If you don’t make a profit from your art, that’s fine. You can still be an artist. But it will be a hobby, and if you’re not yet retired, you’ll be able to pursue it only when your 9-to-5 job ends. Is that how you want things to be?

If you’re like plenty of artists I know, that doesn’t sound good at all. For them, the goal is to have the financial freedom to give the art the attention it deserves. And there’s no better way to do that than to shift at least some attention away from making the work and toward making a profit. That approach isn’t dirty; it’s practical.

A few years ago, I began selling digital versions of my sketches. This started by accident, really. Someone asked me to buy a sketch to use in a presentation. It felt strange, given that I’d never considered selling them. But the interest was there, so I took the money. On Twitter and in my newsletter, I shared the story of how that person used the sketch, and more people asked to buy them. Feeling some tailwind, I decided to try to build a business around it.

I didn’t start sketching to make money. The drawings emerged when I was trying to find better ways to teach clients in my old financial planning practice about complicated concepts. Within a few years, to my great shock, the work ended up in actual art exhibitions. One of the sketches even ended up on the wall of the “money whisperer to the superrich N.B.A. elite,” Joe McLean.

Eventually, I realized that the profit from the digital sketches was a permission slip to do the next project — limited-edition letterpress prints for people to hang on their walls, where they serve as conversation pieces for financial advisers and their clients. I made some art in service of my own struggle, and now other people use it to reach more people than I ever could.