Why 'Do What You Love' Doesn't Work
How to stop chasing money and let money come to you...
One day recently, my wife and I were walking through our local shopping centre when I noticed that ‘LIDS’ had shut down. I was disappointed. I LOVE their caps and planned on getting my 49ers lid from there to improve my street cred. (With no-one. At all.)
My wife responded to my disappointment with this:
‘Of course it shut down. I knew it would.’
‘What do you mean?!’ I responded, incredulous.
‘Well who’s going to buy those things around here?’
I went quiet. As usual, my wife had hit me with some cold, infallible logic (something she seems particularly adept at when it’s my turn to put our daughter to bed).
But this got me thinking. WHY had LIDS failed so fast? (It was gone in less than a year.)
The answer, ultimately, is simple: A new cap emblazoned with your favourite team logo is a WANT, not a NEED.
Businesses built around what you love, invariably struggle. You like caps, therefore you assume everyone wants a cap. I mean, look how cool!!!
You like fishing, so you sell fishing supplies. You like pottery, so you sell pottery classes.
This is the fallacy of ‘do what you love’. Ultimately, if you are creating a business to turn a profit and, one day, be financially free, then you have to realise a single, hard truth: NO ONE CARES ABOUT WHAT YOU LOVE.
Consumers are inherently selfish. They ONLY care about what your product can do for them. How it can relieve their pain or stress. How it can raise positive emotions or satisfy appetites. How it can educate them or protect their prize-winning Tibetan Mastiff.
When a budding entrepreneur, emboldened by the ‘do what you love’ mantra, opens a little shop selling funky, wall-mounted road signs, she has a high probability of fast failure. Just like LIDS. Because no-one is walking around a shopping centre or perusing the web for a weather-beaten ‘SHARP TURN AHEAD’ sign for their kid’s bedroom. There’s no NEED there. Just a (mild) want.
These businesses ultimately end up chasing money to stay afloat whereas businesses providing a solution to a genuine pain point (it could be refurbishing the clutches of supercars or cleaning up toxic bird poo from public areas) just watch the money come to them. Their patrons are desperate to hand over their credit cards.
Because there is a need.
Nobody cares about your dreams or passions. They only care about what’s in it for them.
To attract the money, you have to forget about the money and put all your focus onto the consumers’ needs.
Not wants. Not nice-to-haves. NEEDS.
Just make sure that you can deliver and that you are selling something that’s real and not just an illusion (I’m talking to you ONLINE INFLUENCERS!).
Now, if someone could just hook me up with that 49ers cap. There is an ever-more pressing NEED to cover my follically-challenged scalp…
