Belief Is Not Enough to?Succeed

There’s a pernicious bit of advice that floats around the world of creative business. You commonly hear it in blogs, on podcast interviews with successful creative business owners, and from the stage at conferences.

It’s used to address podcasters, designers, photographers, videographers and pretty much any other type of freelancer or creative you can imagine.

But ubiquity does make it any truer.

The advice goes something like this: “If you have a dream that you truly believe in, that you’re deeply passionate about, and you work hard enough at it, you’ll find a way to make it happen.”

But There’s a Problem Here

I think the problem stems from the fact that most of the people who are in a position to give this advice are currently living a life and excelling at a career that was once their own impossible dream. But they continued dreaming, made a plan and worked hard, and in the end, they realized it.

The thing is that they got lucky, on multiple fronts.

No doubt that they benefited from any combination of timing, existing skills, personal disposition and approach to facing challenges, their network and any host of other small but crucial opportunities, privileges, and chance that helped them achieve their goal.

But their biggest stroke of luck of all was the fact that their dream fit into an existing economic model.

Imagine you dreamed of working for yourself as a freelance graphic designer.

Especially if you didn’t go to design school, working for yourself, as a creative no less, might seem like an impossible dream. 

You may not know any designers or even any freelancers personally, your family and friends might discourage you from taking the unnecessary risk of going into business for yourself, and let’s not even get into the imposter syndrome as someone who didn’t go to design school…

But at the same time, design is a thoroughly established profession with a deep pool of potential clients, educational resources, marketplaces to connect designers with clients, communities and associations to meet other designers, and on and on and on.

If your impossible dream was to work for yourself as a designer, you picked a pretty good impossible dream, and an entirely achievable one.

My Impossible Dream of World Travel

Five years ago when I first got started in business, I too had a very convenient “impossible dream”.

My dream was to start a business that would allow me to travel full-time and work from anywhere in the world.

Going in, I assumed that this might take five years to achieve, maybe even longer, and I was willing to work for it. 

But a whole spate of fortuitous circumstances outside my control, including the rise of online business in general, podcasting in specific, and my latent audio engineering expertise (I was working full time as a landscaper at the time) meant that I was able to quickly tap into a fast-growing market and within nine months had achieved the goal I thought would take years to realize.

Not All Impossible Dreams Are Created Equal

Say for example that my dream, my one true calling, finally emerged in my mid-twenties to become a professional hockey player. If I began taking action immediately, I would be into my forties by the time I had caught up in experience-level to other players who were also competing to join the professional ranks, not to mention they would be entering their peak physical state, and I would be well into my own decline.

No matter how hard I dreamed or how hard I worked over that span, there is simply no way that I would or will ever become a pro hockey player.

I’ll admit, that’s an extreme example, so let’s look at one that’s much more common, and one that I see on an almost daily basis in the world of podcasting.

Can I Make a Living From My Podcast?

The podcast world is currently exploding. Every year sees more podcasts starting up, more big brands invest in the medium, and more advertising dollars pouring in.

As a result, a lot of people, including myself and our team at Counterweight Creative are currently benefiting from being in the industry.

When it comes to podcasters themselves, as you might imagine, most of that incoming capital is being focused on the existing big players, the NPRs and existing media companies of the world, as well as the up and coming first-movers in the space.

That said, there are thousands of indie podcasters who have managed to leverage their podcasts to do extremely well for themselves by building a raving fanbase and then creating products and services for that fanbase. This is what our team helps podcasters do.

But to say that all podcasters will or even can benefit from the explosion of the industry is to fall back into the same lie we kicked this article off with.

What most indie podcasters, bloggers and YouTubers don’t understand is that no matter how hard you work or how deeply you believe in your content, unless it is something that provides tangible value to a sufficient sized audience, you will not be able to make a living creating that content.

Your Niche Matters

We all have dreams of some form or another, and I believe that more often than not, it’s worth pursuing those dreams, even if we don’t always realize them. 

While I believe deeply that there is joy and value in the journey of pursuing a dream, the danger is that you end up spending more time, money and heartbreak than you were willing to spend on a dream that was never viable from the start.

Yes realizing a dream requires commitment, belief, and hard work. But that’s not all it takes.

More often ignored by dreamers is the requirement of a receptive audience who understands what you’re doing and how it will benefit them to engage with your work.

This requirement often means you need some flexibility and compromise when it comes to what your dream scenario looks like in real life.

