Buzzfeed might have an opening for you. 
It’s illegal to charge for what I love to do.
I work for a healthcare company, and we get a lot of the same kind of BS- it’s all about customer service and patient care; the unspoken message is that if you’re in it for yourself and your family, and not for the patient/client’s sake, you’re somehow lacking ethically and morally.
I personally think the “do what you love, love what you do” saying is a sort of catch-phrase to help people clarify their thoughts on what it is they want to accomplish with their careers and lives, and that for most people at best, it helps them find a job that sucks less every day.
Very very few people get the full-bore “Do what you love, love what you do” treatment in life; they’re usually the ones who get lucky, while hundreds or thousands of other people with the same loves don’t. Look at musicians- I’m sure someone like Elton John is doing what he loves and loving what he does, but how many millions of other singers aren’t?
I’ve actually known some people fortunate enough to do what they love for a living and you know what? Every single one of them has told me that sometimes even the job they love sucks, because there’s often some less than fun things you need to do to make the rest of the enterprise work properly. Turn your avocation or hobby into your career and yes, some days, it’s just a job you have to get through. The upside is that you have fewer of those days than most other people.
As Broomstick pointed out, even if you are doing what you love, there’s almost certainly going to be things you do because you gotta, not because you love that particular part of the job. For a pop/rock star, for example, they may love performing but not so much like all the travelling they have to do to get to their gigs.
I think much of it comes from motivation theory derived from sports and/or the military.
When you think about it, the military is one of the worst possible jobs one can imagine. Highly regimented. Highly institutional. Little to no personal freedom. Extensive travel. Not to mention the basic function of having to go kill people or have them try and kill you. I realize there is more to it than that, however, the point is that no one would characterize military service as a cushy or easy career. At yet a significant number of people who join the military have strong positive feelings towards their service.
So not surprisingly, many in corporate America have looked at the military for management theory on how to influence people to have a strong compulsion to perform tasks they might otherwise consider stupid or shitty.
“That question is bullshit to begin with. If everyone listened to her, there’d be no janitors, because no one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars.”
I think this was a late 1900’s extension of the post WWII give-your-kids-the-affluence-they-deserve crap that is often [incorrectly] blamed on Dr. Benjamin Spock. In that sense, it was a counter-revolution to the Protestant revolution centuries earlier. Remember that there were essentially two radical departures from Catholic/Orthodox thought back then:
[ul]
[li]“Behavior and faith lead to salvation” replaced the Catholic “Ritual and indulgences lead to Salvation”[/li][li]“Working hard glorifies God, who rewards the faithful with success in their vocations” replaced the Catholic “Salvation is facilitated by attendance, confession, and charitable acts.”[/li][/ul]
This, as Max Weber put it, was the heart of the Protestant Work Ethic and the underpinnings of capitalism and both Europe’s and (later) America’s success and economic world dominance. It was an ethic which encouraged everyone to toil relentlessly, keep their financial affairs in order, and set aside frivolous (pleasant) pursuits and to do these things in order to prove how pious they were. It also set up the ridiculous paradigm of “Impiety = Poverty and Wealth = Righteousness” because God recognizes the faithful by making them rich.
There have been many criticisms of Weber’s premise, but I’ll leave deeper discussion to another thread. Assuming his thesis was correct, having such an underlying ethic throughout society serves the society well because it encourages everyone to work, even (or especially) at loathsome jobs with horrible conditions that would otherwise go unfilled – butchers, sewer workers, garbage collectors, janitors, a lot of those occupations that were featured on Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs.
But then there was a whole Anti-VietNam War culture of questioning and even opposing what were considered Christian/Capitalist values at the root of the war. Killing people just because they weren’t Christian (or white) wasn’t acceptable; Greed was no longer a good thing; working like a dog wasn’t glorious and didn’t glorify God, either. And the seeds of a new ethic began to sprout: *Work and play need not be conflicting behaviors. *
And at some point in the aphorism-filled 1970’s someone put out a poster or bumper-sticker that said, “Find a job doing what you love and you’ll never WORK a day in your life.”
And it’s nice for the middle- and upper-class kids to go to school with that cliche in mind and be able to pursue their dreams of becoming doctors and teachers and musicians and athletes and engineers and chefs. But it also completely ignores the lower-class kids whose track-focused schools are preparing them to be factory drones and it even ignores the upper- and middle-class kids whose parents are steering them away from “useless” careers in theater and anthropology and video-game design and insisting they become respectable lawyers or doctors or accountants.
When I changed my major to Sociology, my sister made a point of taping and sending me a broadcast of Oprah Winfrey’s show which featured a man who had been unemployed for several years because he had gotten a degree in Sociology and refused any leads from the State Unemployment Office that weren’t specifically “Doing Sociology.” At that time, my sister was in college pursuing an accounting degree – and doing quite well with it because machines and numbers don’t require social skills. I think the message she was trying to get to me was “Don’t pursue a Sociology degree” but the message I was receiving was “Don’t get fatally fixated on a single line of work.”
