I’ve been asking myself this question for a while now. Intuitively I’ve known the answer and have applied it in my life all along, but only recently did I dedicate some time to really dive into this issue and really get some answers that make sense to me.

For most people there seems to be a conflict with the concepts of “Making Money Doing What You Love” and “Self-Discipline“. A paradoxical set of beliefs is at the root of the problem.

On the one hand we’ve got beliefs that say things like:

• To make money in an inspired way you should do what you love, and the money will flow.
• Follow your bliss and the money will come.
• If you’re doing it just for the money, it’ll never work out.
• Etc.

But on the other hand we have other beliefs that say that:

• Making money isn’t always all about fun and games.
• To make money you’ve got to work hard.
• Success isn’t easy.
• Etc.

These types of beliefs create internal conflicts in our minds which play themselves out as eternal battles in our lives. We struggle to make money by doing what we love, and we’re unsure whether it’s even possible to love what you do and make money from it. Throw in some guilt if you ever do make money while enjoying yourself and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. No wonder so many people struggle to make money doing what they love.

Let me help you to put these seemingly conflicting beliefs to rest. Here’s how you reconcile all of this into a nice little belief package that doesn’t leave you confused.

First of all, let’s get clear on one thing. I absolutely positively believe that everyone that is willing to put in the effort can become an Inspired Money Maker and learn how to make money by doing what they love. I am not talking about barely surviving either; I’m talking about making your dream income by doing what you love. It is absolutely possible.

The first challenge, however, is to actually figure out what your purpose and passion in life really is. When I say “Make Money Doing What You Love”, I don’t mean sitting on the couch and watching TV, or sitting in a hot tub. Those are perfectly fine relaxing activities you can do in your spare time or on your vacation, but that is not what I mean.

Everyone has a certain calling, a purpose and passion in life that calls their name. For a lot of us it is a big challenge to figure out what that is, but some of us have found that calling and our challenge is simply learning how to make money doing that.

If you haven’t found your purpose and passion yet, I would encourage you to download and read my free eBook “The Passion Project”. It teaches you a step by step process to find your purpose and passion in life.

Let’s assume that you know what you love to do in life. Let’s say that your inspiration is to be a famous author, or a basketball star, or the next American Idol. We all have dreams and there is nothing wrong with that.

So how does personal self-discipline come into the picture? Doesn’t the concept of “making money doing what you love” mean that we check things like hard work and discipline at the door? No.

To illustrate my point, let me offer you a few examples.

I was listening to an audio series a few weeks ago and the speaker was talking about self-discipline. He was speaking about the topic and he was telling the story of meeting a famous author one day who has written many best-selling books. He met the author and they began talking about different things. At one point the speaker made a comment to the author saying something along the lines of “You must really love writing.” The author then replied quite bluntly “Are you kidding? I hate writing!”

This of course shocked the speaker and he asked the author “What? Why would you write books if you hate writing? You’re a best-selling author, I don’t understand why you’d be an author if you hated it?”

The author replied “To be honest, I don’t enjoy the process of writing. I hate having to discipline myself to get up every morning and sit in front of the computer writing for four hours a day regardless if I feel like it or not.

It’s something that I’ve learned to tolerate over the years, but no I don’t love it. However, even though I don’t really like writing, the reason I do it is because I LOVE HAVING WRITTEN.

When I finish my books, I love that feeling of having written a book and being an author.”

See, I think a lot of us think that we have to try to eliminate ALL the things in our lives that we don’t absolutely LOVE doing and then wonder why we don’t make any money. We try to run away from any sort of self-discipline in anything we do. That doesn’t work. If you LOVE being an author, you may need to learn the self-discipline of writing every day. Stop trying to run away from it.

Here’s another example. On the weekend I was channel surfing and Much Music had a special on showing a Justin Timberlake concert. I left in on the channel for a few minutes to just watch him perform. I wanted to see if I thought that he truly loved what he was doing.

I watched him perform a few songs and the cameras would quite frequently zoom in on his face during the songs. There were numerous occasions where the camera was looking right at him and it was absolutely clear to me that he was totally loving what he was doing there on stage. He was enjoying every moment of it. You could totally tell that he was smiling deep inside and just basking in the energy from the crowd. It wasn’t just him either. The other dancers and performers were doing the same thing. You could tell they loved it and were really enjoying themselves and giving it their all.

To me, it seems abundantly obvious that Justin Timberlake is an Inspired Money Maker. He makes money by doing what he loves. However, this is where people miss the big point. We watch people like Justin perform on stage and we dream of having that kind of life some day, finding something we love doing and making money with it.

What nobody sees, however, is the thousands of hours of rehearsal and practice that goes on long before Justin or any of his dancers ever get on stage in front of a crowd. When you watch the show you can see the choreography is impeccable. The moves are synchronized and they don’t skip a beat. The whole show, from every single drum beat, to every single laser placement is carefully and meticulously planned out and rehearsed over and over and over again. That is the self-discipline these people put into doing what they love.

How many hours do you think Tiger Woods practices to be as good as he is?

How many hours do you think Michael Jordan spent practicing his shot?

Think if anyone you can possibly dream of that successfully makes money by doing what they love, and if you look behind the curtain you will find a person who has learned to self-discipline themselves during the “practice sessions” in order to be able to do what they love.

I love being the author of this blog, but do you really think that I love every moment of writing these articles? No. Sometimes I sit here in agony trying to think of the best words to describe what I want to say next. Sometimes I re-write and revise for hours. Sometimes it just flows really easily. Regardless how difficult it is for me, or how much self-discipline it takes to keep writing, I do it because I love sharing the message of becoming an Inspired Money Maker with the world. I love having written.

So if you’ve figured out what you love doing and you’ve been struggling with this conflicting belief of thinking that there should be no self-discipline involved in becoming an Inspired Money Maker, and that you should spend every waking moment of your life just doing whatever it is that you feel like doing – it’s time to wake up. It’s not going to happen.

Everything worthwhile in life carries with it a price. You’re going to have to self-discipline yourself to do something. The beauty is that if you figure out what you love doing and work towards doing that, the price you’ll have to pay will be totally worth it in terms of who you become in the process.

Embrace self-discipline, don’t fight it. Self-discipline is your greatest weapon and ally. Realize that 99.999% of the people out there are too lazy and too unwilling to discipline themselves in life to do what they need to do to become Inspired Money Makers. That’s why there are so many Inspired Money Maker slots left in the world. They’re sitting there empty… waiting for people like YOU to fill them. Isn’t that inspiring?

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