If your dream is to make a living podcasting, you have a pretty good chance of doing that if you put the work in.

Do some research to find an underserved niche, spend the next 6–12 months learning everything you can about it, and create a podcast teaching people what they want to know about the topic and create products and services that go more in-depth.

It wouldn’t be easy, it would take a lot of work, but there’s a well-trod path leading you there.

If, on the other hand, your dream is to make a living podcasting about your fascination with the lost artistic medium of linoleum flooring, you might have a much harder time building much of an audience, let alone monetizing your show…

No matter how excited you are linoleum, the world has moved on, and it’s unlikely you’re going to realize your dream.

Quality Matters

But let’s say your dream fits into a niche that does have an existing precedent for making a living off of it. In keeping with podcasting let’s say you want to start a comedy show with your friends.

There are certainly comedy podcasters out there that do really well for themselves, so you’ve ticked the first box.

But just because some people make a living creating the same thing you want to create, doesn’t mean that you are entitled to as well.

In the end, no matter how funny you and your friends think you are, that’s not what matters if your goal is to make a living creating your show.

For that to happen, your show needs to resonate with enough other people in such a way that you build a loyal audience around your work that has the potential to support you either by buying your products or by attracting advertisers.

This is what Seth Godin refers to as the smallest viable audience.

No matter how great your show might be either subjectively or even objectively, if the people who engage with it are unwilling to talk about it, share it with their friends, or engage further than an occasional listen, it’s either not good enough in terms of quality, or it is, but it’s not commercially viable content.

If this is the case, you have a couple options.

Resolving the Disconnects

If quality is the issue, you can put in the work to improve it. We’ve all heard the stories of the comedians who did three shows a night every weekend when they were starting out, playing hundreds of shows to near-empty rooms over the course of years before finally breaking through.

Have you put that kind of work into developing your craft?

There is so much competition in so many niches, industries, and professions that exceptional work is a requirement to even enter the conversation.

In addition to developing your skills, creatives often massively undervalue the importance of taking a proactive approach to networking, meeting the right people who are in a position to help mentor, guide, or otherwise aide on the road to realizing their dream.

Have you put in that kind of work?

For most people, achieving a dream is something that takes years of invested time to get to a level where it becomes a viable way to make a living. If you haven’t put in your time already, this should be your number one focus.

If quality is not the issue, but commercial viability is, you have the option of shifting your content to better fit into an existing commercial framework, one that potentially already has an audience that you can tap into.

The content you create or the work you perform for this audience might not be what you initially dreamt of doing, but maybe the trade-off is worth it to you.

When I first set out to start a business that would allow me to travel, I wanted to be a photography blogger. That didn’t end up working out for me, but something else came along that did, and I happily jumped at the opportunity.

The narrower your dream and the less compromise you’re willing to make, the harder it will be to achieve, if it’s possible at all.

A Third Option

Aside from putting in years of work to perfect your craft, and changing the nature of your work to better meet the market where it’s at, there is a third option when the work you care deeply about is not achieving the commercial success you hoped for.

You could decide that the work you create doesn’t need to achieve recognition, commercial success, or support you in order for it to fulfill you on a deeper level.

You could do your podcast about linoleum flooring simply because you find it fascinating, even if no one else does, and the podcast allows you to think about and appreciate it more deeply.

You could get together with your friends once a week and record your comedy podcast because it’s fun and allows you to share the experience of creating something with the people you care about. That in itself is such a rare and rich human experience that it should be cherished for what it is, rather than be a source of frustration for what it is not.

I could accept the fact that I’ll never play in the NHL and play pick-up hockey simply for the joy of connecting with other people in a friendly competition, and feeling of the magic of gliding effortlessly across the ice on a warm winter day out in the sun at the local rink.

No matter how hard you believe, and how hard you work, the world does not owe it to you to fulfill your dream. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take something deeply meaningful away from the pursuit in itself.

Jeremy Enns is the Founder of Counterweight Creative, a podcast production and content amplification agency specializing in helping health and wellness entrepreneurs create kick-ass podcasts and become the go-to authorities in their niche.

Jeremy travels full-time, loves long-distance cycle touring, and will always look back on the day he finally saved up enough money to buy the Millennium Falcon Lego set as one of his proudest achievements. He believes that the way to grow sustainable businesses is by leading with heart, vulnerability, and helping your people be and become their best selves.