You’ve heard it before, the beloved aphorism from the ever-intriguing Confucius;
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
I’ve also heard it attributed to Albert Einstein, but the internet tells me that Confucius coined it, so we’ll go with that. Regardless, you’ve probably seen it in the form of a meme, pinned a thousand times on Pinterest, shared on Facebook, tweeted on twitter, etc…
^stuff like this^
I understand why the quote is so popular. There is something inspiring, something hopeful about it. It is just poetic enough to sound reasonable, just vague enough to withstand any serious scrutiny.
The only problem, of course, is that it is almost entirely false.
If the phrase was not so oft-quoted, if I did not think it influenced people’s decisions, I wouldn’t be writing this post. But from where I stand, this Confucian concept is ubiquitous in today’s culture. And it’s a problem.
Case in point: a recent study from Brookings found that 64% of Millennials would rather make $40,000 a year at a job they love than $100,000 at a job they found boring. Now, it isn’t the response that worries me. I would take a lower paying job that I loved over a high-paying boring job any day.
The problem is that this job, the one you love, probably doesn’t exist. And if you make it your primary goal to find a job that you love, you will be unemployed for a very long time.
Before everyone freaks out, lets make a distinction; loving your job is not the same as loving its end. Just because you are passionate about your children’s well-being doesn’t mean you love changing their diapers. And yet, most people would agree that a clean diaper is essential to a child’s well-being. No parent who loves his child allows him to stew in his own feces for too long. And any parent who says he loves wiping poop out of all the crevices of his squirmy, crying infant at 4 in the morning is a liar.
Here’s the thing: All of these “passions” (or vocations, or loves, or whatever you’d like to call them) involve metaphorical diaper changing—actions that we don’t love doing in and of themselves but are willing to do for the sake of something we do love. In fact, many of them involve doing things we hate—things we wouldn’t do but for the sake of the thing we love. Some are less challenging than others, some involve less fecal matter than others, but they all require the doing of boring, mundane, frustrating, tedious tasks. All of them require sacrifice.
Cooking requires chopping, and measuring, and waiting for the stove to heat up, and standing around, and sweating in a hot kitchen. To be great at cooking requires research, persistence, trial and error, failure. A devoted chef will accept failure as a stepping stone on his path to success, but he doesn’t love it in and of itself. If he did, he would be just as content to continue failing as he is to succeed. He loves producing delicious food and is willing to chop onions, sweat, try and fail in order to do so.
Which brings me to my next point: Not only do all of the things we love require the doing of work we don’t love, the things we love often require more work than things we don’t.
When you are passionate about something, you hold yourself to a higher standard than if you simply like it. If you like writing then you will write, and as long as what you write generally communicates what you intend to say, you will be content. If you love writing, you will strive to perfect what you write, to say what you mean to say in the best possible way. Striving for perfection requires more work than settling for mediocrity. As such, if you are passionate about something you will likely do far more work for its cause than if you aren’t.
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life?
I doubt it.
Find something that you truly love, and you will likely work for it relentlessly.
Now the obvious response to my claims is that I am incorrectly interpreting the aphorism—that Confucius did not mean that a life spent in pursuit of one’s passion is a life without work. Rather, he meant that when you are passionate about something, the work you do for it feels less like work. The quote ought to be interpreted as such: “If you find a pursuit for which you are truly passionate, you won’t ever feel like you’re working even when you are working.”
To which I respectfully respond, “bull.”
^She probably doesn’t even feel it.^
Yes, being passionate about something may motivate you to complete the work it requires, but the work required remains. Yes, your love for something may make the work it requires more rewarding, but the work required remains. And if you asked people who pursued their passions, I’d be willing to bet they’d say that, a lot of the time, the work still felt like work. Maybe not all the time—but a lot of the time.
This is my main issue with the proverb in question: it is a misleading measure of one’s love for something. However interpreted, it suggests that if you have found a pursuit for which you are passionate, you won’t really feel like you’re working as you pursue it.
It follows from this that if you feel like you’re working, then you haven’t found your passion.
Can you think of anything more destructive to the achievement of one’s goals than to be convinced that it shouldn’t require work that feels like work?
I thought that writing was my passion but, based on how work-like it feels, I guess I was wrong. I guess I should try something new—and then abandon it when it starts to feel too much like work, of course.
Imagine if we applied this reasoning to, say, anything else.
“Marry a person you love, and you won’t fight a day in your life. And even if you do fight, the fighting won’t feel like fighting.”
