Is COVID Lockdown The Moment Of Passion Economy? – Padmini Janaki
Padmini Janaki is the founder and podcaster at the Broadcast, and she is a product and growth marketing enthusiast. She is a mentor and supporter of a passion-driven economy or the passion economy.
COVID and passion economy, how are they related? Why do we need to talk about the passion economy now? Passion economy has been there for so long. I think it’s high time we all talk about it.
I studied filmmaking, media, and mass communication. I worked as an RJ, a technical product manager working for Paypal. I pretty much liked everything. I loved being on screen. I liked talking to customers. I wanted a blend of everything. I like the technology. I was a UX designer and then moved into product management. So I like the mixture and thought about making a career of a mix of all these like I have podcasts talking about technology.
We do have a journalism event happening where they talk about entrepreneurs. But they don’t ask the questions. A product manager would probably ask. There are some details which are talking about soft skills and hard skills.
How about I make videos when I am also consulting? Some projects that I love; for example, I care about women. I care about diversity and inclusion. How would I pick projects, which are similar to like pregnancy tracking app, or cosmetology app? Which I like, love, and excites me. I still earn more than what I’m probably be making on a day to day job.
Journey into Passion economy
Passion economy is not hating your stupid boss and then becoming one. Many people think that, okay, I don’t like my boss. Let me just do a passion economy. Let me just jump into entrepreneurship. It is not that case.
You are going to work with someone even tougher. You will be the boss. You are not becoming a businessman. You are a businessman. So it’s different if your reason for quitting a nine to six job and then starting a passion economy is just because your boss or your work is getting a little boring, tired of all the office politics, maybe not the best, option according to me.
Maybe you can pick something else and think about what comes naturally. Well, so in that case, Am I asking you to quit your nine to six job and then jump into passion economy. Maybe not some for someone who is from India for whom the whole template is all generalized.
Finding your passion and challenges
Do not just quit a job and then jump into a passion economy because there are quite a lot of steps that are required only to check. If you are ready for a passion economy, it needs more discipline, needs work, and patience.
It needs to be tolerant of you, time management, and money management. It requires a lot of five times or ten times of you then what you do at work on an everyday basis. So definitely just thinking about passion economy and then waking up and then quitting a job. Probably not a great idea if you have financial constraints or if you have enough financial plans done in place, which I’m to assume most of us do.
It’s not a sprint. You decide and pick something, take a step by step process to achieve it. It at least takes some six months to one year. But determining if passion economy suits you, or do you have a passion? And you now know, what’s keeps you going in the passion economy?
Mediocrity in the passion economy
I had enough discipline to jump into something and be successful because there is nothing called mediocre in passion economy. You cannot be an average. It’s just, you know, you will, hiding on mediocre to your business, which you will never do if you’re enlisting on something. If you are enrolling yourself, you cannot be an average person. Know this; there’s not a lot of chance or choice to be that person.
So it’s a step by step process. It’s a very sprint wise planning.
You have to find your passion. I know it’s easier said than done. If you go to Amazon and search for a book to tell you what is your love? I’m very sure, at least some 18,000 books are getting loaded up. That’s what happened sometime back when I searched. It means that there are quite a lot of channels telling you what your passion is.
Maybe you’re not very sure about, but you know, everybody else seems to understand what your passion is. A little exercise can do it. Ask yourself, what do you, would you love to enjoy if money or, you know, any of the constraints or just having just a name tag is not a constraint.
What will you be doing on your typical day waking up, nobody telling you what to do? There’s no stupid boss. Nobody is discussing that this is the target to finish by the 29th of this month to get a salary. I will probably be reading, or watching movies or dancing all day, or singing all the teaching all day.
Failing is not a sin
It could be anything, but figure out what you will be doing? And ask yourself why you like it. In a relationship, not all 365 days will be the same; there will be days you’re going to love it, and some days you won’t. There are going to be times that you want to go back to the workforce.
There’s nothing wrong with going back to the workforce if passion economy is not working for you, no problem. I mean, it’s not that you come out that, you know, cussing that nine to six jobs that you don’t want to go back. You just okay to tell you that. I have tried for one year or six months. If you don’t like it, you can always go back. I mean today, the avenues and the times are better.
Monetizing your skills
For example, I do podcasts, make videos, and consult product management, which is all related to customers, human behavior. It referred to making products everywhere. I talk about it, but the medium and challenges are different. It’s just keeping me excited in different ways. So you have to pick the combination of your value proposition.
If I’m reading books about human behavior, product management, or marketing, you should be able to implement it in different ways. Like, I should be able to make videos. So many people get insights from my courses. Social media posters or it could be short videos, people where people can access and make use of it and monetize it at some point in time.
I should be able to concern companies that they can make much money because I’m consulting it. I’m telling them how it would work if you know, launch it in the market at a particular time or how this whole project should be broken and then made into stories and given to engineers.
On different mediums, you can make something, but you should also know the question of how to put it in a value template, which is even more critical. Otherwise, it will have no value for others, which means that nobody’s going to pay for it, pay you for your passion. It’s none of their business.
Why do people prefer a job to passion economy?
I conducted a quick survey of where I sent across some studies to people if they are feeling stuck at work? If you ask them, what have you done? They have attended these classes, this course, and this thing and that thing. But you know, the output of it is always zero. Somebody asked them to do. I still feel that people are feeling stuck. So the survey, I know, helped me to understand why people feel stuck.
80% of the people say, yes, they don’t like the job. I feel stuck. Okay. Have you done anything about it? No, not really. I might plan an internal movement sometime in 2021. So you know, you’re stuck, and it is not working out for you. You hate your Monday morning, then Sunday evening, but why are you not coming out of it.
