Nothing in the world is 100% great all the time. Sex is great, but you still have to clean up after and make the bed. Cooking and eating dinner is fun, but the dishes need to get cleaned.
There are two things missing from the prescription
Do what you love
Love what you do
Have someone pay you a good bit for doing what you love
Arrange to control what you do.
I’ve had only a year and a quarter of not liking what I did, and I left that job for a better one. I was an acting second level manager once. That involved tons of budgeting, and I hated it, so I made sure no one thought about promoting me. I no doubt gave up money, but I kept my sanity.
I love what I do, I get paid nicely for it, and the project I’m working on is my own design based on the vaguest of requests. Being a compulsive programmer I get to both work on a long term big project (and farm out parts I don’t like to other people) and short term things which give me a nice rush when they get done and I see them being used. I’m old enough to not have to worry about the long term, and at this point the only time I’d have to worry about losing my job is if they killed the whole product line - and maybe not even then for long enough.
Not that I’ll hate staying home, but at the moment the traffic bugs me a lot more than my work. There are a few idiocies in the bigger company, but I actually enjoy learning how to work around them to get what I want.
It is possible people.
I don’t think anyone believes it’s not possible.
It’s good advice for people who have choices–those who can afford to quit at the first sign of unpleasantness because they know they can find a better job without much sweat or anxiety. I also think it makes sense as a long-term goal, recognizing that a person may have to endure a little hell for several years before all that love starts flowing in.
But I don’t know if most people are in this situation where DWYL is practical advice. A lot of folk do jobs that are tolerable but not really lovable, on the whole. Does hearing “Do what you love!” really help them feel good about their situations? No. I think if I had to work the register at WalMart and someone started preaching to me about how important it is for one to love what they do, I’d want to smack him or her will a roll of quarters.
I guess this is how I look at it. You don’t just fall into being a doctor, graphic designer, accountant or lawyer or even blue collar jobs like fireman, plumber or welder. At some point, you have to go to school, train, study, practice, join a guild or otherwise take some proactive steps over a period of several years to prepare for a career in that field. So if you don’t try and find something you might love (or at least tolerate) doing, you sort of end up by default in some crappy job that anyone can do but no one really wants to. And it doesn’t matter if you are a Harvard MBA or a high school drop out. For every Mark Zuckerberg following his dream, there are thousands of MBAs and JDs grinding it out in tedious, albeit high paying corporate jobs.
From the ages of 18 to 50, I had many different jobs, with varying degrees of enjoyment, from 0% to maybe 75%. I worked for some great people and some real bastards, and played a part in making most of them rich.
Then at the age of 50 I relocated and did not look for a new job. Instead I started making art. Both of my parents had been artists, so it was something natural for me. And I became very good at it. I truly love my work and often get involved with it around the clock. I don’t get a salary every week, no vacations with pay, no sick days, no holidays, no personal days, no pension. I’m now 68 years old, and except for a few sales of my art, I’m living on $1100/month Social Security. Try living on that.
But I truly love my work, and wish I had started a lot earlier.
As my father told me when I was young, there is a word for that thing you love to do, but can’t make much money at. That word is “hobby”.
So, here I am all grown up, 25 years later. A financially well off, artistic engineer.
Do I love my job? No. Do I hate it? Certainly not. It’s pretty good. It has its bad days, but they all do. It pays well and is interesting, and I like the people I work with, and the company treats me well. For 99.5% of us, that’s as good as it gets.
“Do what you love…on the weekends.”
I’ve never given up my hobbies, but that’s what they are. Hobbies.
Nope, and I wish no one else had been raised that way either. A lot of what’s wrong with the typical American workplace is the expectation that employees should be happy to be there, on the part of management as well as the employees themselves. Most places I’ve worked, what would have made everyone happier is expecting everyone there to be competent and getting rid of those that weren’t.
You can thank labor laws and law suits for that. I’ve actually done this, and it is not easy. Nor should it be, I guess. I’ve also been in the position of people complaining about someone, and not being able to say that steps were being taken. A good manager really can’t say “yes I know Joe is an idiot” even if he does.
Also, in the past 35 years it has gone from “we’re all loyal to each other” to “what is the least we can do for employees so that they won’t leave.” In many places, not all.
