Design the Structure Before You Sell What You Love — Connecting to the Economy While Protecting It

Introduction: The Same Thing Happens When You Sell What You Love Directly

You want to make what you love into content and sell it. If only you could turn your knowledge or work into a product and make a living from what you love. Many begin to transmit with that thought. And beyond making what they love a product directly, the same thing we have seen happens: a sense of obligation arises, numbers are chased, and what was loved grows heavy.

Plenty of people are looking for the know-how of selling content. What this article examines is the premise beneath it: what, and in what order, you should design in order to make use of what you love economically while protecting it.

Let me give the conclusion first. The order most people are used to is a straight line: love → skill → work → revenue. Riding this straight line was the entrance to the structure in which passion fades. There is another order — the paradoxical order of build the structure first, and unfold what you love within it.

Sell Not “What You Love Itself” but “What Is Born From What You Love”

First, confirm a decisive distinction. What you love itself and what is born from what you love can be separated.

To sell what you love as an external obligation is to subordinate the very activity you do because you love it directly to an external purpose. In this, what you love itself becomes a means to an external economic purpose, and passion is alienated. There is another method: connecting what is born from what you love — the singular worldview, viewpoint, and experience deepened by that love — to the economy. In this, what you love itself is protected, and what is born from it generates economic value.

The nineteenth-century philosopher Marx showed the condition for undoing alienation as owning the means of production yourself. What realises this in the digital economy is owning the means to design whom you deliver to and the mechanism by which what you make keeps generating value. Holding this structure first is the ground for being spared from selling what you love as an external obligation. The whole picture is developed in the structural autonomy master pillar.

▸ The mechanism of sell what you love itself and what you love itself becomes a means is treated in what are you selling when you turn passion into work?.

Why “Structure Comes First”

You may think there is love here, so why can’t I make it work right away? Because if you proceed in the straight-line order, the alienation of passion occurs, as we have seen.

To build the structure first is not to put what you love off. It is to secure, first, the premise for protecting what you love. Accumulate the intellectual assets born from what you love, hold a relationship with those you want to reach, hold an autonomous system. After that structure is established, connect the output from what you love to the economy. In this order, what you love need not be sold as an external obligation, and autonomy is kept.

And once this structure begins to function, the criterion for choosing activities changes. From the external pressure if I don’t do this today there’s no income today to the inner motivation I want to do this today. Paradoxically, when the state I don’t have to do it today is secured, the sense I want to surfaces naturally. The room of I don’t have to is the very condition for reclaiming I want to.

The Four Failure Patterns in Building the Structure

Honestly, the process of building the structure is not linear. From the first months to a year or two, there is a period when results are hard to see. Here are four failures to avoid.

• Building the system first, without a worldview: make only the mechanism and, without what to deliver, it is just an empty box. Intellectual assets — the singular viewpoint born from what you love — come first, and the system functions after.
• Mass-producing content without primary information: arranging or summarising information is replaceable. Only what you directly experienced and directly observed becomes the irreplaceable core of an intellectual asset.
• Giving up when results do not come in a few months: accumulating intellectual assets is close to planting seeds and awaiting a harvest. Results not showing is not the structure being wrong but a problem of a thing that takes time.
• Trying to start only after the perfect preparation is ready: a structure is not make the finished product, then move but move, and shape it as you go.

I list these not to say designing the structure is hard. Knowing where you are apt to go wrong, you can avoid it.

The Barrier “Does My Love Have Value?”

When you begin to build the structure, many hit a psychological barrier: the doubt does what is born from my love have economic value? — is my viewpoint any different from what someone has already said?

But this feeling itself may be one the structure that sells what you love as an external obligation created. The intellectual asset for building structural autonomy is not professional content that meets the market’s level. Professional-level explanations already exist in abundance. But this particular realisation, in this particular situation, that you directly experienced exists nowhere else in the world. That is the core of the irreplaceable intellectual asset. The first step begins not from perfect preparation but from putting your own primary information plainly into words.

Conclusion: What You Love Is Protected While Deepening

What to confirm before you make what you love into content and sell it was whether you sell what you love itself or connect the intellectual assets born from what you love to the economy, and whether you hold the structure first. If the structure comes first, what you love need not be sold as an external obligation, and the alienation of passion becomes hard to occur.

This is not a story of do not turn what you love into work. Protecting what you love and making it pay is possible. It was only that the order was reversed. Hold what you love not as something to wear down as a means for earning but as a wellspring to keep deepening. If the structure comes first, what you love is protected — and, rather, deepens. This shift takes time. There is no need to hurry. Begin the first step in the right direction at your own pace. Receive the overall blueprint as your next step. How this design of the structure works across turning what you love into work as a whole is gathered in why passion disappears when you turn what you love into work.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
• Marx, K. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844)