My friend sent me this speech by Jobs
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
and it really struck a chord with me. I don’t want to be a 9-5 rat running in the office wheel for the rest of my life. This article came up when I googled how to find what you love to do
and I have some ideas I want to pursue but not sure if I can survive financially doing it. Anybody here have success in this? What’s it like? Are you making good money? If you’re making less, is it still worth it?
I’m fairly certain that doing what I love to do for a living would very quickly turn into me hating what I love to do. It’s a whole different thing when you HAVE to do it.
I get paid to develop in FileMaker which I thoroughly enjoy. It’s not the One Thing In Life I Enjoy the Most or anything but I’d be doing it as a hobby if I weren’t doing it for money, and I’d miss it terribly if I had to do something else for a living. Or sit around twiddling my thumbs retired.
I love working in theatre and film and I’ve been doing it for several years now. I genuinely get excited if I get paid AT ALL. Despite a background at a respected drama school and in a month a university degree in theater and film, I will likely never make any money doing what I love. Ah well. Poverty it is then 
Heh. Athena is certainly right that sometimes changing a beloved activity to one you must perform in order to earn a living can sour one on the activity a bit. As an author I know that now that I’m no longer just writing for sheer pleasure, I feel more pressure and, at least with my former publisher, a dissatisfaction with the work I was creating on his behalf (where I had to fit certain very restrictive guidelines, and also dumb down my prose to satisfy his somewhat condescending view of his readers/customers).
But all in all, yes: I earn money doing what I love to do, writing and editing. I admit in a perfect world I’d have gone into a different career path (performing/singing), but that’s churlish. Writing is both a joy and a job, and I definitely can’t complain at being fortunate to have found a way to earn a partial living at it. (Luckily the rest of my income, earned from web design/development, is also enjoyable.)
No.
Nope.
No, but my wife and I have high hopes that one day we might make it work.
I make money writing books and articles–but I can’t *support *myself at it, and never will. I have my “pay the rent” job, and I make extra money on the side doing what I love.
It can be, I know at times I just want to say “fuck this”. I always have and still do enjoy the work I do, its all the accessory BS running a business (payroll, tax filings, corp filings, work comp, sales taxes) if I had to do it all over I would probably just go back to my little sole prop onsite thing with some different policies and call it good. Part of my issue was I wanted to grow beyond me, but as you do, it adds layers of business and financial complexity, many of which I suck at.
I would love a small lottery win and just do something like only doing custom gaming machine builds or something like that.
I just launched a new service attached to my main business doing offsite backups and I actually am liking that aspect of the biz alot. Just built a new server to house it and once things are up and running its pretty simple. I can easily support any issues with the backups by remote login thus fulfilling my dream of “a business I can run from a laptop on a cruise ship” (once I have enough customers)
Yep.
I teach.
Had I only realized in advance that a vasectomy would make me ineligible to be a sperm donor!
Alas, too late.
I get paid to design videogames. I’m paid pretty well, so I must know what I’m doing.
Most of the time it’s fun. But it’s also stressful. It’s not the sort of job where there’s a set procedure to follow. There’s a lot of “Oh shit, how am I going to salvage this?” moments.
maybe.
I am currently going back into the clowning business. Time will tell if I can make money at it.
Actually, yes. Part of my job involves stuff I love to do - it would be nice to have it be a larger percentage of my job, but eh. I’ll take it.
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I guess I’m the exception, here. I have what I consider to be the best job in the world, and I’m really well paid for it, to boot.
I’m retired now, but when I was eighteen I discovered computers. I loved those things.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that people would actually pay me to program them.
Yeah. I design international development and education programs. It’s not always a laugh-a-minute, but it’s exciting, challenging, meaningful work that engages me completely.
I’ll let you know in about 6 years. 
My husband does, which enabled me to be able to drop from the rat race and pursue what I love, I hope to make money by the end of the summer (concert photography). It is way more stressful but so worth it. I don’t ever want to work for someone else again, manifesting your own job has been the most satisfying decision I have made. I got a degree in theatre though, so I have always assumed I would be broke!