Your Terms: Do Work You Love By GSK Filmmaker

 You are alive for an average of 674,968 hours.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to do some math here. Let’s say that you’re thirty years

old. That means that you’ve already lived 262,974 hours.

By the end of this blog post you will have 411,993 hours left until you’re

dead.

On average, you will spend a third of your life sleeping. If you are thirty now, you

will only have 274,662 hours left to be awake and alive and living.

I assume that you’ll also be pooping and showering and things of that nature, so

for the sake of argument, let’s just round this number down to an even 250,000

hours of good life.

From now until the end of your existence, you have 250,000 waking hours. I

know this doesn’t sound like we have a shortage in time, but just think

that you’ve already spent more hours on this earth than you have left to

really live.

You will spend most of this time working or doing something related to work.

Whether it’s doing work, talking about work, traveling for work, thinking about

work, commuting for work, buying clothes for work, buying supplies for work,

planning for work, etc.

If you had to spend the majority of the rest of your waking hours doing one thing,

would it be something you absolutely hate to do?

Question withdrawn. Don’t answer that.

Why in the world would you not make the effort to spend the majority of the rest

of your life doing something you love?

By the way, you are now at least 30 seconds more dead than you were before you

got here. Time’s-a-tickin’.

Why is so it important?

It’s a Matter of Life or DeathWhen you graduate college, or high school, or graduate school, looking for a job

is not just one of your choices, it’s mandatory.

Not finding a job after college is a social and physical death sentence. How will

you eat? How will you pay back those student loans. What will everyone think?

Creating a job for yourself isn’t even given any thought because it’s

literallyunthinkable. That is because the risk is believed to be too great.

Working for a large company means security, safety, and a lifelong guarantee of

health benefits for yourself and your family.

Working for a large company used to mean that, yes. I think that, to our parents,

that may have been a reality. Today, for us, it’s naive and dangerous to think

that finding a job in a corporation will keep us safe.

That means that everyone who sacrificed their dreams and passions to secure a

job in a corporation in hopes of locking down lifetime security are just living on

borrowed time.

They’re skating on thin ice covered by two feet of beautiful white snow. They

can’t tell that just under their feet is a platform made up of just one quarter of an

inch of ice and, underneath that, miles of freezing water. That platform can crack

at any moment. They probably will never see it coming.

You will never see it coming.

And when you find yourself treading water and freezing to death you won’t be

able to figure out what to do next because your entire life was tied up in a cause

that abandoned you. The life you built doesn’t exist anymore and you have to

start from square one.

This is why doing work that you love is so important. Because even if you

decide to take the chance and walk on thin ice, when it breaks you will know

what to do because you’ve identified what drove you to walk on that ice in the

first place. It wasn’t security. It wasn’t safety. It was passion.

You knew it wasn’t secure and it wasn’t safe. so you tied yourself to a rock on the

surface just in case your investment fell through. If it does, you can use that rope

to get back to the surface and use another medium to fulfill your passion.

It is possible to find a job that you can deal with for the majority of your life and

not suffer any major trauma. It’s also possible to find a job that you love and you

stick with for your whole life because all of your passion is wrapped up in your

daily work.

The point is to do it by choice. I’m not saying that in order to do work you love

you have to work for yourself. I’m saying that you have to be fully aware that no

matter where you work, you’re not safe. So you might as well find something

that you love early rather than later. This way your path is always clear, and

when the ice breaks, you won’t drown.

Winners and Losers in the Game of Life

Remember that horrible feeling of waking up to a screaming alarm telling you to

get your butt out of bed so that you can get to work or school on time? Do you

remember that amazing feeling of realizing that it was Saturday? You told that

alarm where it could put its whining and went straight back to bed.

On average, you experience more of the first feeling than the second feeling.

Which is why the second feeling is so incredibly awesome.

What if you could have the second feeling more than the first feeling? Then the

first feeling wouldn’t be so bad because it would be so rare.

It’s possible you know. I do it every day.

Every day I wake up with more energy than I ever did when I had to do work that

I didn’t love. I’m happier, my relationships are healthier, I’m healthier, my overall

quality of life is better.

I have less to complain about. I have more love for life than I ever thought

possible.

It’s important because living is more than just being alive.

The people who succeed at being more than just ‘alive’ are the people who’ve

found a deeply rooted passion or love for something. No, not someone.

Something. The someone plays a different role.

They are the people who have found something that drives them so hard that

they can and will endure months or even years of uncertainty, loneliness, and

financial scares.

