At a time when automation and globalisation mean many steady, even boring jobs no longer exist, how can anyone leverage individuality when absolutely everyone is meant to be individual? Increasingly, the line between hobbies, careers and personal brands is blurring; Adam Davidson, cofounder of NPR’s Planet Money, calls this new arrangement the Passion Economy and offers two ideas on how to build a business like no other in an extract from his new book of the same name.
Rule one: Pursue intimacy at scale
To thrive in the 21st century, combine the best of the 19th century with the best of the 21st.
Identify the set of things that you love to do and that you do well. You don’t need to be the best in the world at something. People often succeed because they have a set of various skills that don’t normally go together.
It may be obvious, in an instant, what your particular passion and set of abilities are. Are you great at making vegan food for a crowd? Passionate about finding no-longer-manufactured auto parts? Love to take photos of homes? There is an infinite number of these passion plus ability pursuits. You might need to take time and do some soul-searching and experimentation to identify yours. I didn’t learn about mine until I was in my thirties. That special set of skills may not be obvious or something that everyone around you sees. It can be something small – an odd interest or combination of interests, a little voice with a hunch that you can barely hear. The identification of your unique passion is the single most crucial and, often, the hardest part of embracing the Passion Economy. It might be something you make, it might be a kind of service you excel at or it might be a way to further excel as an employee in a field in which you already work.
Match your passion to the people who most want it. When you have identified that specific passion and set of skills you can offer, you can easily find the people who most want it. They are already self-identified in groups. You may find them through trade magazines or trade groups, online message boards or Instagram accounts. I will give you lots of examples of people turning their passions into profitable businesses and employment. As you’ll see, you may need to get creative and experimental and be willing to reach out to a lot of people, who may, at first, seem uninterested in whatever it is you have to offer. But once you put your passions and abilities together with the right kind of customers, you’ll be amazed by how easy it can be to carve out a profitable niche in this economy.
Once you have those customers (or colleagues), the next step is to listen very closely to their feedback – as well as feedback from those who choose not to be your customers. We no longer live in a “one size fits all” economy. It’s imperative that you constantly hone your products and your skills in response to your customers’ needs.
Listening and matching are both closely related and also sometimes at odds. If you find yourself listening to customers who aren’t right for you and trying desperately to adjust your offering to fit their needs, you are wasting your time and skills. Instead, you should seek other customers, those who are far better matches and whose feedback will help move your business forward or strengthen it. On the other hand, you don’t want to spend all your time seeking a perfect customer match without realising that it would be better to listen to the near matches, adjust your offering and make the sale.
Rule two: Only create value that can’t be easily copied
In the Passion Economy, you can capture value – sell and distribute things – on an unimaginable and unprecedented scale. It’s as simple as selling products on a website or using Twitter to get customers. But you should be careful not to produce value – create a thing that people want – at scale. Creating value at a large volume is something only huge companies can do profitably. They have factories that manufacture countless sneakers or candy bars, studios that produce music or movies, giant firms that consult all over the world. Your value should be created slowly and carefully. Absorbing the significance of this point can be hard. Only focusing your attention on those things that reach a relatively small and strongly opinionated customer base, things that are hard to do, will be worth your while. This is precisely why passion matters so much in this economy. Fortunately, our passions enable us to spend time doing things that we love but others would find hard, even maddening, to focus on. This is perhaps the single most counterintuitive idea in this book: in the current economy, you want to do the opposite of what in the past has usually been considered good business sense. The moment one of your products or services takes off and becomes widely copied, you should begin abandoning it and looking for the next thing.
The more stuff you make or the more clients you take on, the harder it is to maintain excellence and to adapt your products and services in a way that both you and your customers want. Leave scale for the mass market. The Passion Economy is about quality and the conversation you have with your clients.
The Passion Economy by Adam Davidson is out now.
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