I hate to break it to you, kids. From what I’m told, if you fall in love and get married, you will fight with your spouse from time to time, and the fighting will make you feel exactly as crappy as fighting usually does. To stick it out and work through your marital troubles is well worth your time, but the fighting still feels like fighting.
The same is true of all passions, all loves.
And that’s okay.
Because you do not measure your love for something by how easy it is for you to accomplish it, or how easy it feels to work for it.
Your passion is not that for which you do not have to work, or that for which the work doesn’t feel like work, but that for which you are willing to work—even when the work is grueling.
Tweets by @baleighscotttt
This is what my parents have been telling me about my career all this while , this post of yours helped me understand them. thanks 🙂
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To work is to conform to society’s law. Work is Love and Hate.
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Hu
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Or maybe you have different priorities. There is a saying, “If you love what you do, it isn’t work.”
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Reblogged this on Arwa.
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Reblogged this on The Guard and commented:
Too many times has this crossed my mind as I completed something that I love. Work is inevitable, especially when you are passionate. My friends will agree.
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Wow! I can’t agree more with you. When I came across this quote for the first time, I understood the quote as, “if you get to work for something you really love, you won’t feel that you are ‘working’, it would be more like playing with what you really enjoy doing”
You have so beautifully articulated your thoughts. I can say that I agree with everything in it, and I agree with every concept that I could interpret between those lines.
You’ve a new follower!
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Great post!
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Reblogged this on JNY's Link.
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Reblogged this on JNY's Link.
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Reblogged this on My Crazy High School Life and commented:
Totally changed my thoughts on the quote…
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Did you take that ballet feet photo from somewhere? I follow a professional ballet dancer’s blog.. looks familiar.
Anyway, part of loving a job/career is something where you are often learning something new or your skills are challenged so that you don’t become stale. Yes, true it requires eating humble pie and hard work.
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Reblogged this on coffeestainedcigarettes.
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Excellent! I think we also are socially conditioned to regard work as serious and ‘not fun’, as opposed to your passions
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Passion for a subject/career path is rare but very rewarding.
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Reblogged this on chasingspotlight and commented:
LOL @fecal matter…jst saw someone post dat some days ago on fb..for a moment i agreed..but this is the reality!! really appreciate ds.
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Reblogged this on lynrobia.
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Reblogged this on theemployeecentre and commented:
I recently wrote about trying to find your niche in life so that you can be happy, such as working on a lifetime goal changing careers etc. I turkey believe that you can love the job your in. However we all face trials and tribulations at some point because it’s work, heck – that’s LIFE! This blog visits this topic adding a little more reality to the mix. Hope you enjoy reading as much as I did 🙂
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good analysis….I have similar thoughts on the love your work concept
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thoughtful
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Reblogged this on bilastudio0.
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this is a good piece! 🙂
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I love this. It goes to show why I often get bored and lose interest in jobs after a year and move onto another. My ideals and desires are set too high. I am yet to find something I love again. Even if I dont love it completely, I will be able to say that I do without hesitation.
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Such a nice article
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A very good article! Can you like my blog? Thanks! 😀
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I enjoy work more than I enjoy those who create it. Hashtag disenfranchised.
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Reblogged this on grnwntr.
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Wow …amazing describe and explain …
am lovin’ it 🙂
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Reblogged this on Daily Bible Quotations.
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Great point! I completely agree. 🙂
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Make a productive life everyday.
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Lets make it happen.
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Fantastic post. Though I am new at WordPress it’s posts like these that inspire me to write more. I hope you can take some time and go through my blog. It’s new but your critique can help me hone my art too. 🙂
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I like. Very hot and well written.
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Hey, i just started blogging and its based on personal development, check out my new post “Confidence”
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As I transition into my “adult job”, I constantly question if I had chosen the right career path. Reading this reassured me that I am in the right profession. Thanks!
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I don’t think the issue is as black and white. What seems more likely is a job in which you feel a range of emotions related to the work itself. You might hate parts, feel ambivalent about other parts, and absolutely love some aspects.
“Loving your job is not the same as loving its end”
A recent popular book called “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman explores this idea of happiness in more detail. He states that there’s 2 types of happiness: experienced happiness, and remembered happiness. The former covers how happy you are in the very moment (the work itself), and the latter covers how happy you are with the memory of the work. In your view, we usually dislike every experienced moment of working, right up until the task is done, in which our memory of it may be positive. But again, I think the truth is actually somewhere in-between – that we experience a range of emotions in relation to the experience itself, and perhaps to a lesser degree, the end result.
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