They never give up. They may slow down, but they never stop. These are the

people who are really alive. They aren’t coasting through life or waiting to be

called for a job interview. They are actively creating their own future.

Maybe they are working as a file organizer for the assistant of the President of a

company that they are in love with and want to be a part of. Maybe they do that

for years and slowly move up to fill roles they are passionate about.

Maybe they are working as unknown writers and artists and mathematicians in

their bedrooms, putting their name out as much as possible and creating a

community of other writers and artists and mathematicians in order to create a

movement.

Maybe they are bloggers trying to start a revolution in the world.

It doesn’t matter who they are and what they do. You know them when you hear

them talk about their work.

If you’re not one of them, you know them because inside you envy them for that

extra energy and life in their eyes that you don’t have.

If you’re not one of them, you know them because they make the world a more

colorful place full of human beings that have come alive in ways that just being

conscious could ever be mistaken for.

If you’re not one of them, you know them because they inspire you, or they

inspire people that you know.

If you’re not one of them, you may wonder why it’s such a big deal and how work

can be anything more than a way to put food on the table.It’s a big deal, because

the difference between someone who is doing work that they love, and

someone who is doing work they hate, is the difference between someone

who is in a coma, and someone who is walking along the Great Wall of

China.

If you are one of them, you know why doing work that you love is so important.

You know, because if it was taken away from you, you’d only be half alive.

Whether you are one of them or not, you know them because they are the one’s

winning at life.

That’s why it’s so important. Because it’s the difference between coming in

second or third, or winning at life.

If it’s so great, then why isn’t everyone doing it?

ConditioningWe’ve been separating work and play since we were children. The stuff that you

‘had’ to do, the stuff that you never wanted to do was work, and the stuff that you

wanted to do was playing or ‘free time’.

This is why subjects such as Art, Theater, and Music aren’t considered ‘real’

majors. No one goes to college to major in 15th Century French Poetry because of

all of the wonderful job opportunities.

They did it because they loved it.

PosturingEveryone around us pretended like they loved their job.

We get lectures in 2nd grade from parents about what they do at their job and

how awesome it is.

When was the last time you heard of a parent walking into a grade school class

and looking all of the wide-eyed children in the face and saying “Work will suck

your soul dry and leave you cynical, clinically depressed, and forever in denial

about your condition. But don’t let that get you down! It must be done so get to

it!”

Confusion

The intersection of the above two points led people to believe that if you are

having fun, you aren’t working.

Boss sees you laughing? You must be watching distasteful comics.

You walk around smiling? You’re getting it on with a co-worker in the conference

room.

You come to work early? You’ve got your eye on a promotion and a raise.

You do more than required? You’re sucking up.

None of these behaviors are attributed to work, but they are what I do every day.

Why is it that work, by definition, has to be unpleasant?

When I tell people that I love what I do, they can’t seem to fathom that I spend all

of my time doing something that I like. They wait anxiously for me to tell them

about some part of the job that sucks; sometimes by pushing and prodding and

asking leading questions to get me to fess-up and tell the truth about all of the

horrible things that Imust have to do.

Only when I confirm that there are periods of unpleasantness do they calm down.

They sigh in relief and think ‘everyone has to suffer for work.’ What they refuse to

think (what they blank out) is that they don’t want it to be possible. They don’t

want to find out that it’s possible to do work that you love, because then it means

that they’ve wasted their whole life.

This worries me.

I’m worried about my fellow humans.

I’m worried that they think that work is something that they have to do and not

something that they want to do.

I’m worried that when they find something they only kind of dislike they think

they’ve hit the jackpot.

I’m worried that most people will spend the majority of their entire life doing

something they hate.

This worries me because the longer it goes on, the harder it’s going to be for me

to convince people that work is not something you do out of necessity, it’s

something you do because you need to do productive work as a human to have

self esteem.

You do it because you want to live, and idleness is the opposite of life.

You do it because producing makes you proud to be you.

You continue to get better at it because it gives you a sense of efficacy and self-

worth.

You try harder every day because it makes you happy to leave behind a legacy

worth working for.

You push through the hard days because you know that, in the end, you will have

created something to be admired. Admired by you and by others.

PrestigeGaining prestige is exactly like doing something out of character to gain

popularity in high school. It’s dangerous to your health – both physically and

mentally – it’s artificial, it doesn’t last, and it’s detrimental to your self-esteem.

When you seek to gain prestige, you are looking to gain admiration from society,

which has inflated the importance of specific titles or types of work.

I’m not saying that these professions aren’t important. I’m asking why you think

that becoming a doctor is more important than becoming a dog trainer?

