Not every hobby has to become a business
During the month of March we are speaking with incredible women about their experience with the hustle culture as part of our #HustleForBetter campaign and shine light on the many different ways we can approach success.
In this blog Sachelle Frazer, marketing expert and founder of Crissy’s Sweet Escapes shares her thoughts about having hobbies and passions we do for love and not money or success.
If you’re good at something, it seems like the natural step nowadays is to then try and make a profit out of it, right? Well, I think it’s wrong and I’ll tell you why.
I’ve always been able to create almost anything with my hands, through the school of YouTube I’ve learnt advanced levels of photography, photo retouching, baking and decorating and how to build a website – to just name a few.
Like most people, during lockdown 1.0 I started to bake and experiment with food, I then realised that I was actually pretty good at it. After my family realised that this was my new hobby and my cakes weren’t looking too shabby, I was assigned to make my nieces 10th birthday cake and after spending days researching on what exactly I needed to do, the cake came out even better than I could imagine. It looked like those fancy drip cakes you’ve probably seen all over Instagram.
A friend saw what I created and asked me to make her birthday cake. I was hesitant and proclaimed just how much of a novice I was, but she wasn’t having it, she had cake on her mind! Her cake ended up coming out pretty good too and everyone around me was impressed. I decided to create an Instagram page for it to see how it would go, and while initially I wasn’t getting any traction, I used the skills I had learnt in my career of marketing to attract more clients and visitors to my page. I started to slowly get a few more orders here and there which was exciting! The more people that ordered, the more clients I would get through them, word-of-mouth was really working to my advantage. In a matter of a few months, I went from a couple of customers for the month, to be almost fully booked every weekend. It was exhausting, but I was on a high. I was amazing myself with this newfound skill and I had people who were willing to pay for my hobby. I put everything into this new business, if I wasn’t baking, I was learning new skills and watching others bake. The reaction on people’s faces when they collected their cakes and all the good reviews really kept me going.
In between all the excitement, I would often question myself about what my Why was? What was I doing this for? Did I ever see myself as a baker? Did I see a sustainable career in this? I would quickly ignore these thoughts, because well, I didn’t want to think about it, after all I had found my purpose on earth, right?
Fast forward to February 2021 and I couldn’t ignore these thoughts in the back of my mind anymore, I was physically and mentally drained, the initial excitement had died down, I wasn’t producing at the same standard that I initially was. I was getting overwhelmed; I wasn’t eating, and I was slowly falling into depression. I had a severe case of burn out. How did I go from thinking there is nothing else in this world that I would rather do to hating the thought of it?
The feeling of being ungrateful began eating its way at me. I kept telling myself that there were 1000s of people who went to school to study to be at the level that I was, I just watched a few YouTube videos, looked at a couple pictures and was able to do it. As true as all of this was, I simply couldn’t go on anymore, everyone around me thought I was crazy, they told me that I just needed a little break because I had been working so hard. As far as they were concerned, you can’t be naturally good at something, have people willing to pay you for it and just walk away. This just didn’t make any sense. I bought into this idea and took a 2-month hiatus to work on my mental health and hoped and prayed that I would come back stronger and ready to go.
During my hiatus, I started to focus and zone in on my mental health, I was trying to figure out what it was that made me happy, and I discovered that it was in fact not baking. I had an epiphany that doing anything that put me in such a deteriorated mental and physical state could never be what’s meant for me. Essentially those doubts that I had every day, the questions about whether this was for me, was my gut saying this isn’t it. My mental health was slowly but surely deteriorating, and I decided that enough was enough.
The hardest part for me was the feeling that I had disappointed everyone around me. My family especially was.
Ultimately, I realised that all I wanted to do was find a hobby that I enjoyed, though I always admired what other bakers would create, I had no real life-long passion for baking. I had never aspired to be a baker.
What I know for sure is that my mental health and following what it is that makes me happy is my ultimate goal. It’s positive mental health over everything.
We hope Sachelle story inspired you in some way
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