I had to share this today because I’ve encountered far too many people emailing me over my lifetime asking me the question of whether or not one should follow their passions in terms of their blog.
In other words, they are asking me whether or not they should blog about their passions and whether that’s the right path to go so as to achieve success.
Although you’ve heard that you should follow your passions and that your passions will keep your blog fresh with new ideas and a never-ending flow of community development and posts and strategy and, of course, energy, I’ve learned that it’s not enough.
In fact, I would argue (and have argued) that it’s vastly better to blog about your interests instead of your passions and in a nutshell here’s why:
Your passion may not necessarily scale or translate well into the online publishing world. Just think about that for a moment and even ask yourself this tough but very important question:
Does my passion “make sense” as an expression online and on a blog?
What I’ve discovered is that this is neither guaranteed nor true of most of my passions, as I understand and define “passion.”
There are unfortunate consequences of following your passions into the online segment and these consequences are rather unfortunate – for example, you might just get “fat” on it all and eventually burnt out. How many times have you pursued a passion online or through a blog and discovered that you’ve burnt out on it?
Did you ever expect that you would lose interest in your passion because of the pressure to actually write about it and share it? You may have become discouraged and even distracted away from your passion because you’re so into the blogging metrics, the stats, the amount of shares, or even the amount of comments that your blog did (or did not) receive.
And in the end you may realize that writing about your passion is not the same as actually experiencing your passion. Your passion was rock climbing but writing about rock climbing is not your passion. When you think about it that way it begins to make a lot of sense.
When you begin to admit that this dynamic is real you can begin to critical analyze your own blogging efforts as well as your intentions, goals, and hope with your blog in a much more explicit and objective way. You may realize that you’ve engaged this blogging thing all wrong and need to even shut down your current blog and start something fresh.
That’s ok, you haven’t “lost” anything, it just means you need to start over. Isn’t that what life is all about anyway?
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