Living on the Edges of Obsession
You’re told to follow your passion. Tattoo it on your ambition. Frame it on your office wall. Build a life around it. But here’s the hard truth: most of us will never earn a living directly from our purest passion. We won’t all be professional surfers, Olympic athletes, rockstars, or Michelin-starred chefs. The dream rarely becomes the reality, and even when it does it’s often not what we imagine or doesn’t persist anywhere near as long as we once hoped.
And yet — and this is the good bit — the most interesting, impactful, and often most profitable opportunities don’t sit squarely inside your passion. They’re found around the edges. They live in the margins and at the intersections. In the weird Venn diagrams where your interests intersect with unmet needs, emerging markets, or gaps in status quo. This is where the magic happens. Perhaps not in the passion itself, but in its periphery.
Let’s call it: Peripheral to Passion. And let’s explore why that’s often where the real work — and the real rewards — begin.
When Passion Doesn’t Pay (And That’s Okay)
Take Will Hayler, co-founder of the Blue Earth Summit. Will grew up in love with surfing. Like, rearrange-your-life kind of love. He chose board wax over job boards, much to the dismay of anyone who ever gave him career advice. But Will didn’t end up on the World Surf League tour. Instead, he launched “Ticket to Ride,” a surf travel company. Surf adjacent. Passion peripheral.
That venture evolved. Ticket to Ride morphed into immersive cultural engagement, long-term community projects, and sustainable travel. Later, Will rescued a dying magazine called Wavelength and turned it into a creative agency and event business that now anchors the Blue Earth Summit. It’s storytelling meets activism meets brand strategy — all gently orbiting that central gravitational pull: surfing.
He didn’t make surfing his career. He built a career next to it.
What We Learn From the Edges
This pattern repeats. In sport, in conservation, in entrepreneurship. I know it intimately. My passions? Whitewater kayaking, sport (sadly never quite talented enough to make it pro), and the addictive puzzle of data. I don’t work in any of those industries. But I’ve built a business that touches them all — through performance analytics, environmental restoration, and team dynamics inspired more by NFL playbooks than MBA case studies.
At Oxygen Conservation, we restore landscapes that capture carbon, nurture biodiversity, and tell beautiful stories. And all of this leans heavily on the disciplines I’ve borrowed from the edges of my obsessions — from the structured chaos of outdoor adventures to the tactics (and margin gains) of elite sports performance.
The idea that we need to directly monetise our passions can be a trap. Because passion, unchallenged, can be selfish. It asks, “What do I love?” not “Where can I add value?”
Conceptual Collisions
Peripheral passion isn’t neat. It doesn’t arrive fully formed or follow a job description. It’s messy. It shows up where your enthusiasm crashes into the walls of reality — a clash between what you love and what the world actually needs. These are the conceptual collisions and they create energy.
Will’s ventures weren’t about surfing alone — they reveal the soul of surfing: connection, movement, place, and purpose. Surfing was the spark, but relevance was the real wave he learned to ride. Blue Earth Summit didn’t come from chasing the dream. It came from noticing the gap between outdoor culture and business, and stepping into it.
At Oxygen Conservation, we play the same game. Our projects live in the productive discomfort between restoration and protection, respect and reinvention. Between elite performance and radical transparency. We’re not trying to work in our passions. We’re trying to work with them. To apply the lessons they taught us in the wild, in sport, and in data to a world that desperately needs fresh thinking.
Serendipity is a Strategy
When you work in the periphery, something strange and wonderful happens. You become a connector. You develop adjacent skills. You start to see links no one else sees. Suddenly, you’re sitting in a meeting about land management, making points about Tour de France domestiques and performance cycles. You’re different. But perhaps you’re the only person who knows how the dots join.
Michael Lewis, who famously wrote about baseball stats, blind-side tackles, and high-frequency trading, never worked in those fields. But he saw the edges — the forgotten players, the misunderstood data — and turned them into bestsellers. He’s not a football coach or a hedge fund manager. He’s the guy in the corner, noticing the thing no one else is looking at.
Peripheral thinkers do that. They see around corners. They find the idea behind the idea.
A Playbook for Peripheral Passion
So how do you make this work for you? Here’s a cheat sheet:
- Inventory Your Obsessions – Make a list. Not of what you want to do for a living, but of what you can’t help but learn about, talk about, lose time in. That’s your core.
- Map the Adjacencies – What industries or problems sit just outside that core? Where is that energy already being commercialised, challenged, or ignored?
- Explore the Overlaps – Where does your weird mix of interests solve a real problem? This is your Venn diagram of value. It’s where your identity becomes your differentiator.
- Make Passion Practical – Can you create a business, product, role, or strategy that lives at that intersection? Don’t aim for perfection. Aim for proximity.
- Tell the Story – The periphery needs context. People may not “get it” straight away. Make them. Build the narrative. Connect the dots.
Play on The Edge
The dirty secret is this: the centre is crowded. The edge is where you make impact. Will Hayler didn’t follow surfing. He followed what surfing taught him — about risk, resilience, rhythm, and responsibility. That’s what led to the Blue Earth Summit.
I didn’t follow kayaking (or cricket or the NFL) into a coaching career. I followed the flow — how performance is shaped by systems, how ecosystems mimic elite sport, and how storytelling changes strategy.
The world needs fewer followers of passion, and more interpreters of it. More translators. More people prepared to peer over the edge. That’s where new markets are made, new roles invented, and new futures built.
So if you’re staring at your passion and wondering why it hasn’t paid off — maybe you’re standing in the wrong place. Step to the side. Look around. There’s something valuable in the periphery.
It might just be the best idea you ever have.