If I wanted to turn modding into a career, this is how I'd do it.
1. Mentally prepare yourself - It's not very likely that you are going to be able to make something good in any amount of time unless you get help. So if you have any ambitious and fully realized ideas for a game, you should probably abandon them before getting too deep into this, because it's not very likely that you will find mindless slaves to do everything you want exactly as you want it. People will do what they're best at and what they're comfortable doing and that's about as much as you can get out of them unless you're already prepared to start paying them.
2. Make friends - Play people's stuff, read the credits, and find out how to contact people who accomplish the things you know you couldn't do on your own. Talk to these people directly and tell them how much you admire their work. If you're not used to making friends, then you might want to start practicing building friendly relationships with people who won't be able to do anything for you.
3. Get to work - Develop your team and talk about your skills and ideas and come up with a game idea that best utilizes each other's best strengths. Become obsessed with your game and talk about it constantly to motivate your buddies. Work on the game with the expectation that you are going to be doing all the work. The enthusiasm and work ethic will rub off on your buddies and they will want to keep up.
4. Get on social media - Once your game starts becoming close to done, get a twitter handle ready, post about it on reddit, become friendly with popular people in other gaming/modding communities. Talk about it constantly with content to share like screenshots and promotional videos. Talk about it like you've never been more excited in your life to create this awesome game. It will get other people talking about it and they will be excited to check it out when it's done.
In short, make friends, be nice and likable, do what you're best at, and promote the shit out your game. You're going to be spending a lot of time talking to people and being an internet celebrity. Its most important that you remain present in people's lives, especially the people you are working with and the people you're selling your game to. It will be a lot of work and use a lot of your time, but I think that's what you're going to need to do to make it successful.