. From my point of view soooo many problems are just people having the exact same goal, and possibly even solution, but not agreeing when they talk about it. Being able to concisely explain what I, or others, wanted in a way that was understandable to everyone involved so we could all get on the same page has been useful. That's not really a "hobby", but more the point that a large portion of my job isn't just my hobby skills.