Most of us have heard the expression “Follow Your Bliss.” And if you are on the personal development bandwagon, you know it without a doubt.
I have been thinking quite a bit about this common idiom and how most of us have understood and acted (or not) on it.
It usually goes like this: you have an artistic passion (it can also be a sport or entrepreneurship), and inspired by the “Follow Your Bliss” philosophy, you decide to make a career out of this passion. Sometimes this happens early in life, sometimes later; sometimes it is advice received as a child or a mentee.
To justify that choice, path examples are given of successful artists, soccer players, content creators, tech entrepreneurs who bet on themselves and followed their bliss with tremendous success (and supposed happiness).
Energized by these examples, you decide to focus full-time on pottery; after all, with social media, Etsy, and WFH, how difficult could it be to make a solid income from your passion?!! And then troubles usually follow shortly after. Whether studies or corporate jobs are abandoned (or not started), savings are dipped into—and usually all of the above—the upheaval has started.
In the first part of the process, you are usually excited and make a lot of wrong decisions in naively following your blissful path: wrong allocation of capital, time, and energy summarize most of the mistakes made.
After a while, probably not too long, you start wondering what it is that you are doing wrong… You should be well on your way to success by now… You have followed all the social media trainings, you are a master at pottery, you have launched your own online course and community, diversified your portfolio of activities as recommended by the gurus of the new economy, and even registered for a mastermind for potters. Maybe you are not visualizing your success well enough, sending the wrong messages to the universe. You can’t really put your finger on it, but the bottom line is: tremendous inputs, very limited outputs… and your bank account is not giving very encouraging signs. You really don’t get it—others seem to have it totally under control based on their Instagram. Confusion and frustration settle in, finally that freaking pottery sucks and now you are in debt (or have severely dipped into your retirement/education savings).
You wonder what went wrong—you did follow your bliss, how is it that it is not working?!
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🤯What went wrong
The idea for this newsletter came from my own observations, reflections, and a recent discussion with one of my high school friends whose 8-year-old daughter is very artistic. Visibly, the little girl absolutely loves to dance, recite poetry, act in plays, and so on. After telling me that, my girlfriend (who studied at the same B-School I did) started going on with the “Follow Your Bliss” mantra, saying that if her daughter loves dancing, she will find a way to make a living out of it.
For context, my friend burned out from her corporate job last year and has since been following multiple trainings—from hypnosis to pottery—trying to find her own bliss. So there is definitely some projection happening here.
And here is the exact moment things can go terribly wrong.
This idea that “Follow Your Bliss” means: 1) an easy path, 2) success is guaranteed, 3) your bliss needs to be your full-time career / what pays your bills.
There is so much to say about this freelancer / portfolio of activities craziness that usually comes with the “Follow Your Bliss” approach. Mainly, that most people are not sustaining themselves financially. Not just because it takes time and investment to see traction, but because most of these businesses are not financially viable in the first place. And yes, some people—maybe more talented, maybe more hard-working, maybe who got in at the right time, maybe less ethical (🧌The Top 10 Bad and Ugly Truths about Being an Entrepreneur)—have been able to be a success at this particular endeavor, but this is rare. And I would still ask them to show me their financials, hourly rate, and genealogy tree.
Case in point: I was reading W magazine last night. The article was about “Nine emerging models, musicians, and actors who are carving out their own niches.” As I was glancing through the text, something recurring caught my eye: their “ancestry.” From Sting to Nicole Kidman and Luc Besson, more than half of the “emerging talent” showcased were the scions of pretty powerful and famous people in their own fields. So yes, of course, if your mom is Nicole Kidman or your dad is Sting, “Follow Your Bliss” full-time and make a career out of it is an amazing philosophy! However, for my friend and her daughter, I don’t think so.
If you are curious and want to learn more on the topic of becoming an artist (but really, same-same for any independent endeavors), I recommend a wonderful book: Good Artists from The White Pube, a British collective—yes, it is a play on the name The White Cube. It recounts, in a very dramatized way, the path of an artist graduating from art school and their “Hero’s Journey” to become an artist. My main takeaways: 1) you need to already be wealthy to be a successful full-time artist, 2) being an artist doesn’t mean it has to be your main occupation, nor financially sustain you. Also, the size of the student loans—C$140K for one of the authors out of Central Saint Martins—seems pretty impossible to cover mathematically with a beginner artist income (which is probably $0). So from the get-go, an unsustainable value proposition.
