The other day, I was telling a friend of mine that I haven’t had much of a break lately and she said “at least you are doing what you love which means it’s not really work”. I thought about it for a second and wrote back “it’s the hardest I’ve ever worked”.
Many of us have heard and probably even repeated the famous Confucius quote about choosing a job you love that goes like this:
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
But that’s not true. I would argue that the more you love what you’re doing, the harder you work at it. Doing what you love gives you a sense of meaning and purpose in your life and you will work harder than ever to achieve your dreams, realize your potential and enjoy the benefits that come from doing something you love to do.
When you are in a job or doing something that you don’t love, we don’t have motivation or desire to work very hard because there is no passion for what we are doing.
I’d like to amend that quote to be more accurate so it instead becomes:
Choose a job you love and you will work harder at it than you ever thought possible.
Looking back, I always thought that it would be easy once I found something I loved to do because I could relax and not work as hard. But I want to work hard – I want to create more opportunities for myself so I can continue to do what I love more and for longer.
What is my passion? Frisbee – teaching, competing, performing and inspiring. I’m currently working on setting up school visits all over North America so if you would like me to come into your school and speak to the students about bullying, finding a passion, being different, working hard and then teaching them how to play frisbee, check out my School Assemblies page.
So if you are telling people that you are doing something you love but you’re not working very hard at it, you need to ask yourself two questions.
- Do you really love what you are doing? and
- If you really love what you are doing, why aren’t you working hard at it?