The last part of your decision as to what you should be when you grow up involves some assessment of what the market is calling for.  The major point of this series of post up to this point has been on doing what you love.  But at some point you need to be realistic about what people are willing to pay for.  For example, I absolutely love to sit in my easy chair and watch crime dramas, but I haven't yet been able to think of a career that would allow me to do that full time and still have a roof over my head!

Identify the problem your product or service solves and make a list of who has this problem. Do your potential clients have the money to pay for the product or service you are offering? For instance, you may have a dog who chews your furniture when left home alone, so you decide you want to start a dog daycare, which is a fairly high-priced service. It will be an uphill battle to succeed if you are in an area where people struggle to meet their basic daily needs.  They are not likely to have money left over to send their dog to your daycare. At that point, you will need to decide if you are willing to commute to a more wealthy community, or if you are willing to move away from your home.  If neither of those options sounds good to you, you may need to choose a different passion from your list.

Just because you experience a particular problem in your life doesn't mean that others also experience it, or that they will want to solve it the same way you have.  For example, maybe you have lots of cracks in the plaster around your home, and you have become extraordinarily good at drawing spiders and snakes to camouflage them.  You might think that selling your services to others would make you a ton of money.  However, you need to think about how many people are sitting around staring at their living room walls thinking, "Boy, this room would be just perfect if I only had a picture of a tarantula to hang over the fireplace."  In a big diverse city, you might have a market for that sort of thing, but in a smaller more conservative town, you may have trouble.

Physical and emotional stamina are another important component in your choice of careers. My personal worst job choice was when I decided to work in a factory, without considering the fact that walking on cement floors 10 hours a day caused me extreme pain in my arthritic leg joints. If you do decide on a business that requires more endurance than you have, you may want to consider doing the business part time while you keep your day job to pay the bills. This will give you an outlet to do the thing that you love, but will not require you to exert yourself beyond what you are capable of. Whether you choose to pursue your passion part time or full time, you can expect to work long hours, especially in the beginning.

Emotionally, be prepared for entrepreneurship to be one of the hardest things you have ever done. You will be juggling many balls at the same time, working long hours, dealing with angry customers, and worrying about finances, in addition to making the product or supplying the service you so love doing. It is definitely not for the faint of heart!

 
I sometimes compare it to the stress of having newborn triplets in the house - there are many sleepless nights, others are dependent on you for their needs, you must clean up all the messes these other people make, no one thinks you are doing it right, and you may feel like you are trying to nail Jello to a tree most of the time, but yet you carry on, hoping, but never knowing for certain, if the outcome will be worth the effort.