Doing what you Love

I’m sure everyone has heard the statement, “do what you love” from one of the successful people you look up to. It’s such a simple statement that can solve almost all your “problems” yet it’s almost impossible to achieve.

People will tell you to do what you love, or to follow the line of work that makes you happiest, but I think there may be some miscommunication here. Yes, you absolutely should do what you love and what makes you happy but that doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be days where you “highly dislike” your job. Just because you’re doing what you love doesn’t mean you aren’t going fail miserably. It doesn’t mean you aren’t going to land flat on your face when you’re starting out. There are still going to be bad days, days where you feel like quitting and just hiding from the world. People have the wrong impression that doing what you love means you never have a rough day and your happiness level is always at 100% regardless of what’s going on. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

This is the point I’m trying to get across. Doing what you love involves attacking the bad days with just as much passion as you do the good days. It’s knowing that there are going to be tasks you need to complete that aren’t the most enjoyable, that even though you’re doing what you love you aren’t going to love every aspect of the job.

Doing what you love doesn’t mean you “love” doing every task required to reach the next level, it’s loving the process and believing in the process. I’m pretty sure athletes don’t wake up EVERY morning loving the idea of training. Of course there are days where they’d prefer to stay in bed and sleep that extra hour, we all would. Athletes (I’m talking about the true ones here not the ones faking it on social media nowadays) don’t love every aspect of training and what’s required to be successful, but they do love the process of becoming a professional athlete. They know and trust that going to training whether they’re “loving” the idea or not is going to help them become better athletes. (Do a little research on Ali to make this a little clearer)

There’s a difference between doing what you love and doing what is “easy”. Often people seem to think that doing what you love and means it’s going to be easy and you’ll be a natural pro. It’s still going to be ridiculously difficult. You’re still going to have to put in an ungodly number of hours.

Fall in love with the overall process, not certain tasks.