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Turning Hobbies into Careers
How to Make a Living Doing What You Love
Don McKillop likes to joke that he spent 20 years climbing the corporate ladder before falling off it.
As the vice president of global communications with State Street Corporation in Boston, McKillop was at the top of his game when he traded in his briefcase and business suit for a paintbrush and canvas nearly two decades ago.
Today, the 62-year-old Jamaica Plain man's hobby has brought him the success he never dreamed of achieving while working in financial services. Four New England galleries now exhibit his work and his canvases are part of several private collections. His landscape and abstract paintings, which sell for up to $6,000, still don't pull in as much money as his old job, he admits, but the feeling of putting brush to canvas has its own rewards.
"It wasn't an easy decision," McKillop says of his departure from the business world, "but it turns out it was the right one."
Turning a hobby into a career requires more than just desire, however. It requires passion, determination, and often the stamina to weather those financially lean start-up years.
Researching the marketability of a hobby-based product or service and developing a business plan can make the transition easier, career counselors say.
"The model is don't give up your day job just for your hobby," says Joyce Picard, with Career Counselor Associates of Newton, a career counselor for 30 years, and the author of Common Sense for Careers: Mapping Your Way to Focus, Change, Satisfaction. Picard advises hobbyists to gauge the success of their career choice by first marketing their hobby while still employed.
Reading books on business, getting career counseling, taking training classes in a chosen field, and developing a marketing plan that can serve as a guide to future success are important steps in turning a passion into an enterprise, Picard says.
Morphing a hobby into a career also requires good networking skills to build relationships in a new profession, says Dan King, a principal with Boston's Career Planning and Management, Inc., who counseled McKillop during his career change.
"Ultimately, people hire those they like, so you need to get in front of them rather than let them see you on paper," King explains.
Sometimes, even the best laid plans can take on a whole new dimension when a hobby turns into a career. Just ask Robert Daniels, the executive director of the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University.
A photography hobbyist, Daniels spent time as a photojournalist before starting a career producing conferences. That work later brought him full circle to his first love, photography, and Boston University, where he helped co-develop the school's digital imaging program to teach photography, 3D animation, filmmaking, and other digital genres to aspiring students.
"I think a lot of us have the feeling that we can't pursue what we love and what fascinates us the most, and that is actually very wrong," Daniels says. "It's really just a matter of choosing the door that has dreams attached to it."
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