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Doing What You Love Right Into a Hole
Each week I’m contacted by a handful of people who have just begun thinking about becoming professional patient or health advocates. Often they share long stories – many paragraphs or several minutes long… describing years of advocacy for a loved one, or a resumé full of nursing experience, as if they need to convince me that they would make a good advocate or they run the risk of not hearing back from me. These long, heartfelt messages are about the intersection of passion for advocacy – and the wish to use that passion to make a living. Advocacy fits them. They love it! They’ve been doing it for a long time. They have enjoyed their journey as advocates so far, have usually been frustrated in some way by a system that wants to thwart good outcomes for patients, they see how it can improve, and now they want to be advocates in this very different, independent way – and be paid for doing it. But I worry about most of them. I worry about them because too often they don’t seem to realize that there’s a big difference between doing what you love, and doing what you are good at. Even more so, I worry that they don’t seem to realize that “what you are good at” needs to be at least as much about running a business, tending to important business tasks and details, as it does about being a good advocate. Further that, at first, the business emphasis is even more important than being a good advocate. When I write or return the phone call, I acknowledge their experiences and then (often bursting a bubble even though that’s not the intent) – I tell them that unless they tend to the BUSINESS of being an advocate in private practice, then they will not be successful. Put another way, the very best advocate in the world has already failed at advocacy as a profession, because she didn’t tend to business details. And the very worst advocate in the world is succeeding mightily because she knows how to run a…