this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Do What You Love (mikestone.me)
submitted 12 hours ago by carlos@communick.news to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.

My dad used to say this to me. He didn’t come up with it of course. Searching for the source, I see attribution to Marc Anthony. How it came to be a 70-80 year old man was quoting a singer to me I’d bet money he’d never heard, I’ll never know. Maybe he didn’t either.

The basic idea behind the quote is that what you’re doing won’t feel like work if it’s something you love doing anyway. I mean, think of the thing you want to be doing right now instead of reading this post. Your favorite thing in the world. Now, along comes some idiot who offers to pay you to do that very thing! How can you possibly say no?

There’s a darker aspect to this quote that I don’t think people consider though. If you take the thing you love and do that for work, you’re turning what you love into a job. This is a trap that I’ve fallen into. Multiple times.

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[–] Flamekebab@piefed.social 1 points 12 hours ago

Seems like an odd place to post this but I'll bite.

Even the things I love doing involve work. If I want to do some sewing I still need to tidy up before and afterwards, for example, or spend time pinning stuff (and then taping up the numerous stab wounds). It's a bit reductive.

Instead I try to get paid for things that require minimal emotional "work" from me - that is to say, things that don't leave me sapped of energy to work on my passion projects. I don't dislike what I am paid to do but I'm not super enthused about it. That means that when I'm done working I've still got the creative juice to work on stuff I actually want to do.

If instead I have to spend my working days pushing myself through stuff then I tend to be left with nothing in the tank, even if I still have time left at the end of the day. Instead I get paid to do something I'm good at but that doesn't usually involve extended periods of advanced problem solving or frequent uphill battles of effort (there's always a bit, of course, it's not a perfect solution!). That isn't to say what I do is easy, but much of the stuff involved is stuff I've been doing for twenty years so is comparatively easy for me.