That would be incorrect. My husband and I work out together, take several runs per week, see movies, watch our favorite shows on television together, and go out to dinner with other couples once a week for long conversations over a good meal and drinks. I spend time with my daughters, play games, read novels, work on my garden, walk my dogs, play with my cats, spend time chatting with friends, etc. We are also planning several camping trips this summer.
And yet, when I am working as a veterinarian, I enjoy it immensely. But I don’t bring my work home. Just like I don’t bring my home to work.
Who has “hobbies” besides socially maladjusted pre-pubescent boys? And if you would rather work than spend time with “familes/loved ones”, they aren’t loved ones. They are people you are genetically related to who you spend time with.
I’m kind of half joking, but some people don’t take satisfaction from things unless they are being evaluated or judged on them.
I am a clinical psychologist, and I love my job. Seriously, it is the best job in the world. I get to nurture people while they heal–what’s not to love? Plus, I am just naturally nosy.
Not a workaholic, btw. Lots of loved ones and fun stuff to do. Is it just me who thought “sour grapes” when I read what lindsaybluth had to say?
What an encouraging thread. It looks like most people are doing what they enjoy.
My husband and I just opened our deli. It is too soon to know if we will succeed and that stress takes away from the fun a little. But I don’t dread going to work like I did when I worked for someone else, so even if we fail, I doubt I’ll regret giving it a shot.
Just as a refresher. And what, may I ask, do my complaints about grading papers that have the coherence of word salad have to do with my statement about how surely you didn’t mean to sound as condescending as you did?
Only for certain definitions of hobbies that don’t involve competition of any sort. Walking in the park, sure, no demands, deadlines or pressure. Competing in marathons, not so much.
Does something change about writing, or painting or singing once a person starts making money at it? Or about reading when a person gets a job reviewing books? Maybe people don’t get paid for doing what you enjoy- but that doesn’t apply to every leisure activity and it doesn’t mean that people can’t love what they do and still have other interests. I’ve had jobs I really loved- and I still rarely worked more than 35 hours a week. Just because I loved my job didn’t mean I wanted to spend all my time at it- it just meant that I tended to enjoy the time I was working instead of watching the clock.
I didn’t know I was doing what I loved until I’d been at it for awhile. I just needed a job and felt lucky to find one, and then found out I’m really good at it and that my responsibilities fit my personality very well.
I’m not necessarily doing what I love as in -turned a hobby into a paycheck-, but the ways that I naturally express myself in the world are exactly what make me good at my job. I love creating systems that organize information. I also really like teaching people how to access and manipulate that information within those systems. The key is that my job also involves a lot of superficial chatting and sociability, I love the mix of both focused thinking and casual yammering. The paychecks aren’t huge, but they’re steady and that works for me.
I wouldn’t have known how to describe this job before I had it, but if you asked me what I love to do I could answer by just showing you my current job description.
**Do any of you make money doing what you love to do?
**
I am incredibly lucky. I have two careers running side-by-side and I love both of them. Database Administrator during the day, Taekwondo instructor in the evenings.
It’s not 9-5. It’s worse. It’s 7-7, which of course, starts earlier than 7 and end later, too. OTOH, I only work about 3 days a week, so I frequently get lots of time off.
But, after several days off, I find that I don’t sleep terribly well the night before I begin my shifts and this is because I am a bit excited about going back to work. Because I really do love my job. And, I’ve been there for 15 years.
I’m a nurse.
I love my facility, my patients, my boss, my pay, my coworkers… I love all sorts of things about my job and I feel especially about it grateful since so many many people hate their work. None of this means I don’t have bad days, days that are frustrating or even horrible, days when everything goes wrong, or unpleasant coworkers, etc. I do have those. But overall, I could not imagine spending my days doing anything more fulfilling.
If it had been someone else I might have thought that, but it’s lindsaybluth. She’s pretty young and I think she doesn’t always understand situations she has not personally experienced, so what I though was “guess she still hasn’t had the good luck to land a job she liked, oh well.” Hopefully, some day she will.
The classic definition of a DBA’s job: hours of boredom spent surfing the Web, interspersed with minutes of sheer terror when a server crashes. But I work with a great bunch of people. They are all insane (in a good way), to the point where I appear to be the normal person in the group.
I enjoy writing and selling articles, but it simply does not earn a living for me. So I do have a regular job which pays good for part-time. I have mulled about going back to full time (or even take another gig for an extra workday) but I’ve just gotten used to the free time I have for writing.
I did once have a full time job that I loved simply cuz it was not much responsibility and had luxury part of the day to listen to my tv shows on my radio headphones (back when we had antenna tv) as I worked. But I had to move and didn’t find a job like that since.
That’s what I thought too. Mostly I thought, “Whatever. She has no idea what the fuck she’s talking about.”
I do love what I do. I practice employment law. I love it because it is juicy and interesting, and there is a mix of writing, meeting and interviewing clients and witnesses, figuring stuff out, taking depositions, and (once a year or so) going to trial. All fun and fascinating. Only thing I don’t like about it is that I have to work a little bit too much, and that takes me away from my loved ones and hobbies. Sure, if I could do it only 2 days a week and take the other 5 off, I would. But as a job that pays OK (hopefully more in the future), it’s pretty perfect.
No it is. I have a closely related job and do DBA work. It is the ultimate problem solving exercise and you are on your own when the shit hits the fan. It is low stress most of the time followed by disaster just like being a bodyguard or soldier in combat except you get to sit in an office and nobody knows what you do well enough to say if you are doing your job or not. Plus, the pay is high.
I work in a heavily regulated industry however. I also do checks to do to prevent corruption within a mega-corp. It is like being a superhero whose only power is a stack of forms the have to be filled out like they are coming out of a treadmill. I don’t like that part much.
Wow! This thread is inspiring! To tell you the truth, I always debated this in my head but the answer is clear from all the answers in this thread. I’m going for what I love to do!
btw, that article was awesome! Gave me some good ideas to pursue and I got the book too just in case. I want to be fully prepared for my new journey
…or they have awesome jobs that let them do things that hardly anyone else gets to do. To take the most extreme example I can think of, do you think astronauts “love what they do” because they don’t have any hobbies/family to occupy their time when they’re not being blasted into space? To take a more prosaic one, how about a veterinarian?
My hobbies include fishing for tuna 200 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, and looking at deep-sea organismslikethese. Which would be virtually impossible for me to do with any other job, even if I was fabulously wealthy.