Reminds me of the two commercials of finally retiring so you can write that novel.
I sometimes thought about opening a local yarn shop since I’ve loved knitting so much. Butafter discussing with another board how much burden it would be and that my hobby would turn into hatred, I backed out. A shop did open the year I thought about opening one in my town, and it closed within 3 years.
And, as in many other aspects of the economy, women get screwed worse than men. It starts with the imposition of required Emotional Labor, a good example of which is Disney’s dictate that “they can hear your smile!” during all phone conversations.
Ramping up the requirement that you act happy while doing your job, the next requirement is that you genuinely be happy. These are service sector jobs: traditionally held by women, and while little boys are punished for being destructive, little girls are punished for being smart-mouthed. They come to the workforce readily conditioned to bend to the will of authority.
So while there are a few women who love their jobs as yoga instructors or veterinarians or whatever, there are thousands of women whose bosses who dump piles of paperwork on their desks and expect their minions to be delighted, like babies who think mommy must really love changing that poopy diaper they’ve presented her with.
I wasn’t pressured into doing what I loved, I think my parents just wanted me to not be a complete loser with no job. Due to extreme laziness on my part I ended up doing what I loved (flying) but I can’t say I love what I do. When I do it for work there are aspects of it that I don’t like, if/when I do it for pleasure I make sure those aspects are minimised.
Y’know, I dragged this thread out of the weeds because I realized there’s another angle on the aphorism that some people have lightly hinted at but haven’t really discussed. And I’m really surprised that I didn’t write about this in my first response [but, on the other hand, that one really rambled way too long already].
Back in the mid-1970’s I was a ‘teacher’s aid’ except that I was assigned to the Career Center on campus. It was my job to take all the numbers from the surveys that students took and enter them into the GIS – Guidance Instruction System – software and give the resulting output back to the students. The software basically had a database of aptitude scores related to questions about existing jobs – do you like working outdoors? Do you like working as part of a team? Do you like speaking to groups? Do you like working in an office? Do you like… The software would crunch the numbers and come back with a list of 5 jobs that match your preference scores well, and 5 jobs you should probably avoid. Because you like speaking to groups, working with your hands, and turning ideas into real things, but don’t like working outdoors or sitting in an office, or dealing with words or calculating things, you should seek education that will lead you to a job as an art teacher, an architect, or a graphic artist. You should avoid secretarial work, factory line work, and data entry jobs.
In the early 1980’s a bunch of military recruiters came to my high school campus. They invited all the students to come in and take the ASVAPB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude & Proficiency Battery) test. It was a series of test packets that challenged a person in areas like mathematics, languages, spatial conceptualization, mechanical understandings – various aspects of jobs related to military roles. [I think of Grosse Point Blank every time I think of those tests.]
In the late 1980’s I designed and presented a recruiting program for my University student organization. Most of my focus was on getting kids to think about going to college (and then, if they did, consider our college – oh, and joining our campus club) so I’d say, “Hey, ya wanna design cool cars? You wanna cure cancer? Do you want to put criminals behind bars, or get innocent people off – or be the one who decides who’s guilty or not? Would you like to…then you need to go to college. You can do anything you want but I recommend you follow your interests AND your skills and talents…”
In the early 1990’s I was out of college and not yet employed. I went to a Vocational Training class run by the state Employment Development Agency. There, the instructor had us organize cards that described our values and personalities and aptitudes. When we were done, he had us match the color of the majorit of our cards in one pile to certain job fields. If your cards are mostly blue, you’ll be wise to look into jobs in the construction industry. If your cards are mostly green, you should look more at outdoor careers…
In the early 2000’s after my job was moved (without me) across the ocean, my employer enrolled my colleagues and I in a Career Redirection seminar at a company that consulted for fortune 500 firms which were de-hiring whole departments. We took several surveys and gathered lists of words that we felt described ourselves – I am an outgoing, autonomous, word-oriented, abstract-minded, task organizer who enjoys directing others and working on long projects with definite endings. Analysis of my buzzwords strongly suggested that I should be an editor for the print (books) industry. That meant, I was a perfect match – for the job that was being shipped overseas without me!
