Paul Graham on Doing What You Love

I have always envied in a way the folks that can get up and do jobs that are uninspiring simply because they get paid. I tried that route a couple of times and it kills me inside. How nice to meet an accountant from a car dealership who tells me he doesn't think about or even like his job, but he makes mid 6 figures and has a huge retirement and two homes... sheesh. I am sure he has his challenges and such, but at the same time much more security than us in the freelance/entrepreneur world.

I love what I do. I have never done something just for the money. It has to be something I am passionate about. Read this very good essay for Paul's take.

How to Do What You Love: "To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: 'Do what you love.' But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated."

Oh, and are you shooting things you love today? Next week? This is a constant problem for many creatives and I believe it is one of the ways that creatives get burned out. They stop 'producing' for themselves, or for the love of the creation. If it doesn't pay, it doesn't get done. Wrong thinking on so many levels.

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.

"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.