Unproductive pleasures.

 Doing what you love is complicated. 

I wish I could say that I wrote the essays below - but alas, I did not. I found them online and pulled my favorite excerpts from them. They are both quite real and quite inspiring and gave me something to think about...so it goes...


>>"To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.

Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that.

By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the private jet pilot. But I don't think the bank manager really did.

...What a recipe for alienation. By the time they reach an age to think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world." Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.

It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren't identical.

The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit of so many years my idea of work still included a large component of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.

If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong.

...How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia.

Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.

But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.

I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems with procrastination. You'll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.

...To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool.

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know?

This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.

Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.

The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living.

...The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. It seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors and whose parents want them to be novelists. The kids think their parents are "materialistic." Not necessarily. All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences.

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it—finding work you love does usually require discipline. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they were on railroad tracks. But this seems the exception. More often people who do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A, drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after taking it up on the side.

It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."

There's another sense of "not everyone can do work they love" that's all too true, however. One has to make a living, and it's hard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes to that destination:

The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don't.


The two-job route: to work at things you don't like to get money to work on things you do.

Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.

A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way—including, unfortunately, not liking it.

Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.

Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically there.">>

View the whole essay here: How to do what you love

Okay - so then I found THIS essay... :)

In order to find your passion, we are told to ask ourselves: 

“What would you do if you had a million dollars (tax free)?”

The typical answer ensues: “Well gee, I would put it in an account that yields high interest and live off the interest each year. Then I would move to Hawaii, buy a house, sip margaritas all day, play video games, go to the beach, swim, travel around the world, taste all the cuisines, read the books, play the sports, and on and on and on.”

Does this really help? Not really. Sure, you figured out what your lazy butt likes to do, but it doesn’t really answer the question that’s hidden, which is “How do I make money doing what I love to do?

What's the result? People working in jobs they hate, feeling trapped because they can’t quit as they rely on that sole source of income to finance a lifestyle tailored to escape their grim reality, drifting aimlessly in life, in short, leading lives of quiet desperation, as so eloquently put by Henry David Thoreau.

Why don’t they just quit their jobs and pursue what they love to do you ask?

Two Reasons.

Reason #1: They don’t know what they love to do.

Reason #2: Fear. They’ve got a lifestyle to uphold, bills to pay for, families to take care of, fear of no steady source of income, fear of what other people might think or say about them, etc. Fear. Conquer indecision in Reason #1 and ACT, and you will most definitely conquer all fear in Reason #2.

The very fact that you are seeking to find what you love to do is a BIG step believe it or not. Many people in their lifetime avoid or do not even seek to find the answer to that question. They hear the question in their head but have become extremely adept at silencing it.

It is extremely important to answer the question on how to find what you love to do.

You must decide what destination to steer your life in. Otherwise, you leave yourself wide open for others to direct your life, as well as at the mercy of the winds and storms of life. If you know where your destination is, the rest is easy.

You will find once you know what you want to do, all uncertainty and burden will be lifted off your shoulders and you will have clear vision as to what your journey is and that journey will truly be joyful.

How do you know you've found what it is you love to do? 

Write it down.

Does it make you feel good? If you feel it in your gut that you’ve hit the jackpot, you’re right. If your friend were to bring up the idea you picked, would you be all over it talking about it? You have to have no reservations about it. If you feel the slightest doubt that it’s not your passion, then it’s not. You must hunger to overcome any obstacles to pursue your passion.

A reader of this article wrote this:

"So when you look over your goals, and one seems right, but you’re still finding excuses to not do what you have to do, that’s not it. It might be a close relative, but it’s not the one. Keep looking and you’ll find the goal that makes you counter every objection with a solution, the one where you’d happily pay whatever it takes, cash and years on the barrelhead right now. The path that makes you quiver with eagerness like a hunting dog on the point, the one over there you’ve been ignoring because you’ll have to learn a difficult new skill like drawing, or face big mistakes and big fears, and you didn’t believe you could do those things? That’s the one. Admit how much you really want to go down it, tell yourself you really can do it, and then your passion will take over and you will not let anything keep you from it. "

Once you have that, your search is over. That, right there is what you love to do.

As for how to make money off of it, you might have already found ways when you wrote down your answers. If you still want to find more ways to make money doing what you love, just follow the same steps.

Step 1: Know you will find the answer.

Step 2: Write a clear question, write down the answers, and you will be amazed at the many ways you can make money from it.

I’ll leave the money making question up to you, but it shouldn’t be hard to do.

Now that you know what you love to do and how to make money from it, you must ACT.

That’s a whole other story. Most people get to this stage but don’t act and it doesn’t make any difference in their lives.

People think you have to travel around the world, experience new things, etc. to find what you love to do. No. You just have to sit down and decide. The answer is already within you. You just have to dig it up and avoid procrastinating. Your brain has absorbed all sorts of information and experiences and it has the answer ready to be unraveled.

Just let it out.

Be honest. Have you actually sat down by yourself with no distractions, with your sole focus on asking yourself what you love to do without picking up your cell phone, surfing the net, watching TV, chatting on AIM, listening to your favorite song, playing solitaire or minesweeper, checking your email, returning a call, getting a drink of water, going to the bathroom, looking at the clock, reading a magazine article, I could go on and on but you get the point. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you haven’t for the sole purpose of you reading this article. Why is that?

