Don’t do what you don’t love

Sometimes in fits of over-analysis, I decide to try to apply lessons learned one place to something I don’t care about. This has yet to really work.

Paul Graham says Do What You Love. Below are a couple examples where I didn’t follow that advice.

Fantasy Football

Before last Sunday’s Super Bowl, I hadn’t watched a football game in two years. Yet, I gave fantasy football a shot last season. My thought was to see if I could use my statistical analysis skills I picked up from fantasy baseball. It’s just numbers, right?

I quickly lost interest and sank to the bottom of the league.

Replica Sword

Sure, giant medieval swords look cool, but I’m not really the Ren-Faire type. However, I wanted to test another affiliate program (like my Amazon/Adwords experiment). I signed up, grabbed the datafeed, and made a cool “which sword is more badass” game. Then I started sending traffic to it.

What a failure. People came, but they didn’t buy. Not a single user even clicked. The site was awful and I didn’t even dare enough to make it better. Luckily, I only blew about $50 (plus time) on this experiment.

Conclusion

Succeeding at something I’m not interested in is hard. It’s a huge barrier to get past and there are so many other ideas out there. Granted, playing a fantasy sport I enjoy could still land me at the bottom of the standings. And I could easily blow fifty bucks on keywords I like more than “medieval sword.” At least it would have been fun.