“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”– Steve Jobs
Everybody loves a good success story. An investment banker who threw in the towel to become a yoga guru or a cheese farmer. Then there are the proverbial rags to riches tales. We lap it all up. The bottom line being: Find your passion and do what you love (DWYL). Success, and presumably happiness and money, will follow.
If the mantra were that simple, then how come I look around me and see a lot of unhappy people, hunched over their laptops, taking quick breaks only to grumble about what they do?
Writer and art history scholar Miya Tokumitsu, in Jacobin magazine, says, “DWYL is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love. If profit doesn't happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker's passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.”
Ouch! Although I must confess that I felt a certain sense of relief as I read that - it confirmed a niggling suspicion I’d secretly harboured but balked at voicing.
This DWYL business isn’t all it is cracked up to be. Dare I venture that it is a somewhat romanticized notion of our working world - a fallacy of sorts and a present-day “emperor’s new clothes”syndrome?
The truth is that a large majority of our jobs have no relevance in a DWYL universe simply because they are done, as Tokumitsu puts it, “out of motives or needs other than love”. There are bills to pay and mouths to feed. Or as some of us like to call it: “middle-class reality”.
Term it cynicism or pessimism, but “the idea that everyone gets to choose what they do only applies to the wealthy,” writes The Guardian columnist Heather Long. By all means, follow your passion. However, practically speaking, ensure you have a safety net or some sort of financial backup. It is hard to find something that you love doing that also pays the bills. No disrespect to Jobs and his profound wisdom but one tends to notice he glazed over the part about the labour of unseen thousands around the world – labour that “allowed Jobs to actualize his love,” says Tokumitsu.
So it appears this whole DWYL theory is a gigantic dark cloud. Depressing thought, isn’t it? Well, not entirely. There’s a beautiful silver lining to it. Perhaps it would be more practical to train yourself to Love What You Do? Love what you do. If you like what you do, it’s not a bad place to be, no?
If you choose to stay in your imperfect job, then you can make it happier for yourself by choosing to focus on the positives – a fun work culture? Flexible work hours or locations? Nice colleagues? A lot of my co-workers list “free food and drink” as a positive (so does my dog, but let me not digress). It can be that simple.
Or work it the other way. Choose work as an enabler of DWYL – for instance, a job that entails foreign travel if you want to see the world (at someone else’s expense) or a job with a food magazine if you’re passionate about food.
If you choose to go looking for a better job, then taking pride in your current job is most likely going to make you a better candidate and increase your chances of landing that “better job”.
Let’s face it. Generally speaking, life rarely places us in perfect situations. I often think of my life as a television-worthy sitcom. Learning to enjoy the good, whatever little there might be, in our situation is vital.
As for me? I’ve come around to liking what I do, warts and all. There’s a purpose to it. I’m doing what I do because it affords me the life that I love.