The Big Think

How to do what you love. (and not feel guilty about it)

By the time they reach an age to think about what they’d like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one’s work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can’t blame kids for thinking “I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world”….

How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don’t know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you’ll tend to stop searching too early. You’ll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige– or sheer inertia…

The test of whether people love what they do is whether they’d do it even if they weren’t paid for it– even if they had to work at another job to make a living…

The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. It seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors and whose parents want them to be novelists…

With such powerful forces leading us astray, it’s not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions…

Most people would say give me a million dollars and I’ll figure out what to do. But it’s harder than it looks. Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.

read the whole thing.

This article really speaks to me. I consider myself one of the very few, very fortunate people to have found work that is enjoyable and fulfilling. I have been twice blessed in that I was able to find it right out of college and didn’t have to spend years toiling in the mines to discover I didn’t like toiling in the mines. I take a certain peaceful pride (sounds weird, but there it is) in the fact that I’ve never had a real job and instead have invented my way through the thicket of “work”. I’m constantly amazed by the stories that friends with “real jobs” tell me about what they do. Office politics, fighting rush hour traffic, dealing with their boss. And insurance co-pay? What’s that?

I talked to a friend not too long ago about doing what you love and her response was that it would be nice, but the security of her current position was too good, and that giving up that security represented too much of a risk. She doesn’t hate her job, but I get the feeling that it’s not very fulfilling for her. I was sad to hear this, but she was aware of the choice and comfortable with the tradeoff. She valued security more than “freedom”- however that’s defined.

There’s a quote on my computer monitor that I cut out years ago and stuck up as a sort of gauntlet thrown at my own feet. It reads: “Out of every hundred people who aspire to a successful career in music and audio, maybe one will make it”. At first I read it as a challenge to become that elusive one. However, in the past few years I have started to wonder just how long you have to do something successfully before you can start thinking of yourself as a success. One year? Two? Ten? Forty? Most of the time I feel like I have achieved that success, but sometimes I wonder where the finish line is.

Part of the burden that comes with doing what I love is the fear that it will somehow be taken away. I know that this is unreasonable in light of the circumstances of how I got into this, and my firm belief that it wasn’t accidental, but the fear is still there. Many of my friends know that I’m extremely competitive and hard working when it comes to my job, and this stems largely from a couple of deep rooted beliefs:

First, at some level I don’t really believe that I’m good enough to do what I do. This feeling of “I’m fooling everybody” is very common among self-employed people. I have two friends who are both into computers and we’ve had long conversations about this. One of them started a business a few years ago that has grown by leaps and bounds. He’s very proud of what he’s accomplished, but we talk a lot about how he feels like he’s just making it up and some day a customer is going to realize that he’s a fraud. We all feel this way, especially those of us who are out there representing ourselves as a business of one. I want to do Good Work (it’s always capitalized in my mind), and Good Work means Excellence. It also means doing everything to such a level that nobody will ever find out that I’m not actually very good at what I do. Believe me, I know how that sounds, but there it is.

The second thing that drives me is the fear that, at some point, I’ll have to quit doing what I love and get a job just to pay the bills. Some soul killing work that I have to drag myself to every day because the mortgage has to be paid, or the car needs new brakes, or we have to put food on the table. What would I be like if I had to do something I hated? Is this the responsible path? Will I not become a “real” adult until I realize that “work is hard”, or “you can’t always do what you want”? Am I a spoiled whiner because I actually look forward to my work every day? I believe that we can all make a living doing what we love but there are so many counter examples out there that I sometimes wonder if I’ve won the work lottery and that makes me scared.

So this is what drives me to perfection in my work; the fear that I’m not very good at what I do, and that it’ll be taken away from me. I told Erin not too long ago that I feel like I’m in a race. At some point in the distant future retirement funds will kick in and we’ll no longer have to work. I hope to keep working, and never plan to retire, but I feel like the finish line is when we no longer need the next paycheck. When the house is paid off and the big bills are finished, and when investments bring in enough to see us through the future. Then I’ll be able to say I made a successful career. That I fooled everybody. My definition of success used to be “do exclusively what you love for one year and get paid for it”. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten so used to doing what I love that I’ve come to define success as “doing what I love my whole life”. And if I ever have to do something else? Doesn’t that mean that ultimately I wasn’t successful? That’s a ridiculously high standard, but I can’t get my heart to not believe it.

We talk about this a lot around here, and it always comes back to the fact that I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing right now if God had not worked in the strange and convoluted way He did. There’s the other side of my personality that tells me there’s a bigger purpose to all of this and that the God who gave me what I have today is still in control. He can be trusted. I don’t like using words like “lucky” or “FORTUN-ate” when I think about how I got into what I do. I know absolutely that this was the direction that I was supposed to take, and I’m constantly grateful for it. It’s just my human nature that decides to freak out and think the ride is going to end. If my current work is “taken from me”, it’s only to make room for something else. It’s just hard to convince myself of this. I think that’s what my faith is for.

In the mean time, articles like the one above are like cairns on a vague and snow-covered trail. They tell me that other people have come this way and that this thinly travelled trail leads to a place worth going. Keep moving, you’re doing fine…