I've read
How to Earn Your First Love Dollar and
What If You Have Many Different Interests and Cannot Commit to Any of Them?. I completely get that, have been applying it indirectly for the last 2 years, and have recently made a push to more directly apply it since I read those posts.
I understand that if you can't fully define what you love, some exploration is required. My current solution covers that. What my current solution doesn't cover is the short term. While I am exploring, creating, and improving my mastery, how do I make ends meet?
While Steve was able to leverage his skill on the side when he was broke, my skills are largely unremarkable (this isn't true, but finding people who can recognise the value of my skills seems difficult; perhaps that's a limiting belief, but I still see no reasonable way forward there. I work best in environments where I can have a more direct impact). The only solution I can reasonably see is me going out and getting a job. I have some experience with computers, and my self awareness is a powerful asset, but I have no desire to go out and apply those in a way that "makes money," and doing what I love produces me very little income in the short term.
I guess I'm saying, "I would like someone who has already achieved this alignment to guide me towards it and the state of being required."
But I'm not sure what that state of being is. I'm already doing what I love to a reasonable degree and can fully see how that can eventually be useful to people as I gain more clarity about what I'm specifically good at and what I enjoy most, but for the moment, I see that it's going to be a good while before there is any payoff. (Although perhaps that belief is inaccurate.)
What do I do in the meantime?
Even when Steve was broke, he had skills to leverage. Skills that are effective within the job paradigm. I have skills that I can leverage, but they are not recognised within the job paradigm. E.g. While I can probably create better plans than most people, being able to connect to the people who needs these plans isn't easy without some sort of qualifications. Environments that recognise talent and connect that to a role or outcome instead of using humans as cheaper versions of machines to do drone work are difficult to find (at least, I've no idea where to find them).
And besides, that is more of the "get money so I can then do what I want on the side" thinking. I don't want to go work for something. What I really want to do is do my own work, but right now, unless I want to work in jobs I absolutely don't like, I see no way for me to reasonably support myself in the short term doing what I love. I can absolutely see how to do it in the long term, but the short term isn't working for me.
How can I take care of the short term, while still doing what I love, without having to shelve it as a side project or do diluted versions of what I love, again, turning "what I love" into a side project?
If I could only make this connection between "exploring what you love, doing what you love and expanding it" and "being able to sustainably do what you love so that you can keep doing it and expand it", I see that the rest would be easy (note how that statement might be telling about my mindset). I *know* that you will become good at what you practice, and that if you do what you love you will get better at it, blah blah blah, but how do I take that and apply it in a way that I get compensated for my efforts such that I can keep doing, and thus, expand them.
Is there some solution I'm not seeing?
Is it something that I do see, but I need to adopt a different way to look at it before I can align with it and walk that path with no resistance?
Is there some sort of limiting aspect in my thinking that is causing me to think about this the wrong way to begin with?
I'm looking for the same sort of "woah" shift you get from reading
I'm not sure if I'm comfortable going the "scrape by" route that Steve describes in
What I Learned From Going Bankrupt in My 20s That Proves to Be Immensely Valuable in My 30s since my best work comes from when I'm comfortable and relatively positive (at least, that's what I currently believe, but it seems to be true in my experience... perhaps it's only a partial truth). Whenever I go that route, I find I spend most of my time "dealing with" scraping by and the side effects of that instead of creating, and I'm mindful of not putting myself in that situation because I know what it does to my effectiveness (at least, I think I do; I'm fully open to questioning my assumptions, but committing to a path just to see how accurate it is--which may be difficult to find out in the first place--is time consuming; I'm looking for a more elegant solution.)
Someone from the outside looking in, please help.