
Don't Do What You Love - gatsby
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/04/dont_do_what_you_love.html
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ansy
"The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight
and die for it. The way real science goes is that you come up with lots of
ideas, and most of them will be wrong." -- Francis Crick

A slightly relevant quote from an unrelated article I recently read in the New
Yorker[1]

[1]
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/25/110425fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/25/110425fa_fact_bilger?currentPage=all)

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iamdave
Counterpoints:

 _You love it — but you're not great at_

But you're probably driven enough to find out what needs improvement, and you
apply the advice given and the processes pointed out to you.

 _You're skilled at your passion — but hate the work that surrounds it._

Then you probably don't "love" it, do you? Or maybe you do love it, but your
environment sucks. Change your environment.

 _You're too emotionally attached._ Scale it back, take a vacation, clear your
mind. Own the issue.

 _No one will pay for it._ Someone will.

My point? If you love it, make it work for you. Spend less time reading
articles like this and spin a bad opportunity into a good one.

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dpcan
Title is link-bait-ish, but article has some good points.

A more appropriate title might have been, "Is doing what you love what you
should actually be doing?"

What I got from this article was that you have to evaluate several things
about your passion before you decide to dedicate your life to it full-time,
especially if you are going to try to make a living from it.

~~~
Semiapies
Exactly. The defensiveness in other comments here just isn't warranted.

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ChuckMcM
Ok so I'm going to go all contrarian here and provide counter points.

1\. You love it but you aren't great at it.

So she took a guy who was really enjoying his writing but wasn't as good as
other writers. She steers him into a different job as a career so now he can
work 9-5 at a job he doesn't like so he can retire and get back to his first
love writing (Ok so I'm projecting he would still be writing if it was his
choice).

If he _really_ loved writing, then he no doubt continues to write to this day.

One of the ways that doing what you love can trip you up is when your passion
is not internal but external. Perhaps the guy Scott didn't really love
writing, he loved the idea of 'being a writer'. That is an externally imposed
passion. If you love something so much that you do it whether or not people
are paying you to do it, then you are passionate about the action. If doing
what you do for work has no appeal to you outside of your workplace then its
probably not 'love.'

2) Your skilled at your passion but hate the work that surrounds it.

Here she uses a graphic designer who loves to design but quits her job to run
a graphic design business. Then she finds she hates running the business. Doh!
Those are two different jobs, running the business vs doing the graphic
design. Now if the graphic designer knew someone who loved to run a business
but didn't care much for the actual graphic design work, poof, match made in
heaven.

I've watched engineers who loved to code crash and burn when they wanted "to
do more leadership" kinds of things. Its a different job, it has a different
reward/influence structure, and its not at all like being able to code faster.
For them, going back to coding returned them to balance and a much better
level of happiness overall.

3\. Your too emotionally attached

Her example here is completely flawed, her 'failure' is a woman who wanted to
help kids from N. Korea get adopted but instead is credited with cleaning up a
polluted river. Ok, for one it wasn't clear if what Marion Stoddart loved
helping people or loved helping kids in need of adoption. It certainly sounded
like it was more of the former, just her first notion at a way she could help
was adoption.

Her second example is that writers who get too close to their work never
improve. But that is a false dichotomy, improve by what standard? And what is
too close? Sure you can have personality traits that make it more difficult to
make money at what you love but it doesn't change the fundamentals.

4\. No one will pay for it.

She completely shows her true colors with this one. If doing what you love is
'about the money' then you are doing it wrong. It is absolutely true that in
order to survive you will need either an income stream or an ability to
successfully barter for your basic food, clothing, and shelter needs. That
being said, I have yet to hear of a single thing that people 'love' to do for
which there isn't some way to earn enough to keep you fed and housed and
clothed. (One of the high school students I was mentoring piped up at this
point in my conversation 'I love to smoke pot.' I had to take a moment to
point out that, while it was clear they really enjoyed it, that instant
gratification was more akin to lust than love in this particular case :-)

I think the author is saying "If you are normal like me you love money like I
do and so if what you are doing can't get you as much money as you could get
doing something else you are stupid." And sadly a lot of people hold that
particular statement to be true.

Those same people can sometimes get very depressed around middle age, the
halfway point in life expectancy, where they see 'the other half' of their
life which is left and so far they have yet to have enjoy significantly the
'first half' and there is no 'third half.' Contrast that to people who have
spent the first half of their life underpaid but loving what they were doing
for most (if not all) of their days. If you imagine yourself, lying in a bed,
slowly dying for whatever reason, what is more comfort to you? Your memories
of doing the things you love or knowing you've got a huge bank balance?

Growing up in Las Vegas I developed an unusual relationship with money. All
around me people some days had "lots" of money and some days had "none." One
of the girls in my high school's father was a professional poker player. He
bought her a Cadillac when she turned 16, but couldn't afford the cost of
running the air conditioning one summer. So I have always viewed money kind of
like gasoline, in the sense that if you have enough you can drive a car from
point A to point B, but if you have less perhaps you need to drive a
motorcycle instead, and if you have none at all then its going to take a
bicycle or walking to get there. It changed the flavor and the planning of the
journey but it has never changed the destination.

Summary:

1) It's not about money, its about loving what you do.

2) It's about the _doing_ not the _idea_ of someone who does.

3) When you're dying, whether by age or by a drunk driver's hand, you will be
better off if you can look back on your life with fondness rather than feeling
cheated that you had not yet gotten around to doing what you really wanted to
do.