But my sister came home for the summer and a friend told us about some jobs available at a summer camp. We both got accepted as camp counselors and my sister fell in love with kindergartners and caretaking. She finished her accounting degree anyway, then immediately went back to college to pursue a teaching credential. The problem was that nothing in her courses for a Computer-Assisted Accounting specialty had anything to do with the curricula for K-12 Teaching – no child care, no developmental psychology, no Introduction to Pedagogy, nothing that would prepare her for babysitting kids, much less teaching them anything from the Three R’s to basic social studies or math or geography or what-not. The best she could do was pursue a special accreditation in physical education for developmentally disabled children.
And so she did. And because she had internalized the DWYL/LWYD mantra at some time in the 70’s, she stopped taking (or even looking at) accounting jobs for globe-spanning property management companies and only sought jobs in teaching physical education to developmentally disabled children. And those jobs are not only few and far-between, but she could only find occasional contract work as a substitute coach for the few full-time coaches who had beaten her to the positions while she was getting her accounting degree.
And because she does better with machines and numbers than with people, she had a habit of saying the right things to parents and school administrators who didn’t like a substitute coach coming in and changing established routines and programs. Eventually the jobs dried up – but my sister still insisted on following the DWYL/LWYD work ethic – even as her funds dwindled, her diet suffered, and her health deteriorated. She eventually stopped wasting money on those expensive blood-pressure pills – and had a hypertensive stroke last Halloween.
Depending on how much she recovers, she will be lucky if she can find work, much less Do What She Can, and much much less Do What She Likes. Doing What She Loves – what got her where she is now? Let’s hope not.
This is why I never opened a dojo. As much as I love martial arts and teaching and even had quite a lot of students tell me they’d follow me if I opened my own studio, I never wanted to do it as a business. I saw my own instructors go through economic cycles and it was painful enough watching them go through lean times. I knew that if I owned a martial arts school, the lean times would make me rue the day I opened for business. And I didn’t want to come to hate what I love so much.
I’ve posted this before, a repeat of someone else’s words: When you work for a company, you work for a boss. When you own the company, every customer is your boss.
I mentioned above that I majored in Sociology – understanding people and how they relate-to and behave in groups. I specialized in macro- issues like education, religion, culture, politics, social change and revolutions, and I aspired to become a professor and do research and teaching in those areas. The closest I got was that I spent almost a decade working for a publisher in their Social Sciences division. But the publishing industry is hemorrhaging red ink now and I was strangely fortunate that my work load was moved to London – but I wasn’t invited to follow it.
My wife also got her degree in Sociology, though I didn’t know her when she graduated. She specialized in relatively micro-issues like workplace relations, senior care, and student acculturation. She’s the one with the career related to her degree; she’s the one doing social work for a state agency.
But well before I got into High School, I was playing with computers – programming in BASIC on the school district’s DEC Alpha mainframe and laughing at the relative powerlessness of the Commodore PET and Apple I computers. And even though I had no desire to make a career of it, I always had a computer or at least a friend with an extra computer to mess with. And that’s how I’ve ended up as a Systems Operator for an insurance company. It’s not what I set out to do with my life, but I still enjoy bragging “Yeah, I play with computers all day and they pay me for it. Then I go home and play video games at night.”
I was subscribed to another board (What??:eek: Treason!!) long ago and saw some kid had posted a question: I’ve gotten a huge windfall from an uncle who died. What accessories should I put on my new monster truck?
The overwhelming (though, not unanimous) responses from other 4WD enthusiasts was: Skip the truck. Get to college and major in Engineering, Accounting, Business, Journalism – whatever maximizes your talents and aptitudes. Then find a job working for a company related to the 4WD industry – vehicles, accessories, advertising, whatever. You will then be able to combine an employable education with your love for 4Wheeling – and you may even be able to get discounts on parts or accessories for the monster truck you’ll be able to buy.
[Of course, I’d already graduated by then ]
But I think that was a detailed way of advising the kid to DWYL/LWYD without slinging the worn-out aphorism: IF you have the luxury of planning your future, then make a plan to DWYL and LWYD.
Around that time, I was assigned to a temp job at a place called Campland on the Bay. Every morning the director would come in, open up his curtains, and watch the sun glistening off the water as the sun was coming up. He’d then turn to me and say, “I stared out as a bookkeeper and now I’m running this place. My god, I should be paying them for this privilege!”
–G!
Linda: Philosophy major? What can you do with that?
Bruce: You can think very deep thoughts – about being unemployed.
–Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
for me it was more of a case of learning to appreciate what I do well rather than what I would have loved to do well (accounting vs performing arts) and eventually use the accounting skills to get me working adjacent to what I love. Took me a few decades to find the love, though.