Anyway, all of these were different ways of getting people of different ages/education levels/intellectual developments to take a hard look at themselves and honestly* assess their strengths and weaknesses and likes and dislikes, then try to match those to the various requirements of different jobs/professions/careers. Although relatively new to the World of Work, the core concept was pretty old by the time I got involved in it: “The Dictionary of Occupational Titles or D-O-T (DOT) refers to the defunct publication produced by the United States Department of Labor which matched job seekers to jobs from 1938 to the late 1990s. It was then rendered obsolete and replaced by a database.” [Dictionary of Occupational Titles - Wikipedia]
So, at least since around 1938, there was some recognition that a worker should be matched to the job he (or she) is going to do (and I would speculate that such was an extension of Taylorism’s ideal of making the right tools for the job and having the workers use them with the right methods for the task). Remember, though, that industrialization took root at the turn of the century and fitting workers to the needs of the (factory) work became the operational mode to be followed. Since the work (specialized sub-task) didn’t change then the adaptable component was (is) the worker, who could hone certain skills and aptitudes while letting others lapse, and avoid trying to fulfill vocational requirements with talents he (or she) lacked. This is really just another step in the Division of Labour In Society (q.v. book of the same name, Emile Durkheim, 1893] which started with letting hunters hunt, gatherers gather, painters paint, critics piss, politicians lie, and so on and so on throughout the History of the World.*
–G!
*Part I
I don’t love my job, but I really like it. It’s a very rare day that I think I really don’t want to go to work today.
The key, for me, is a kind of cultured apathy. I don’t mean to the point of laziness or whatever, but just a natural limit to how much energy–mental, emotional, etc.–that I’m willing to put in. No, I won’t work 60 hour weeks on a regular basis. No, I won’t let some blowhard ruin my day. No, I won’t stress out over some deadline. I choose not to let these things affect me.
The key to that, of course, is being very comfortable financially, and being secure enough in my career that even if I were fired for whatever reason, I could easily find another job. I’m very lucky for this, although I have made other sacrifices in life to make it happen.
I feel sorry for people that don’t make enough money to allow this more comfortable attitude. And I pity those who have the financial means but have somehow (by buying an expensive house, say) trapped themselves in a job for which they cannot afford not to be stressed.
In the end, I’m able to do what I like (programming) without ruining it (as with the cooking->restaurant analogy). I’m not a fan of big social safety nets, but the utilitarian in me says that there would be a tremendous benefit to overall happiness if one could eliminate all the stresses originating from the threat of being fired.
I’ve had the pleasure of never really wanting to know what I want to do.
I’ve had plenty of jobs and know what I don’t want to do.
I know that I am emotionally drained by the end of the day because I feel stuck and I don’t know where to go from here because I pretty much lack skills and education for much else.
I did attempt to go back to school and didn’t finish and ended up racking up so much debt I’ll be paying the rest of my life for. I didn’t even know what I was going for really. I just went because I felt like I should. Get an education. So I did, sort of.
I don’t think I’m lazy necessarily. I really excel at my jobs and advance fairly quickly but I always have jobs that I either don’t love or ones that aren’t going to go very far in the long run.
I’ve never not had a job, I’ve always worked. I’ve only had passion for one job and that was being a radio DJ, but I burned that bridge. The only positive spin I can make is that my boss was caught embezzling money after I left and the remaining staff quit.
What it comes down to is that I can make excuses for myself all day long and rationalize why I can’t find the perfect job, whether it be other people, my depression, anxiety, etc., why I lost other jobs and why I can’t further myself, which is lack of money, time, etc.
I’ve rambled on but I really feel that I am in a mess. Ever since high school, I’ve felt that my friends have had it “together” and I’ve just been all over the place, disorganized. It’s not that I am not smart, I am well spoken and intelligent, I’m just a nutcase.
Yeah, I know this is a zombie, but since I posted the quote above and happened to stumble across this opinion by a philosophy professor, I figured it was an appropriate excuse for reviving the thread.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/a-life-beyond-do-what-you-love/
—G!
Frustrated mom to her oppositional/defiant daughter: Fine! Do whatever you damn-well please – huh? Huh? Try disobeying that!