What You Enjoy and Making a Living Doing It
On dedicating your life to things that you love doing while earning a good living.
I enjoy doing sports and creating things with my hands. I also enjoy meeting new people and facilitating connections between people who haven’t previously met.
I don’t do much of the things I love. I’m too busy focusing on survival matters.
Can you make a living doing what you love? If so, how?
It is hard to find an answer to this question, even though many people claim to answer it.
The truth is that it depends. It depends on who you are, what your skill sets are and what you love.
Survival vs. What You Love
“What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.” — Bob Dylan
I love this quote by Bob Dylan, I just wish I believed it enough for it to ease my fears and scarcity mindset.
Like a lot of people, I spend a lot of time worrying about money.
I worry that if I don’t focus on making enough money while I still have energy and youth, I might struggle financially for the rest of my life.
I’m afraid because I grew up in a poor family, and that experience still traumatised me. I’m scared of ending up like my parents and the rest of my family who struggled financially.
This fear leads to me making decisions about my career and life solely based on money, even though I don’t want my whole life to be about chasing after money. I feel like I’m wasting their life and living in a constant state of fear and lack.
How do we override our impulse towards survival and focus on doing what we love?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this question and so far I’ve come up with the following explorations:
- Identifying what you love.
What are your favourite places, activities, music, podcasts, movies, books, art, foods, smells, tastes, sounds, etc?
It’s important to write down and make a list of these. I keep my list in my journal and add to it along the way as I think of more things I love.
2. Identify what you don’t like and eliminate non-essentials
Find out what you’re doing with your time that you don’t enjoy or that doesn’t make your life better in any way. Once you know, stop doing those things and instead focus on the activities that bring you joy and fulfilment.
For me, I realised that I spend a lot of time on social media even though it adds very little value to my life. So I cut down on my social media use so that I can focus on doing things that I love.
3. Combining what you do for money with what you love.
When we know the things that bring us joy and do them more often, we can figure out more ways to incorporate those things into every aspect of our lives. While many of us can’t just stop working to pursue our passions, we can still find ways to include what we love in our daily activities, even those necessary for survival.
I enjoy writing, so I’ve set a goal to write really good emails at work. This way, I’m using my work time to get better at something I enjoy.
I’ve also begun arranging social gatherings outside of work to help my colleagues bond because I enjoy bringing people together and creating connections between people.
So, is it possible to live our passions while juggling the realities of daily life? The answer, as we’ve explored, isn’t a simple yes or no.
However, it is possible to do more of the things you love by:
- Identify what we love
- Identify what you don’t love and eliminate non-essential unenjoyable tasks
- Integrate passion into all aspects of life
