Passion projects can be the key to staying inspired while getting through the daily grind. Having the time to focus and learn about what really drives you is important in your growth both as a person and in your career. For me, I’ve spent years trying to find the things I’ve been passionate about. I was one of those college graduates who finished and said “Well that was fun but now what?”. I didn’t want to follow in the steps of my colleagues who went into sales or real estate. These sounded terrible to me. I eventually discovered that I loved design. It brought me back to when I was a kid and used to redraw entire comic books or silly little cartoons just because I could. I was never the greatest at it but it gave me moments of incredible joy. This discovery for design soon lead me into the emerging medium called the web. The ability to create one thing that is flexible and beautiful across various devices and screens blew my mind. In all honestly, it still does. Every time I work on a new web project or app and release it, I have that feeling of excitement.
The beauty about working on a passion projects is that they never really have an end or fail. They can evolve from one simple idea into something that you never thought possible. Look at Twitter, when Jack Dorsey initially thought up the premise of Twitter, he thought of it as a simple SMS text messaging system to let his friends know where he was so they could meet up. Now it’s a global communication system that shares information, news and events globally in real time. These passion projects should also not be dedicated by timelines. Slowing down and digging into what will truly get others on board with your idea doesn’t have to be focused being quick to market or by launching an MVP (minimum viable product), it’s about what really matters to you and how this product will continue to evolve and grow. Some of the most successful passion focused companies I know didn’t start by working to get their product to market the fastest, they were about getting these done right so that the outside world using their product would benefit from the company’s smart decisions.
Now as many of you know I have a huge passion for food, cooking and creating emotional experiences. Two of these things are obviously related. The emotional experiences through the use of user experience techniques seems completely unrelated but I will challenge you to say that this couldn’t be more untrue. Studies into the growing obesity issues in North America have found that we connect our emotions very closely to the food we prepare and eat, which in turn influence our self image either positively or negatively. The studies have even gone as far to say that being morally mindful can lead to better nutrition, food ethics and cooking habits. In fact, you can help influence others eating habits by sharing your experience with food. After reading these studies and understanding my own passion with food, I believe these results to be true.
For the past couple of years, I’ve held on to a passion project that has been a slow process with lots of ups and downs, starts and stops. It was my first taste of entrepreneurship even though I’ve never made a dime from it. It’s Forgetful Chef. Initially, it was simply a recipe sharing app. Free to use and share with. Getting people on board was difficult especially when going up against companies with essentially unlimited budgets like All Recipes or Food Network. I had overlooked one of the most important aspects of what makes a great product and that’s the emotional connection with it. Love or hate Facebook, but we all check it daily. We make threats to remove it from our lives, but we constantly come back. We want to be a part of others experiences and moments they are sharing. This is no different from sharing food experiences.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime
Now on most of these other recipe sites, our emotional experiences with the recipes we search, try and create gets interrupted with ads and promotions. I realize these companies are trying to make money off the traffic that comes to their site but at the expense of truly impacting their audience’s food decisions, which leads to poorer food decisions and unhealthy eating habits. I believe that by sharing the full experience without the ads will have a greater impact on people’s decisions to make positive food decisions. In standing behind this belief, Forgetful Chef will be relaunching in late 2014 as a subscription based application with the focus on sharing eating habits and the experiences behind those decisions. I don’t mean the nutritionist facts because those don’t really influence our decisions. For example, we know that a can of Coke has a ton of terrible calories and ingredients that can negatively effect our bodies but we drink it anyways, but if you were told about an experience involving drinking coke then you might think twice before opening that next can.
Having the opportunity to influence habits is just one step to changing society’s path towards unhealthiness, giving back can help a little bit as well. That’s why Forgetful Chef will now also give back to the community. We will be working with non-profits on educating people on healthy cooking and eating habits, getting better food into schools for our children and overall creating a more positive outlook on eating.
If you want to be a part of this passion project and initiatives, please sign up to the Forgetful Chef notification list. We won’t spam you with ads or useless content. What we will share with you are tips for healthy cooking, how the new app interface is coming along and links to initiatives that we support.
###Further Reading and Inspiring companies