Oh, in a couple of decades we’ll almost all be unnecessary in the job market. And after a lot of death and fighting and horrible unemployment rates, we’ll figure out how to live well even if most of us aren’t forced into jobs we don’t like. The human race: doing dumb things like there’s no tomorrow.
In my personal experience, that hoped-for payout at the end never happened. Finally learning my lesson, I said “screw this” and switched to pursuing things I care about. I’m a lot more broke, but also a LOT more HAPPY.
Having done this for a while… you’re forgetting the time required for things like commuting to that 9-5 job, going to the store for groceries and toilet paper, cooking, cleaning your living space, paying bills, etc. etc. etc. Having done this day job plus vocation thing for a while, you vastly over-estimate the amount of time left over for “what you love” after the basic tasks of money-making and living are done. I very often go short of sleep.
Personally, I don’t recall really being “taught” do what you love, but I have learned I’m very ill-suited to do anything else. I’ve done day jobs – some of 'em fairly well-paid – that literally made me suicidal. If I’m spending 10 hours a day (don’t forget commuting time!) doing something soul-sucking, not only does it cost me in time, but it sucks the life out of me. A few hours on a weekend (actually not enough time to get anything accomplished, either, but that aside) is not enough to compensate for that.
Among the chirps of crickets, I give you my clap. That was awesome.
I think it is a very small percentage of people who can make a living doing what they love. Either what you love to do doesn’t pay the bills, or you turn a love into a job and grow to resent it. IME, well adjusted folks learn to be content with where they end up, much like you would if you were part of an arranged marriage.
This.
I have always toyed with the idea of opening a restaurant, because I enjoy cooking. But turning a hobby that provides stress relief into a highly stressful job doesn’t seem like a good idea.
"Do who you love, love who you do."
Yeah, when I was in high school/college in the 90’s this thing about being passionate about what you do was everywhere. I struggled with it for many years, as I don’t feel strongly enough about anything for it to be my passion. I wish that, instead of everyone telling me that I had to be passionate about what I do, that people had told me that it was really just fine for me to like what I did, to be committed to it and interested in doing a good job with it.
I don’t see it around nearly as much these days… I suspect that it’s the kind of thing that is more likely to be said in a robust economy…
…Okay, I must say I am confused by this. An accounting degree didn’t prepare her for math? She couldn’t babysit/tutor kids and figure out how to teach them? I mean, nothing in my courses had anything to do with the curricula for K-12 teaching either, but even when I’m just hanging out with my 5-year-old niece I start talking to her about math; it’s fun to figure out how to introduce concepts to kids.
Yes, and what do people in the West generally think of arranged marriages? Generally considered fairly backward, I believe.
Only because we’re told to marry for love, and look how well that works out. Don’t read too much into my throwaway remark, I’m not prepared to defend arranged marriages today.
Well, the situation was that my sister was really a phenomenal accountant (as far as accountants go, I guess) and very much in demand by property management companies and other accounting firms. The problem was that she hated micromanaging pennies for greedy property owners and other accounts. The other irony is that my sister was good at learning things and demonstrating a high level of skill and knowledge – dance, gymnastics, accounting procedures, origami – but she really isn’t a very good teacher. In fact I’d say she epitomizes the fact that Knowing and understanding a subject doesn’t always imply an ability to explain that subject so others can know and understand that subject. Plus, there’s a certain amount of skill and talent that goes into teaching and she just didn’t have that. I submit that if you think “it’s fun to figure out how to introduce concepts to kids.” then you have a natural propensity for teaching (which my sister lacks, in spite of her desire to enter that field).
—G!
Oh, and I just reviewed my own post (#47) above and I gotta admit it’s painfully long and rambling. I apologize to you all for that.
No, I don’t feel that way. It sounds hellish to me. I love my job, my hobbies, my girlfriend, our friends, and the things I do. Except maybe clean the litter box. But even that’s not bad because I love my cat.
Doing what you love does not mean you have to do the specific thing you ar presently feeling passionate about as much as it does identifying the elements of what you love doing and applying those to a skill, craft, proffession etc.
It’s a stupid meme.
Look around you. How many people are cashiers, or construction workers, or stock shelves or serve burgers? Or look at your doctor: how would you like to spend your days looking into peoples orifices and writing scripts? How many people answer the phone, or pave the roads, or hand out speeding tickets all day?
If everybody did what they love, the economy would grind to a halt. It is the way it is because it has to be that way. 99% of everything that has to be done is not fun. That’s why it’s called work.
The truth is that not everybody can be a rock star and play in the NBA. Or be rich enough to work only if they feel like it.
Saying everybody should do what they love is bullshit. It’s a way of pressuring people into either pretending they love what they do, or be considered losers.