~~~
brudgers
I think you overlooked:

    
    
       But executives can hurt their careers when they care about something too much.
    

The article is more about how emotional involvement can be detrimental to
entrepreneurship rather than career choice. For example campaign staff are
hired guns, freelance graphic designers have to run a business, writers have
to tailor their work to commercial realities, and in a corporate setting the
bottom line is the bottom line.

[TL;DR version] If you love what you are doing, it is really hard to pivot
when it is unsuccessful.

~~~
ChuckMcM
_[TL;DR version] If you love what you are doing, it is really hard to pivot
when it is unsuccessful._

It may be non-obvious but I think your statement captures the trap perfectly.
How did you define success?

If you use an internally defined success to be "I'm doing what I love" then it
becomes tautologically impossible not to succeed :-). If you define it as
"supports a particular lifestyle I associate with 'successful' people" then
you run the risk giving up on your own happiness to chase an externally
defined goal. Many people do this, its why the phrase 'keeping up with the
Joneses' is easy to understand.

When you talk about how your love of doing something is 'hurting your career'
what you are saying is that you won't make as much money as you might
otherwise make if you continue doing what you love.

Ask yourself if you are OK with that. My thesis is that when you start doing
things for their earning potential rather than your personal desire to do
them, you run the risk of having a bank full of cash and a bunch of sour
memories of the last _n_ years of your life. Worse still, if life throws you a
curve ball at the very moment in your life, all the cash in the bank may not
be able to get you back to doing what you love. Ever.

Its not easy either, it may sound like a bunch of platitudes and aphorisms but
understanding what makes you personally happy, distinct from the influences
which have tried to define happiness for you throughout your entire life, is a
challenging task to take on. For me its the single biggest reason to try new
things as you just may find something you love to do that you never realized
was so fulfilling before.

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yzhengyu
I can understand where she is coming from: if you can't survive doing what you
love, what is the point of being a master carpenter if you can't support your
family with it?

Now this contradiction is probably more applicable outside the western
developed nations, where making a living income is a much more difficult task
than most of us here will think.

I think a read of Maslow comes to mind. You can only start thinking about
higher needs in his pyramid when the lower ones are met. I have yet to meet
anyone who can cut out food and shelter from that base level.

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muhfuhkuh
I think alot of this makes sense, in a certain context. It comes from a person
writing about alot of people who don't actually _have_ a passion, just a
"moderate interest".

A passion makes one get out of bed to do it, or research/study it, or talk
incessantly about it, or practice it. They can't help but evangelize their
passion, they would continue doing it even if they had to _pay money_ to do
it.

When your passion is a loss-leader for you in a personal finance sense, then
you could be ready to make it your living.

In other words, make what you're living your living. Some people _claim_ to
love sitting around watching television, but in actuality they are lulled into
it through boredom or exhaustion. If they had more energy, they perhaps
wouldn't do 50% of those "loves" and do other things.

I talk to guys in the workforce who say "man if I could just make money
boatin' n' fishin', boy I'd be set." No, that's your weekend escape hatch. Get
on that boat every day after work if you really want to get paid. See the pain
points in the "want to boat recreationally" industry/market and then serve it.
If you can't do it, then you're just one of those "weekend warriors" adrift
with a couple sixers whittling time away.

That's not a passion, that's not what you love. It's a pastime, like carving
wood on the porch or reading romance novels before bedtime. Now, _writing_ a
romance novel in any professional capacity (yes even romance novels) takes a
dedication that likely 90% of romance novel readers (or any other reading
enthusiast who dreams wistfully of writing for a living) have the time,
training, dedication, or inclination of doing. Of the remaining 10%, only a
handful will have the amount of talent, perseverance, immunity to rejection
and ridicule, and plain luck it takes to make a living out of it.

If you don't like the odds, odds are you don't like the career. Don't do it.
But don't listen to people who say you can't do your passion as a career. I
refuse to believe your only choices in life is either be infinitely talented,
connected, and lucky or to work for a corporation. There is in-between, and
just because there are Zuckerbergs and JK Rowlings out there making everyone
else in their field look bad with their embarrassment of successes, not
everyone has or even _needs_ that insane gobs of drive and dedication and
luck. You just need to push at it every day like you did when you first
started doing it. Consistence and persistence unlocks doors.

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johnrob
You could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Life's too short, do what you love.