The book went on to explain how artists have to pay not only for their own materials and studio—they also have to cover the exhibition costs (considering that most young and not-so-young artists are not represented by galleries) and marketing-related expenses (and so on). When represented by a gallery, 30–50% of the listed price goes to the gallery. And no, artists don’t make a living by directly selling their pieces through social media. Not many people actually see financial success via social media (💡3 Marketing Truths from Starting a Platform From the Ground Up).
This reminded me very much of my experience as an author, where (unless you are already successful) you pick up most of the costs but share the profits.
The big challenge with the “Follow Your Bliss” approach is that your passion very quickly becomes less exciting when it now has to be your main source of income and you have to produce. An artist is usually dependent on the whims of the buyers (when one is lucky to have buyers). Whether the gallerist (who also needs to make a living, actually) requests a certain size of pieces in order to move more inventory—yes, a giant fresco is nice but difficult to place—or a sponsor requests a specific color theme, in addition to a specific size and theme, the creative process is more curtailed than one thinks. A similar dynamic will apply if you are a musician, a writer, an actor, etc…
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💵The Opportunity Cost
The opportunity cost is the other side of the “Follow Your Bliss” equation: what didn’t you learn, earn, do as you were pursuing this passion of yours? This calculation can quickly lead to tremendous monetary amounts (and regrets). Whether a young adult was channeled into the wrong studies, a recent grad into the wrong career, a mid-career professional into entrepreneurship—these choices can end up being very costly, and not just financially. Of course, there will always be people for whom it worked out, but unfortunately this simple extrapolation of a tiny sample forgets that these successful people tend to be the rare exceptions, not the rule. These people have also usually made tremendous sacrifices and taken tremendous risks to get where they are (do not minimize the importance of timing and luck either). And, as demonstrated in the W article, they can also have had a very strong head start. I also want to put the emphasis again on social media success: it has nothing to do, most of the time, with financial reality.
I was chatting with one of my friends who did this corporate-to-entrepreneurship shift a few years ago and who gladly came back into corporate after several years of not-so-exciting daily tasks as an entrepreneur. It is challenging for someone who has been working for large organizations at a senior level to find intellectual stimulation and impact in an early-stage venture. A lot of the work is actually quite mundane, as being solo or in a small team means doing everything from picking the color of that last social media post, to doing the taxes, to booking the client meetings, to selling and executing, and so on.
You might be thinking that this is different when one starts a tech startup. I would say not really, actually. Most of these companies go belly-up too—the difference is that they do so after having raised external capital. Many of these entrepreneurs took on a lot of personal debt, often remortgaging their house (if not selling it) to get their business off the ground. It is difficult to run two parallel realities at the same time, but I have no doubt that some of these entrepreneurs (even those whose companies might still be operating after a decade) still left a lot of money (and hair) on the table had they gone the corporate route.
Last but not least, these endeavors—artists, content creators, soccer players, entrepreneurs—can be very lonely (and competitive). One will need a very strong supportive network and community around them in order to keep that sense of connection and also keep learning. It is easy to become quite isolated when you “Follow Your Bliss.”
↪️ Bottom Line
It is not about becoming an accountant from a place of fear for the future, but it is about being realistic with how economics work. Most “Follow Your Bliss” endeavors are not economically viable, especially when weighing the success/failure probabilities. At the end of the day, you still need to pay your rent at some point (unless you are blessed with generational wealth, and then none of that applies to you!).
So find a career you enjoy enough, and be an artist / entrepreneur / soccer player during the weekends, the vacations, after work. Kids have tons of after-school programs—why would it have to be different for adults?
Peggy Van de Plassche is a seasoned advisor with over 20 years of experience in financial services, healthcare, and technology. She specializes in guiding boards and C-suite executives through transformational change, leveraging technology and capital allocation to drive growth and innovation. A founding board member of Invest in Canada, Peggy also brings unique expertise in navigating complex issues and fostering public-private partnerships—key elements in shaping the Future of Business. Her skill set includes strategic leadership, capital allocation, transaction advisory, technology integration, and governance. Notable clients include BMO, CI Financial, HOOPP, OMERS, GreenShield Canada, Nicola Wealth, and Power Financial. For more information, visit peggyvandeplassche.com.
