Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hello everyone. Welcome to the 5 Minutes Podcast. I'd like to start this episode by asking you to do a quick exercise, try to find anyone that is around 15/16 year old and ask him or her what would be your dream profession? And wait and try to hear. Probably you will not hear, Oh, I want to become a doctor. I want to become a lawyer. I want to become an engineer. I want to become a project manager. There is a good chance that the answer you will hear is, I want to become an influencer. And this is becoming so critical that this is some of the pillars of what we are talking and calling a special economy. Recently, I was in the panel and a jury for the Drucker Challenge for the Peter Drucker Global Forum, and the topic was Passion Economy. So we receive a brilliant essays and we had to decide which one were the best ones to be awarded during the Drucker Forum late this year. And most of them talking about the passion economy and the great things about it and the challenges. But let's start talking about what is the passion economy first? The passion economy is when you take something that you truly love, that is your passion and you find ways of transforming this passion in money and monetize this passion.
And the best example, let me give you a couple of examples, but the best examples, they are related to technology. For example, you can create a YouTube channel. Let's suppose you are a fan of astronomy and then you create a YouTube channel and you monetize this channel and you receive money from the viewers. Based on the amount of videos people watch on your content and the content you produce, you may do dances in TikTok and people start following you, or you can do paid posts on Instagram about things you know, and you can do many, many other things. You can create an online school to teach how to do skydiving. And this is a very niche related, very close to your passion and you can monetize on that. It's different from the gig economy where people are mostly freelancers doing short term contracts. It's not. It's a way that you take things you are passionate about and transform it in money. Our initial reaction, it's all this is so cool. And I did that two years ago. I recorded a series on YouTube called What Matters and the first episode of this, and I did this for my daughter, it’s called Passion. And I told the history of passion, the passion I have for the job I do. For example, I am extremely fortunate of, for example, not using necessarily technology, but I found a profession that is a very close related to what I love.
Since I was a young boy, I love to create things. For example, I didn't like very much to play with a game. I prefer to build a game and build again from scratch and trying to have ideas. And probably when the game was ready, I was not the one playing it. But for me the fun was to create the game. And I was able and I was very lucky in life to find a job in a role that I could live with this passion. But we cannot be naive and think that everything Oh, you are passionate about something, just open a YouTube channel and do it and it will be successful. Look, let's be smart. This is not how reality works most. I'm just using YouTube as an example. I would guess that 0.01% of the YouTube channels they make relevant money. I'm not talking about a fortune because a fortune, then it's 0.00001, but they make some relevant money. Most of the money we all know they are made by YouTube or by Instagram or by meta, by the providers, by these middlemen that control. And there is a perception and look, I'm telling this because I know I have a YouTube channel and my YouTube channel is not massive, but it's not irrelevant.
But financially it's nothing. It's absolutely nothing. So it's very hard for you to transform. And this happens to be with everything. Imagine a soccer player, a football player out of a million players, maybe one of them become Cristiano Ronaldo. Right. It's far easier that you become just an average or even, you know, a player that. Will struggle to pay the bills at the end of the month. And this is something that raised my attention and why this in a project management podcast because the project management area is facing also this concept of passion economy. So there is a lot of people saying, oh, I'm passionate about Agile. And then you start doing this thinking that, Oh, then tomorrow I don't need a job anymore. And this it's not like that. It's not like that. It's not. And it's an illusion that most of the people and it doesn't mean that passion is an illusion. Passion is not an illusion. But you need to find ways of mixing. What is your passion and what exists in the market that you can live from? And these match. Because when we talk about, oh, someone had a brilliant idea on doing this and suddenly this person is making a million.
This is not true. This is true, but this is not the reality for everybody. It's like, for example, when I said this and this is very contingent for each Bill Gates the world produces, for each Elon Musk that were produces it produces 2 billion of miserable people. And these inequality and this illusion, it's something that you must be aware. And what do I want to say to that? If you have a passion, yes, you should pursue it and you should monetize. But you should not be with the illusion that these will solve all your problems, because it's not. Maybe they will solve the problems of one out of 3 billion. And this is my view for you in the project management area that are really implementing projects to drive the passion. You should drive the passion, but you should be cautious because most of the time the big winner of this driving passion is the middleman. It's like Uber saying, Oh, you'll be your own boss driving your car. But the big winner is Uber. It's not necessarily the driver. And over time we saw that. We saw that. And think always about this. When you think about your next project and most of the time about your disruptive innovation that will drive the passion. See you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
