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Some people say that it’s okay to have a job you don’t love. Your job’s purpose is to pay your bills, right? So why talk about this woo woo “do what you’re passionate about” theory?
Let’s take a step back and look at it from a 10.000 feet perspective: Why are you here? What is the purpose of your life?
If you answered these questions with “Guess there is not much meaning to it. You know, just do what everybody else does and you’re fine”, or with a blank stare, that’s to be expected.
And here’s some truth: There is no big built-in purpose in life. The good news is, YOU get to decide what your purpose is, meaning what you’ll do to make your life worthwhile.
Now how does this relate to doing work you love?
Why should you choose a job you love?
Let’s say you start working when you’re 20 and retire when you’re 70. That’ll be fifty solid years of working. If you say, have 80 years to live on this planet, that’s about 80% of your adult life. Your work takes up the majority of your life’s time. This makes it an incredibly important part of your life.
I don’t know about you, but spending the majority of my life doing something that I don’t really care about freaks me out.
Do you really want to look back on your life one day and say: “Oh yeah, I spent most of my life sitting at a desk wondering how I was going to survive another day of boredom. The rest of the time I didn’t have enough energy to do something fun or meaningful because work was so damn exhausting.
This. Is. the WORST case scenario.
Why some people manage to do a job they love
How come some people are able to do work that matters and that is meaningful to them? I am convinced that every one who does work they love had to take risks at one point. Maybe some people are born into a family business they naturally love, but most people graduated high school without a clue of who they are and what they want. Or, let’s say, a first draft version of themselves.
To do work you really care about, you have to believe that you deserve to give that a try. You have to believe that you have got some potential that is worth cultivating. And you will definitely have to do things that feel risky and maybe even nonsensical at times.
If you want to do work you love the first step is this: Believe it can be done.
How do you do this?
Look for people who are doing what you want to be doing. Look for people who are leading their lives with passion and intention.
So rule #1 to find and do work you love is:
Surround yourself with people who love their jobs
If all your friends and co-workers are stuck in jobs they hate, guess what: You are going to have a hard time believing that it’s possible to do work you love when everyone around you shows you the opposite.
Peer pressure doesn’t stop in high school. While we’re most susceptible to it when we’re younger, adults are still impacted by what their peers think is cool, normal, and bad.
Even massive life decisions like whether to get married and have children are influenced by what the people around us are doing: Studies have found that if your friends recently got married or had kids, you are more likely to do the same. 1 2
Luckily, you can use this effect to your advantage as well. If the people around us influence our life decisions so much, that means surrounding yourself with people who have achieved a goal that matters to you (like finding a meaningful job) can help make it more attainable for you.
You don’t necessarily need to fire all your loved ones, but you do need to go out and search for people who inspire you. If you can’t find them in real life, teach your social media algorithms that this is a topic you care about, and start consuming content that aligns with the life you’re trying to create. Is it the same as real human connection? No. But it does shape what we consider to be normal or possible too.
Start inching closer toward work you love
Once you understand that it’s not crazy and indeed quite possible to get paid to do work you love, it’s time to take some action:
Do something that you previously thought was impossible. It doesn’t matter whether it’s big or small. It just needs to stretch your mind a little. It might be something as small as starting a new tiny habit.
When you change your definition of what’s possible in one area of your life, that’s going to change what you think is possible in general. If you can make smoothies in the morning, maybe you can also cook quick weeknight dinners.
A lot of big life changes years down the line starts with small habit changes today.
Get really curious about yourself
You can’t do work you love if you have no clue what you are passionate about. Self-knowledge matters here. If you are in your 30’s or older, you probably have a solid foundation of self-knowledge. Even still, it doesn’t hurt to get very interested in who you are, what you care about, and what you are good at.
And guess what, nobody can know these things about you – except for you. So you have got to do some digging to find out what lights you on fire. Take this seriously: If you don’t know what you want at all, it’s going to be hard to make it a reality.
Ask terribly cheesy self-help questions
I know these questions sound terribly cheesy, but they did help me find my career path in my twenties. I journaled a lot on this, and it eventually led to me becoming a psychologist. Which was definitely not the job I had in mind when I graduated high school – because I didn’t even know what psychologists did!
But through self-inquiry and trial and error, I figured out that my strenghts, my interests, and how I like to spend my days work out well with being a psychologist with a private practice.
Here are some of the questions I asked myself when I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up:
- What do you love so much that you would pay to do it every single day?
- What are you really good at?
- What do other people ask you for advice on?
- What makes you come alive?
Yup, nothing fancy. But these questions do let you go deep if you want to.
Why our world needs YOU to do work you love
When I was on my “everybody should do work they love” soap box around 2012 (when the first version of this article was published), I did come across a quote that I still love to do this day.
It reminds me that doing work you love isn’t a selfish luxury, but a worthwhile pursuit. I know life doesn’t always give us a ton of privilege and lovely circumstances to make shaping our future easy – but I think it’s worth aiming for the stars with this one.
Here we go, this is the last cheesy thing I’ll leave you with today:
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Howard Thurman
- This study found that people are more likely to get married or have kids if their peers/friends do so first: Nicoletta Balbo & Nicola Barban & Melinda Mills, 2013. “Friend and peer effects on entry into marriage and parenthood: A multiprocess approach,” Working Papers 056, “Carlo F. Dondena” Centre for Research on Social Dynamics (DONDENA), Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi.
↩︎ - This qualitative study showed that even big choices like having children are influenced by our social network: Khadivzadeh T, Latifnejad Roudsari R, Bahrami M, Taghipour A, Abbasi Shavazi J. The influence of social network on couples’ intention to have the first child. Iran J Reprod Med. 2013 Mar;11(3):209-18. PMID: 24639748; PMCID: PMC3943220. ↩︎