hello friends adam savage here in my cave uh and i am answering some questions q a is the
flavor of the day and the cues are all about mythbusters and miquel i say meek isle because
it's spelled m-i-k-a-e-l sounds like that's the proper pronunciation for that michael
b kyle says uh i'm in the process of turning my hobby of making into a side business but i
am scared that it won't be fun anymore because it'll be work any advice on how to keep it fun
whilst still making a profit this is a really good question
this is uh i'm not gonna have a definitive answer to this because work is boring where all work is
boring all work all work all of it all of it okay this is the thing that i say to young
people asking about the history of employment 90 of everything that you will do for work
will be a boring slog if you're really lucky um my hearing aid battery just went out give me a second
so work work is boring 90 of everything you will do for a living is a crushing
slog it's like being an adult right like paying the bills keeping track
of everything it's exhausting it's unending it's unceasing and it's yeah it's it's boring
once we accept that i mean literally not i'd say 80 of the work i do in here is tedious
i mean i get to do a lot of fun design stuff but that's usually the beginning and the rest is just
like cutting parts to size and it's not like i'm not having fun but like you're asking a really
specific question it's not going to be fun anymore because it'll be work and the answer is it won't
be fun anymore because it will be work that's that will happen but it's not quite that simple because
you'll be if you can make a living doing it you're you're getting bored on your own time
you're not getting bored for someone else's company and that that right there is a real
sweet feeling i can tolerate a lot when i'm making my own living um as opposed to the way
i'd like a job to be when i'm working for other people so this is like you want to take a side
thing that you've been doing and turn it into a side hustle and turn it into a viable business
the relationship you have to that kind of work will change you're going to get much better at it
you're going to get much more efficient at it you're going to keep finding those efficiencies
because they make you money and you're going to build you're going to start building a bunch of
institutional knowledge about a very different kind of making because making for money is very
different than making when there's nothing at stake they're just very different um
and i fully support this i fully support this i the idea of taking your like side
excitement and making a living with it is fantastic just you can't expect it to give
you the same things it was giving you when you were just doing it for your own pleasure
and that's that's why we do all of our stuff so uh how do i say this
there's like this there's a subtlety here that i want to get to and it is about
the fact of how much we change over our lives so
okay i'm going to take a let's say that your side hustle that you want to turn into a business is
customizing sharpies let's say you cut you you've you've customized a ton of sharpies for everyone
you know and they've all said man you should make this into a product you're like yeah again
you start to sell it and you're starting to pay rent with your customized sharpies
now the doing of it is like it's this drudgery you've got to get past in order to like pay
your rent so there's a certain amount of every day spent customizing sharpies for the dollar
the reason you started customizing sharpies wasn't because you thought it would make you money it was
like you learned this thing that you were again this is just a theoretical task but i'm using
this as the as the guide um the reason you started customizing sharpie is just because you wanted to
and then you got good at it and you found you had this niche and like nobody else could do it in the
way that you were doing it people started to tell you they could pay you to do it and so now maybe
you could turn this into a business and while you were learning that you could do this and you were
finding an aesthetic point of view that was uniquely yours you got a lot out of that process
whether or not you turn that into a business the enjoyment you get from that thing is going
to change and it's going to diminish over time i think that's a universal human truth
i say that as a generalist i've known people who
spent their whole lives painting the same painting paul reziko oh my god an amazing painter
painted like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of paintings of this red barn near his house
this is like an a a creative output i don't understand but uh like it's not mine i mean
i it's not to say i don't understand it i just it's just not the way i do things
um i'm i think i'm more like a like a rauschenberg i'm not comparing myself to robert rauschenberg
but i'm saying like as a generalist who tries a whole bunch of different things
rauschenberg is generalists like patron saint um robert rauschenberg uh pop artist of the
50s and the 60s super important american artist um so whether or not you turn your side hustle of of
i don't like saying side hustle i don't like hustle culture it's
distasteful to me you know that's a longer story um your side business of customizing sharpies
whether you turn it into a business that the enjoyment of that is going to go down
and you should just expect that in my experience when you get really good at something and you keep
on doing it it loses its luster after a while and you you start wanting to crave the novel i mean
and that is what humans do we crave the novel experience it's why we eat so many different
things so i've traveled to so many corners of the world um it's part of what makes us explorers
um okay so i think i've covered that that like it will stop being fun to do it as a business
but that doesn't mean it's not going to give you a lot of enjoyment because you'll be making money
on your own on your own sweat equity and with your own hands and that is a really sweet living
to make it is the first time you get a paycheck that's yours because of something you made that is
an unparalleled bit of enjoyment i seriously like i i i strongly recommend it um
you're also going to have to get used to all the aspects of the business and again those will
i think i'm saying the same thing repeatedly i the advice that i want to give you
is don't look to the thing that you're turning into a business for your creative fulfillment
you're going to have to keep looking elsewhere just as you were always going
to do throughout your whole life milton glazer the totally amazing uh graphic designer art
