Don't do what you love
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“I hate writing, I love having written.” ― Dorothy Parker
Among the bits of career advice that has always bothered me is the old saying “do what you love and the money will follow.” You’ve heard that before, right, |NAME|?
It’s well meaning but misguided. Most of us can cite plenty of things we love doing that have zero marketability.
In the business of creativity, you’re not paid for your passion or love of something: you’re paid for your mastery of it. The distinction here is that love and passion, while important, are how you feel about a subject.
Mastery is how you take those feelings and turn them into knowledge and action.
To be clear, your comprehensive knowledge of a subject, whether it’s writing or fundraising, accounting or lab sciences―any profession, really―is not proven by the hours you put into it. If it were, we’d all be masters at something eventually.
Sure, time does shape and sharpen your skills, but what it really reveals (if you let it) is something even more important. Putting in the hours towards mastery teaches you what you truly value in the exercise of your skills. You learn how to do the work in a way that’s consistent with those beliefs.
In other words: you learn where you give a damn and why. But only if you choose to.
Achieving this is what powers people to do their best work. Not just writers or people in the arts: anyone.
It gives us what Tom and David Kelley of Stanford’s ** Design School (http://dschool.stanford.edu) call creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out. It also gives us what creative master Luke Sullivan calls the cultivated ability of infinite resignation. “Resignation doesn’t mean resigning,” he explains. “It means accepting. It’s about finding a way to be in the fight, but not of the fight.”
For many of us, getting to that point is not easy.
It means having to persevere beyond the forces that tend to hold us back. Call it resistance or just procrastination, there’s usually 101 reasons telling us why we shouldn’t dare try anything, let alone something new, even if we’re passionate about it.
That’s why I included the quote from Dorothy Parker at the top of this message.
I’m with Team Parker.
Even as someone who writes for a living, writing comes out of me slowly and often painfully. I learned to be okay with that, but only after I understood that what I really enjoy is the process that makes ** good writing (http://thinkitcreative.com/blog/great-writing-never-goes-out-of-style/) possible. I’m a problem solver. I like to do research. I engage what maverick physicist Richard Feynman once called the pleasure of finding things out.
I enjoy finding new ways to snap together things that at first glance might not seem to destined to connect to each other.
And I like to find ways to express that thinking with the fewest words possible.
Those are the areas I work hard to master.
How about you? What parts of your work do you strive to achieve mastery?
Remember, |NAME|: Don’t do what you love. Do what you give a damn about.
Very best, Patrick
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