Because you’re so happy with your mediocre life, you’re so satisfied with the whole luxury it gives you. Then you are in that nine to six that you can just do most and then come back if you love it. I have all the due respect to you, but you don’t, at the same time, have to cringe about that you feel stuck.
Finding your better self and becoming an expert
Understand what is right. So coming back to finding that good spot when it comes to passion economy is, like I mentioned before? You cannot be that passionate economist who’s mediocre. You have to figure out that extremely best person to do that job because nobody wants to come to you.
Ask one question on why someone wants to pay X and Y amount of money to make you do this work. They have no obligation for you or just this project. So why should someone do it? So ask this question, do you might have three times, and you will have an answer that you want to become that extreme best person, like Malcolm Gladwell, said, you will need 10,000 hours to become an expert on something.
I don’t know if we have so much time to become that expert, but the philosophy of becoming that expert landed a hit. Now that you know, you have to be like learning that 10 hours, 12 hours, so you can attain that 216 hours and become that expert. But the process of investing in yourself for two, three hours, put it on your calendar.
There’s no excuse, because if you plan a thing that, okay, I’ll do it over the weekend. That weekend is never going to come up. So put it on a calendar that this is something I want to do. I want to be the best to do this so that somebody will pay me so that I will be not just for the money, respect, value, and address as the best person in the industry to the brand value. You have to be that best person.
So this means that there’s no excuse or discomfort. You have to be that perfect person. But thanks to the environment and the ecosystem we have today. We have all the resources at our disposal. All that you have to do is help each other, which is right, and put that in all common sense and understand what is right, what is not correct.
What is something that you have to pick that you are interested in? So all there does require from you is that common sense? There are ways to get that information everywhere you don’t have to go to a particular school to acquire knowledge.
So I just wanted to remind you that.
- Plan your year. So I call this as a warm-up year where you can plan your whole year of finance warming up and then learning it, becoming that extra mess. You can’t expect it because there’s always a price you pay for becoming something. The price you pay is the lifestyle you have. If you have financial constraints, these six months to one year, you can use it to save that money and have one more year off. So it’s easy for you to try out and probably come back. If it’s not working, nobody is going to ask you. But have one year. Use it as a warm-up year.
- You can quit anything that I told you so far, but there’s one thing that you shouldn’t quit at all in passion economy, that is consistency. No matter what you do, the simplest thing, you know, it could be as simple as just collecting flowers and then taking a picture and then making that as a business. But if you have that consistency, if you believe in your idea and repeat it again and again. Keep working on it.
The whole economy is a reset due to Covid19. Now, many industries are booming. Many industries are just coming up. There is much space that needs technology, needs people to work on a different, you know, ecosystem or thought process. The whole thing is taking a reverse gear. And so I think it’s the best time to consider different out of the box and come up with ideas.
AMA with Padmini Janaki
The following is excerpts from the AMA session with Padmini.
The Covid-19 lockdown week has resulted in significant shifts in communication behavior through the digitization. Do you think this virtual life will be the cause of passion economic rise?
Of course, yes. Let’s take the schools, for example, and the tech industry. People used to choose somebody teaching in person is better. Students were going to school. Now it’s all different. Now you are put in a place where you will have to innovate. There is going to be much innovation. How about bringing hologram there? I feel like I’m talking to someone. And how about having a VR and AR support there? I have a feeling I’m in the classroom. We are going to be charged with networking. How do I bring in some creativity or debt, and you know, bring up a business? There are going to be many businesses on these gaps.
Do you think ultra-modern tools for developing new strategies and customer engagement empowered by digital will still be useful after a crisis?
Yes. Because, you know, we always got very creative during a crisis. Post world war we came up with the internet and computers. Being part of our ecosystem post-crisis, we only got very creative, and these are not going to go fade. These aren’t going to be like only growing up, and it’s going to be even better, bigger, and reasonable.
What are the benefits of passion economy and in post covert crisis?
So I think, now more people want to be an entrepreneur. Companies are now focusing on people more and want to have a fancy office. Companies and employees wish to work-life balance for their employees. Businesses are making it part of their cultures and doing better when it comes to office space.
Real estate of all these things is taking up much investment. Every company is probably getting it from the investor, not just smaller companies. Technology companies are hiring some real talents and trying to focus on what is essential.
Most people misunderstand the passionate economy as a gig economy. So how do you differentiate these two?
Many people ask me what the difference between the passion economy and gig economy is. I think there are quite a lot of definitions. You’re singing, dancing, or pursuing any other passion like art, and you can monetize it. It is called a passion economy.
If you’re into designing there, you pick projects from freelancer.com or Upwork. You earn from it. It is called the gig economy. I think it’s possible to have these together so I can love designing but pick projects depending on what works for you and how you want to call it a test.
For most of us, the drive for our passion is mediocre; the conditions of driving the business become a priority. I am a brand and design consultant. How do I drive that passion?
I’m very passionate about something, which is just related to a bit of emotion and subjective things. But, in this phase, where people are just trying to survive, how do I drive it? I think. I also spoke about it, right? You have to see the channels on how you can use it. You can get creative like I might like to videos of my daughter just dancing.
That might be my passion as a parent. Parenting has been there since human beings, but since somebody is creating blogs, videos, and making money out of it. It’s been there. Everybody had done it. And, people talk about surviving and, but how can you conquer it?
Everybody will survive. But also, are you planning to monetize? That is precisely how we can get creative, and people are getting creative. You can get inspired by each other, and you know, make things work.
