The trouble of loving what you do.
A meditation on work

A project I was involved in recently left me a bad taste. A friend asked me to help with managing a project. The vision seemed inspiring, the challenge up to my skills and interests.
The project however didn’t turn out to be as interesting as I initially thought. I had to power through it, make the best out of it while waiting for the day for it to be over soon. I have promised, and I really didn’t want to disappoint my friend.
I’m definitely not the only one with the fear of letting your team members down or damaging a potential relationship. If I fail to achieve my own goal, at least I’m the only one bearing it. But if I let other people down… Some people shine in that kind of pressure and responsibility. Not me.
This episode made me wonder about the nuances of motivation at work, especially for those freelancers like me.
Ideally, no one wants to operate out of fear. I maybe afraid of letting my team mates down, but what really motivates me is how much I love working with them for the vision we both share. The unsettling reality is that many hidden fears still play a big part even among people who get along well, and part of the real Work is to uncover and embrace these fears.
Our motivation is rarely that black and white. What the romantic notion of “Do what you love, and no single day will feel like work” misses is that while it maybe the work we think we love, in the experience of working itself, fear and love are inextricably entangled. Each motivates in its own way, which is why it is even more important to notice the subtle differences.
Whenever fear drives me to do something, I’d complete it feeling relieved but somehow cut off. “That was good, thank you, but enough. No more”. In a sense, fear uses up the irrenewable energy reservoir in me.
On the contrary, whenever I’m naturally motivated to complete something out of love, I would feel exhausted but at the same time exhilarated. It is as if a refreshing wind just swept through my inner landscape, leaving behind a few budding flowers.
Doing work with love doesn’t mean it is always easy. In fact, often love requires us to do the even harder work, but at least when it is the main animating force, the work always carries an unmistakable sense of beauty and awe. That experience of beauty is why “love what you do” comes before “do what you love”. When it comes to work, the How is more important than the What.
Unfortunately, it is way too easy to forget this element of love in our work because of the social and cultural conditioning about hard work, from the Puritan work ethics to deep belief like “No pain no gain” or more recently the rise of “grit”. Just look at how many successful famous people attribute their success to such qualities. I see that in myself too through the pride and bravado I feel in pushing through the struggles.
While discipline and determination are important, it’s only one side of the holistic coin of work. I think it matters much more as we do our work to remember the greater Love behind what we do. Without it, no matter how much willpower we can muster, we will find ourselves unnecessarily doubting our work and eventually burn out.
Work as a living being
The experience of doubting the work that I am supposed to love made me wonder: There must be something beyond choosing the right work, such as one that fits with our skills, aspirations and preferred environment. Something that goes much deeper than what we think is our checklist for the ideal job.
What if our work is an living entity too, in the sense that it has its own unique liveliness that continues to evolve side by side with us?
In the not-so-distant Industrial age, humans are likened to machines performing functions, so our work is necessarily seen as liveless matter, readily trapped in measurement. But as humans are transitioning into a more biological and ecological worldview, work is not only something we do, but also a being we live with and care for.
What if we can really think about work like we are a loving parent caring unconditionally for a child? What if we do it not because he will eventually grow up to be successful and pay for your retirement home (think of Passive Income, or cash-cow business here) but rather because he is your lovely and messy child?
Lest you think that I’m the overly romantic “follow your bliss” when it comes to work, I’m not against having conditions and checklist. What I am saying though is that the unconditional element in our relationship with work has often been so neglected. “How does this pay the bill?” is a much more common question than “How do I love this work unconditionally, regardless of whatever it asks of me?”. Understandable, yet unfortunate still.
In school to training programs, we are often taught how to do things. It’s already a big step to ask the question “What kind of work will fit me?” rather than just do what we learn how to do. Good career books or a counselor should help with that.
Yet from my experiences, it’s even more important to ask a different question altogether. Instead of “what do I need in a job or career in order to be happy?” It is also “What am I giving to this work, and how can I do so in a way that will ennoble it and strengthen our relationship?”.
In a world where many people have ossified such a resentment against the idea of Work from their previous jobs, it’s worth wondering that maybe it’s not about what the work is itself but our relationship with it.
Love your work
I am reminded by the wish of a dear mentor before I entered college: “strive to love your work”.
Not strive to do well, but to love the work.
Moreover, it necessarily takes striving, because that work is not only a matter of entitlement as in “I’M SUPPOSED TO FIND WHAT I LOVE” but also of patient cultivation. “How can I learn to love what I am doing? How can I see the love, right here?” Yes, I am an entitled young Millennial who aspires to “find what you love” and “do work that matters”, and I’m also trying to discern the wisdom from the previous generations.
Both are right. When it comes to work, we do have a gift that is unique to ourselves in our particular contexts. Yet it takes effort to find and embody such gift. It even takes more effort to remember the unconditional love we have for our work instead of doing it out of fear or getting sucked into the macho culture of “work hard and you will succeed”.
Kahlil Gibran reminds us that it could be better.
“Work is love made visible. And if you can’t work with love, but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy”
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