How many people have you heard say “Follow your bliss” or “Do what you love” in relationship to your work?
I’ve heard it a lot…
And I remember my friends telling me back in college,”you should be an English major like us, we all love writing and Literature.”
I wondered what kind of job you would end up with that degree, and decided to go into accounting instead…Â I KNEW there were jobs that paid pretty well for that!
So Laurie on The Cynical Girl seems to think that getting paid for doing what you love is pretty much a myth – for most.
She has some advice on how you may be able to do what you love – which turns out to not really be advice on how to do it, more how to be prepared to NOT be able to do it.
I didn’t find it too encouraging. Which she pretty much says…
Most of us will never do what we love. Life is cruel and unfair, isn’t it? Pass the potatoes.
Not that you CAN’T do what you love, just that it may not be your primary source of income. Think of it more as a hobby.
But this did get me curious, and I searched for more words of wisdom and found a similar article by Jeff Haden on Inc.
His position is that as you get to know more about something, you build passion around that, that passion is a side effect of mastery.
I like the way he presents what one does for a living, for work:
Roughly speaking, work can be broken down into a job, a career, or a calling. A job pays the bills; a career is a path towards increasingly better work; a calling is work that is an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity. (Clearly most people want their work to be a calling.)
The more I thought about it, the more I agree with his position. People often get started down a path by encountering something that caught there attention – maybe in school, maybe during a summer job…
If you are interested, you will probably work a little harder learning it, which tends to result in positive feedback about your knowledge/ability. And that inspires you to learn more…Â And someday down the road you may wake up feeling very happy about what you do!
Remember that accounting major I was going after? Well, in the process of getting that I took a computer class. I was good at it! I took another class…
I changed my major to Business Information Systems and ended up with a career that has been extremely satisfying – a calling.
I went through a phase where I thought it would be cool to run a restaurant or be a chef because I love to cook. Then I realized that I liked to do it on my terms, and if I HAD to do it – yuck! It would ruin the joy. Glad I didn’t go down that path.
You don’t have to do what you love – but you just may find you end up loving what you do!
