The Difference Between Doing What You Love And Loving What You Do

Not following your “passion” — not turning it into your career — is not the end of the world. It’s not the end of your potential for happiness and it doesn’t mean you’ve failed.

There seems to be this great, modern schism: follow your passion or follow the logic that tells you making your love of post-modernist literature into a career is probably going to be fruitless. Indeed — because there are many passions that can’t, and won’t, become careers. There often has to be a difference between what we love and what pays the electric bill.

This should not — and does not — affect whether or not you can be happy.

There’s a difference between doing what you love and loving what you do. Doing what you love is taking a passion you have — maybe your only passion, maybe not — and making it lucrative. Selling your paintings, signing a book deal, performing for profit. Some people call this selling out. It’s not. It’s just one of the means to an end. But loving what you do involves taking something else — plucking from the proverbial sea of somethings that you already enjoy doing — working hard on it, creating a professional pathway, seeing it to a lucrative end and being happy because your love for it grows. This is the kind of career that will grow with you.

To many people’s surprise, I’m not someone who does what they love, I just love what I do. I never wanted to be a writer, as I very often mention. I did not work to create a writing career, but writing was something I enjoyed, among many other things I enjoy; but it became something that is lucrative and fun, and as the weeks and months (and now at this point, years) go on, I find that my love for it grows, but doesn’t consume me in the way some of my other passions that I didn’t end up pursuing would have. (My list of “Things I’m Most Grateful For” is essentially made up of things that didn’t work out, for what it’s worth).

But if you would have asked me five years ago if I’d like to be doing this — the answer would be no. Ask me today, and I’d tell you I couldn’t imagine anything else.

As anybody can tell you — in fact, as I have already — pursuing what you’re passionate about isn’t always the best idea. It takes the thing you most love and makes it just that — work. And not just the kind of work where you put in effort, but the kind of work you find yourself slogging through. It becomes a job. A chore. You become consumed by it because you feel you have a responsibility to be the biggest and best; a natural, ego-driven response to pursuing the thing you most love. But it’s not healthy. And often, it’s not realistic.

There is a middle ground. There comes a point where each one of us has to decide whether or not we realistically have the talent, ability and — most importantly — heart and commitment to pursue a one-in-a-million type of career.

Whether we do or whether we don’t, we have to let go of the idea that we can only be happy when we get to “do what we love” for a living — and start simply loving what we do, whatever it is, and seeing where it takes us. Everyone can be doing something they love for a living. It’s not about what you do, it’s about how you do it. This isn’t about foregoing dreams, this is about allowing yourself to find happiness in whatever your circumstances may be, and on whatever path you choose to changing them.

Some people realize this sooner than others, and those who do end up more successful than not. Steve Jobs didn’t start Apple because he was following his passion, he was just good at programming, and as he did it more and more, he found that his love for it grew as his talent and company did.

When you can stay balanced because you have interests outside of your work space, you aren’t devastated by criticism, don’t find yourself destroyed by a setback, and aren’t emotionally invested to an unhealthy degree, you’ll realize that such can never really be the case when you’re trying to make marketable something that inherently isn’t, or won’t be.

You’ll realize that fame, fortune, attention, whatever it is that comes with wild success for doing what you love, will not make you happier. The only happiness is in the doing.