“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
How many times has someone said that to you? More times than you can remember, most likely. It’s a hopeful thought shared by well-meaning people who want to help you through a bad day, give you a useful tip for the future, or sound like they’ve got all the answers. You’ve probably said it yourself. It probably made you sound smart.
I’m here to tell you that everyone who has ever said that to you is wrong.
(Not the kind of wrong where you shouldn’t listen to another word they say. They’re only wrong in this one instance as far as I’m concerned.)
The thing is, work that you love is still work — and you are never going to love something every day that you do it. I haven’t even been alive for two full decades and I can already tell you that from experience. There will never be anything you love so much that you could do it every day and not once regard it with irritation or distaste. Because loving your work (call it what it is!) means that it frustrates you. In fact, the more you love what you do, the more dissatisfied you will be with it. You will want everything to be perfect, but it won’t be perfect because you are not perfect, and that will make you angry. The people around you will not understand your anger, or why you choose to keep doing something that makes you angry. You will try to express your love for your work to others and they won’t understand, and that will frustrate you. (The stereotype of the misunderstood artist didn’t come from nowhere.)
Doing what you love is hard because loving what you do is hard.
I don’t mean that in the sense that the act of loving what you do gets to be tiring. I mean that it is mentally, emotionally, and physically draining to be attached to what you do. You become incapable of not loving it; you couldn’t not love it if you tried, and you will most likely try at some point or perhaps several points.
If you pursue a career in what you love, you will shed more tears than you ever would have otherwise. You will miss more nights out, hurt more people unintentionally, and throw more chairs across the room. You will probably consider jumping out of a few windows. You might be poverty-stricken for the entirety of your human existence. But here is the beautiful part: it will be such a human existence. Humans exist because of love, by love and through love. Our own love is imperfect — fragile, fickle, fleeting. We are incapable of loving anyone or anything flawlessly. So it’s right that the choice to spend your life doing something you love will bring out flawed emotions (provided you’re human, and for the purposes of this article I’m going to assume that you are).
I am not going to encourage you to do what you love anyways because it’s rewarding. You know it’s rewarding, and everyone else will tell you that anyways. Few people will tell you that doing what you love hurts. (Fewer people will tell you that it’s the best kind of hurt.) But the reality is that if you do what you love, you will work more than you ever would have had you chosen to do something you had a moderate dislike for, or even something you hated. Is work really so bad, though? You have to do something with your life, after all, and you are only going to live for so long. You never asked for my opinion so I’m not going to give it unsolicited, but if you had asked, I’d recommend that you die having spent your life on a path that means something to you.