saying graphic designer doesn't even cover it milk glazer is an artist and like
significantly responsible for the way you think of the 60s and how they looked like milton glazer
is responsible for that he has a beautiful video he died a few years ago but he had a beautiful v
has a beautiful video online and i'll try and find the link so we can put it in the comments talking
about how success will cause more people to come to you and ask you to do the thing that you got
successful at and they'll ask you to keep on doing it and the problem with that is the more you do
the thing you got successful at the less enjoyment you're going to get from it because you're raking
over the same old territory however once you've gotten successful at something stopping doing
that becomes terrifying because if it made you a living and you got successful at doing it well
moving on to the next thing is an unknown it's kind of like having a tv show for a long time
and then it goes away and what do you do now i here i am i'm a youtube i went all the way
from being a television guy to a youtuber i never expected that was going to happen um but at the
end of this video glazer says you know you've got to embrace the thing you don't know you've got to
you've got to embrace that fear and that unknown if you're going to keep progressing creatively
and keep searching in yourself for the point of view that you converse with your culture about um
keeping it fun you asked specifically how to keep it fun
you know when i'm doing work on the clock here and i'm up against the deadline i remind myself
that my time is my own and that even though i'm sitting here doing this thing that i find
tedious and i might be wishing i would be rather having a sandwich and like sitting
on my deck than making this thing i remind myself like i'm still doing this on my behalf
under my control and that's that is a lovely frame i find that a very uh
self-reinforcing invigorating and creatively a useful frame
don't be afraid to raise your prices don't be afraid to raise your prices um one thing that
can happen is you may find that you make a thing that people want and you get so tired of making it
you think i really don't want to make any more of these and then you'll think yourself
wait a minute if someone came to me with a whole bunch of dough i'd certainly find the
motivation to make another one of these and that's when you should be raising your price
like at a certain point the price of something is a bribe to get you to go through the discomfort
of making that thing seriously that is absolutely like sometimes that is part of the cost factor of
like yeah no this is like that's what it costs to get me to get off my butt and do this thing
oh there's so much in this self-employment is really difficult uh all the things that
like that are difficult about adulthood in general build tracking and paying stuff on time and making
sure you know what you're spending and where it's going self-employment is like that times 10 and
it's it can be awful um you're definitely going to want a custom tax preparer you don't want to
you don't want to do your own as soon as you're self-employed i strongly recommend
you have someone else do your taxes and that you start looking at efficiencies for things you can
deduct because they're part of the business uh and ways to adjust your finances because
you're self-employed um we have a tax system that tends to punish the lower end of the self-employed
yeah the the it's it's problematic but it's it's the reality
you know i was so many times i finished these questions feeling like i just rambled for
11 minutes and 52 seconds um mikhail the best of luck to you
uh i hope some of what i've said here is useful i i as much as i'm telling you you'll you will
lose the enjoyment of the thing you're making it makes me so excited to think of you taking this
um this interest and turning it into an income um because it will help you with every other thing
that you feel like turning it into turning into an income um one of the things i spend a lot of time
doing when i'm prognosticating about the future and this is something i recommend to do whether or
not you are going to be self-employed or employed by someone else or however you're going to apply
your skills i think a lot about how i want things to feel instead of how i want them to be
because how i want them to feel will inform how i how how i want them to be so you know
every now and then i check in with myself and i think about the time i spend at the shop versus
the time i spend at home the time i spend doing work versus the time i spend with my partner
and we check in and we adjust the values of all of those parts of the equation based on that based
on the life we want to live um there's been times when i've traveled away from home for too long and
like when i come came back come back we had discussions about like yeah that was
too long for both of us so okay that's the there's a maximum amount of time
like knowing each of these things and and how they quantify the quality of your life
because that's really ultimately the question that you're asking you're asking how do i do
this big step in my life and still maintain a quality that feels creatively invigorating
you just got to keep asking that question what what what how do i want things to be
the other main question you keep on asking as a freelancer it turns out is what's next
because when your time is your own but so is your income it doesn't matter how much you just made
from the job you just did rent's still coming out of that bank account every month all your
expenses are still having to get paid so like i had a job that once paid me six months rent
and one shot i didn't relax for a second it was like still time to keep on making money because
the dry spells i mean i had a dry spell in the middle of working for industrial eight
magic that lasted eight and a half months um i spent that whole time looking for work
getting small jobs here and there but yeah it's a full-time job being self-employed and what's
next what's next what's next what's next what's next what's next you never stop thinking that i
love that frame of thinking i personally love it it's not from it's not necessarily for everybody
uh which is totally fine i've also had magnificent times working for other people
oh yeah i i don't have a a pithy wrap up for this mikhail thanks for the great question
tested patrons thank you for all of the great questions and uh if you want to
know any more information about being a tested patron it's in the comments below
thank you guys so much stay safe stay cool and i will see you next time