Most people would automatically say that the doctor is more important without

even thinking about what kind of doctor they are, or asking if they are even a

good doctor.

My point is that doing something just because you want others to look up to you,

and not because you like it, is a surefire way to end up an insecure and unhappy

human being.

Don’t become a doctor if you hate medicine.

Don’t become a lawyer if you hate to read.

Don’t become an engineer if you hate math.

Don’t become a novelist if you’re not interested in telling stories.

If your goal is to become prestigious, then you need to live your own personal

legend. You don’t need to fight for a title, award, or recognition from people

you’ve never met, whose lives are insignificant to you and who don’t really care

about you anyway.

MoneyDon’t get me wrong. I do not think that money is the root of all evil.

I think that money is the root of all good when its earned honestly by doing good

work that you love which just ends up contributing to the overall well being of

the universe. I think that people who do great work should be so rich that they

could never spend all of their money no matter how hard they tried.

On the other hand, people who will do anything for money are on a path to self-

destruction.

Money does not bring happiness. Financial security doesn’t bring happiness

either. That doesn’t stop people from using it as the ultimate solution to life and

all of it’s problems. Tweet This

The importance given to money is so great that even loved ones will encourage

you to do something you don’t really like so that you can have a financially secure

future. This is supposed to translate into ‘safe’ but it doesn’t. It translates into

‘late onset reality check.‘

How to Find it

Ok so that’s all great but how do you find this elusive ‘work you love’?

How to find work you loveThe first thing I tell people when they ask this question is to look at the verb in

the sentence ‘how to find work you love.’

In case you’re rusty on your grammar, the verb is ‘find’ and it’s a verb for a

reason.

It requires action.

You literally have to go out and find it. You have to actively look for it like you

would look for a lost dog.

Start by asking yourself these questions:

What comes easily to you? What are things that you do that you don’t have to

force yourself to do? Don’t limit yourself to things that you think ‘make sense’

for work. If you like getting shitfaced drunk, then write it. I’m not making any

promises about the business opportunities in shitfaced drunkenness, but I’m

not writing it off either.

What are you good at? What have people told you that you’re good at? What

comes effortlessly to you?

What do you read about? Whether it be books, magazines, the internet,

sidewalk chalk? What topics do you find fascinating? Are there times when

you can’t flick past the History Channel? Does Shark Week on the Discovery

Channel make you go all warm and fuzzy inside? Write it all down.

What pisses you off? What topic could I bring up that would get your panties

in a ruffle? Is it abortion? Is it government, taxes, beached whales, peeing in

swimming pools, people talking on the phone in libraries?

What is a major problem in today’s world that, if solved, would make you

happier than the Cookie Monster at the arrival of Girls Scouts at his door?

Maybe it’s homelessness, hunger, lack of drinking water, or the fact that there

aren’t enough people in the USA that know how to parallel park.

Look around your house. Tell me the one thing that you would consider

murdering me for if I took it away from you. Is it your MacBook? Maybe it’s

your 1980′s overalls or your collection of exercise pole dancing videos.

After you are done fleshing out the answers to these questions (and don’t forget

not to hold back!) sift through your answers and see if you find any potential

business ideas or already existing jobs.

Try combining them. For example, say that you really love the Apple brand,

you’re pissed that they don’t have a 17″ MacBook Air, and you’re a bad ass

programmer. Sounds like a job opportunity there. That’s obvious of course but

you get the point.

You might not find anything. You may have to just start trying things.

For example, if you really love fashion, but you know you’re not cut out to be a

model, then try designing clothes, even if you think you have no skill at it at all.

Maybe all it takes is a few months of drawing lessons on YouTube to bring out

your inner designer. You may not know that you love it until you really try it.

Answer the questions I listed out a second time. Once you start to broaden your

knowledge of what is possible in the world and what you know, the answers

above will change. They won’t remain the same. This is an iterative process. It

goes something like this:

1. Answer questions.

2. Pick something and pursue it will all of your heart and soul.

3. Test the waters. How do you feel about it? Lukewarm? Drop it or, if it’s

making money already somehow, keep doing it on the side.

4. Look at your answers to the questions. Has anything changed?

5. If not, pick something else and repeat 1-3.

6. Once you find something you love, see if it’s a viable business. It could be

something you can start yourself, or perhaps it’s a job that already exists.

7. If it’s not, think about what you can modify/change/remove so that you can

monetize it. If it’s impossible to monetize, and you’ve really given it your all,

start the process over again.