Fear of what the answer will be if you ask yourself what you love to do.

The answer is: I don’t know.

But that is exactly why you MUST find out. You’re avoiding the question because you know the answer is you don’t know, but that’s ok. Admitting you don’t know is perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. You’re way ahead of a ton of other people who learn to quiet the voice within that asks the question of “What do I love to do?”

And let’s say you’re one of the few people who actually specifically know what they love to do. The next thought that pops in their head is “Oh, I can’t make any money off of that.” The seed that was planted never grew.

I hate vague answers. I want clear, logical, definitive answers to questions.

So let’s do this.

Step 1: You WILL find the answer. No doubt.

You will find the answer. You will find it. No doubt.

Approach the question with this mentality and you are sure to find it. How long will it take? It doesn’t matter. Bottom line, you will find the answer.

By doing this, you automatically instill an anti quitting mechanism within yourself, because you know you will find the answer. If you know what you want to do, then you will do it.

For example, if you know you want to arrive in New York, you’ll find ways to get there. You’ll hop a train, bus, or plane going to New York and will arrive in New York.

If you don’t have the cash, you’ll borrow it, or get a job and save up, or get a job as a flight attendant to get there for free. It doesn’t matter how long it will take or what you need to do because you know you’re going to New York.

All your actions onward from the decision that you want to arrive in New York will revolve around getting to New York.

Read that last sentence again.

All your actions onward from the decision that you want to arrive in New York will revolve around getting to New York.

Finding what you love to do = Deciding to arrive in New York.

So, my friends, I leave you with these thoughts...

Not to discourage you, or leave you gasping for air at the very thought that you are stuck in a dead end job you don't thoroughly enjoy and have NO LIFE. 

WAY off! that's not the point at all. The point is we have probably all thought about things like this before at one time or another. And that's probably as far as it has gotten. I am guilty of this...big time. So, maybe it's not about always having a plan in place, but in staying true to yourself along the way. 

I think it's a good thing to work several jobs when you're young. Acquire skills, meet people, learn discipline, and feel proud of your accomplishments as big or little as they may be.

But eventually one day you'll wake up and realize life is short.

Too short, in fact, to not be doing what we love. This should not be mistaken for loving what we do. If you're doing what you need to do to stay afloat right now, then why not enjoy it until you're able to move on to bigger and better things? It sure beats watching the clock all day longing for 5 o'clock! 

Little things that help...listen to music. It keeps it real. Sometimes all we have are words - and those words are connected to us, our life, what we have done, and what we want to do. So, put on some tunes, sing along, pause and listen once in a while. 

Get up and walk around. Go outside and get a breath of fresh air - not only in the literal sense, but just getting away from where you do your work 8+ hours a day and changing the scenery for just a moment is a good thing. It'll give you a little boost to finish the day, and enable you to remember that there's more to that day of yours. There's something to look forward to. 

Put pictures up of your family/friends/pets. A little glimpse of life outside of work keeps it in perspective and keeps you in check. If again, you are doing what you need to do to stay afloat right now, at least make sure you know why it is you're doing it - and that it's worth it. Heck, if you're doing it to purchase that new 4-wheeler, put a picture of that bad boy up to motivate you! 

Get to know your coworkers. It doesn't mean you have to get together when the work day is done, but really, you see these people maybe more then you seen anybody else. It'd make it better to like each other, right?  Even just a little. And well, if you can't like em' figure out a way to amuse yourself by pretending you do. Ask questions, be appropriately nosy. And at least maybe they'll ask you questions back - so you get to talk about yourself for a little while, which may make you remember that you're a pretty cool person. Win, Win! 

If you work at a computer change your desktop background to something that makes you smile. Here's mine...

Hubs surveying in Kotzebue, photo taken by Ryan Sorensen.

This is the first thing I see when I turn my computer on, and the last thing I see when I leave work. Not only is it a reminder that I have an awesome hubby so right off the bat I'm thankful, but I also know that he is working hard just like I need to.

Am I currently working a job to pay the bills? Yes. Is this the career I always dreamed about and want to retire doing? No. 

Do I have an idea of what I'd love to do? Yes. Do I know how to go about doing it? Not really. At least I've gotten that far! ha! 

Maybe a lot of us are at this phase of our lives. The "growing up isn't easy, but I gotta work to pay the bills" phase. Maybe a lot of us don't want to budge from this place. That's okay too. However, I at least challenge you to write it down, like the article said, and see what lands on that paper. Maybe it will be a motivator to, in your own words, write down and actually see, what it is you love to do, why you love to do it, and how you can incorporate that into your life more than it is now (maybe? yeah?) And i'm not just talking about unproductive pleasures...the things you like to do when you're not working. I'm talking about what you want to do with your life. I always like asking people, no matter their age, what they want to do when they grow up. It's inspiring to hear the answer of a youngin' aiming REAL high, and also an elder talking about all these things they've still to do while 'they can.'

I admire those who at least tried, or are trying to do what they love... Made a go at it. 

Even if they failed or it didn't work out as they originally planned...they stayed true to themselves. 

I think that beats wondering. Wondering can be a suction (aka it can suck!)

You may not be in the same boat as me, but either way, I think it's a good read - and gives us something to think about.

Phew! that was a long one! =) 

Happy Thirsty Thursday!

Cheers!