What Does It Feel Like To Do What You Love?

Everyone tells you that if you do what you love then you’ll never feel like you’re working again in your life. This statement is more complex than surface value. For example: I enjoy photography, but will I love photography if I did it for a living? For one, do I plan to work for a company like a sports agency or do I want to freelance photography?

It takes a lot of hard work to be able to do photography for a living. I paid my photographer over $1,000 to shoot my wedding and photography was a side gig for him. Photography is expensive to do for a living. You can’t make a living by using a camera phone or a point-n-shoot. And it takes hard work to build enough consistent clients to make a living off of.

So that’s one aspect to do photography as a living, you can’t just enjoy taking photos, you also have to enjoy hard work. I love taking photos but I love taking photos of what I want when I want to. Doing that will barely allow me to make photography a side gig.

A lot of people like to write which is why Facebook and Twitter feeds are never empty, and why you receive more text messages and emails than calls. But only a few people are willing to write consistently to finish a novel or write and revise to publish to a blog. A lot of people like to write, but not a lot of people like to write more than what they feel like writing.

It sounds cool to write for a living. Get to wake up whenever you want and get to work without having to get dress and leave the house. But just loving to write isn’t going to get you there. You have to be willing to endure the grueling processes that are not so lovable.

It’s cool to think about being able to play video games for a living. But competitive gaming teams don’t have much of a social life. They spend at least 8 hours a day practicing. Yeah video games are fun but when you spend 8 hours a day on them then it becomes tiring like any other 9 to 5 job and you really start to treat it like a business than a down time activity.

I sometimes wish I could just be a rapper. They always look like they’re enjoying life and having fun. But most 9 to 5 careers last longer than rap careers and most people have more control of the success of their corporate career than rappers do with their rap career. Most corporate career success deals with the work you do, most rap career success depends on how people feel about you.

So I imagine that doing what you love has more to do with having a reason why you do what you do. Like Lebron James is the King of the court not just because he loves basketball but because he loves to win, he loves to be great. Same with athletes like Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant. Just loving that you play basketball for a living will probably make you work hard enough just to stay on the team. But loving to be the best of the best, to work hard, to have attention to detail so other aspects is what causes people to love doing what they do. Because job satisfaction is more than just doing something that interest you.