I Love What I Do. It Still Feels Like Work

Love what you do and you'll never work a day in your life."

It sounds nice as an inspirational postcard, but it can actually lead to very toxic thoughts.

Loving your long game can really help you overcome short-term frustration. It can get you to "try just one more time" where otherwise you would give up.

Nevertheless, if you put too much stock into "loving what you do", you might feel guilty every time something feels like work. After all, if you truly loved what you did, it wouldn't feel like work, right. Since what you are pushing through does feel like work, maybe you don't love it enough?

This line of thinking can give you a major guilt trip and amplify your imposter syndrome. At least it did for me whenever I was dealing with something that just needed a lot of plodding through. Whenever things felt "too sluggish", I thought that I just did not want them or love them enough.

I felt bad about that because I felt like the projects I was involved with deserved a lot of love.

The truth is that you will never love everything you do. Even when you have the best job in the world, keeping things running will still involve some things you don't like quite as much as the rest. Even when you are really into music, sports, or any other thing, practice can feel tedious and uncomfortable.

Perhaps you won't hate them, but they might still feel like work in the same way that running a marathon always feels physically painful even when you are in peak form.

Yes, you can love the journey, but that won't change the fact that you are walking a thousand miles. Your feet will still get blistered sometimes. Perhaps, it gets really cold some nights and on some days, water leaks into your shoes and you have wet feet.

You don't have to love your wet and cold feet to love the overall journey.

You can be passionately connected to the long game and still be frustrated with what it entails in the short run right here and right now.

Loving what you do doesn't make things magically not feel like work anymore.

In a way, it's a bit like having children. You love them, but that doesn't mean you love everything you have to do for them. But you do it. Because the results you get from the discomfort are worth it.