Love What You Do and Never Work a Day In Your Life

 

I follow this guy on LinkedIn named Bob Tarantino who writes a column called Counsel for Counsel. I quite appreciate reading it. He wrote a post the other day that triggered me. He said, “Don’t get too worked up about finding your passion or doing a job that you love, instead figure out what you’re good at.”

On the one hand, I agree with that, because no matter what work you do, it’s still work. If we beat ourselves up every time we feel that we’re not passionate enough about what we’re doing, then we’re setting ourselves up for discontent.

On the other hand, I refuse to believe this is true. There are people who are passionate about what they do.

Why not me?

Why not you?

I think of it as a spectrum:

spectrum_lovewhatyoudo_separation.png

For most of us, there’s an expectation that we would be closer to the doing what you love side. And then here’s the kicker: we feel GUILTY because we’re not achieving that.

And the guilt ACTUALLY HAS AN EFFECT on where we sit on the spectrum. It brings us closer to the right.

Wait, wait, wait.

This isn’t the whole picture. It’s not JUST about loving what we do, since the other side is not giving a shit. This spectrum is measuring two variables.

So, we can split them and have two spectrums:

two_spectrums.png

You’ll see I’ve also included my current theory on how critical self-compassion is, and how it affects where we are on the spectrum.

Cal Newport weighs in pretty close to Tarantino. He says that it’s dangerous to TRY to be on the left side of the second spectrum. Instead, just focus on being excellent and it will come.

Which doesn’t mean that being excellent is all that’s needed. He says that there are three factors that go into whether you consider your work a vocation or just a job:

  1. Competence - How good are you at what you do?

  2. Autonomy - How much control over what you’re doing do you have?

  3. Relatedness - How much do you like the people you work with?

Newport argues that if you score high on all three of these, you’re going to be more satisfied by (and passionate about) your work.

And, if you’re super good at what you do, not only do you have #1 on lock, but you have enough leverage to find/create jobs that score high on #2 and #3.

It makes some sense to me. Although, I think it’s forgetting a piece of advice that I heard (that I didn’t actually mention on the podcast):

Don’t get good at something you don’t want to do.

No easy answers yet on how to do work we love.

I think the easy answers lay outside this connundrum:

  1. Stop spending so much time, energy and money chasing things that don’t actually move the needle towards making you happy.

  2. Don’t ignore your boat’s hull while you focus on building your sail.

How is your boat doing? How are you going to work on it so you can move forward?

Join us this week as we discuss this and more.

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Paul KarvanisComment