You’ve heard it before: “do what you love”. Steve Jobs told Stanford graduates that “the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” I’ve always been passionate about finding what I loved, having first heard the mantra from my grandpa. On that journey I’ve quit jobs, ended relationships, and sold enough of my belongings that what remained fit in the back of my car.
Important as it may be, I’ve found that finding what you love is more problematic than it sounds. As with dating, there are lots of signals that can be interpreted as love and not all of them are real. For example, I love triathlons; am I supposed to love work like I love triathlons? Expecting to feel runners’ high 40 hours a week seems excessive. There has to be some reasonable timeframe implied when asking, “What do I love to do?” And then there are the temptations of prestige, exhilarating risk, and wealth. Many careers are a path to all three, but are these things the root of passion for your work? Hardly. Even benefiting society can be an imperfect indicator of fulfillment. Sewage engineers, for example, help millions of people, but I don’t see them giving commencement addresses at Stanford.
As is often the case, it’s insightful to turn this problem on its head. Rather than ask, “What do I love to do?” ask, “What is it like when I don’t love what I do?” For most people this is easy. For me, I feel under-engaged, uncreative, and unfulfilled. Basically, I don’t like who I am when I’m not doing something I love, and there’s the key: “who I am”. It turns out that it’s not that finding what you love is hard, it’s that “What do I love to do?” is the wrong question. “Who do I want to become?” and it’s corresponding axiom, “Become what you love” are much more useful.
Seeking to become rather than to do leads to an entirely different set of goals, habits, and values. In our cocktail party culture, the question “So, what do you do?” is really a proxy for “Who are you?” since we so closely associate personal attributes with professional pursuits. Truly happy people have narrowed the gap between who they are and what they do, and they view these two questions interchangeably. They must, in order to set free their full creative capacity.
The question “Who do I want to become?” is remarkably simple to answer for most people: a creator, a healer, a leader. Many titles would fit under any given answer to the Become question, but the values that you surround yourself with in pursuit of becoming, say, a healer are identical for most people: compassion, understanding, service. Setting free the qualities that you feel lurking within yourself is what brings fulfillment – not titles or job descriptions. Once brought to the surface, your most desired attributes work in overdrive since they are so closely aligned with the person you want to become. It’s a creative and productive force that can be felt behind some of the world’s most accomplished, magnetic, and happy people. You can bet that these people have repeatedly made bold decisions to follow their own voice rather than accepted definitions of success.
And that’s the trick. Become what you love.
Interesting, this post is actually try to answer a comment I just made. To find out ‘who I am’ is not easy. Yes, you can try to turn the question and ask yourself ‘what i don’t love to do’, but the time spent to find out the answer may be too long.
Take myself as an example. I went to college at 15 (earlier than most kids in my country) and I was studying applied mechanics in college, after 4 years (19) I went to graduate school and my research shifted to materials engineering, and then to computational sciences and engineering. I found out all those thing are not what I love to do, but I still don’t know what I am passionate about. Then I got admitted to MIT (age 24), which make me be able to be exposed to even more interesting subjects such as web technology, consulting, medical sciences and informatics, robots technology, startups and entrepreneurship. All looks interesting, but you can not try them all.
Now what I know is that I am here to learn.
hope to read more from your blog
I think everyone struggles with this question. Strangely enough, the best way to answer it is to start with a hypothesis and refine based on the results. It’s like an experiment. Based on what you’ve done in the past, and what you know about yourself, and what those who know you best tell you that you would be good at, you try working in a particular field. And you’ll learn from that, but it probably won’t be your ultimate passion. MIT is a fantastic place to be. However, the best thing it may give you is freedom to move laterally several times as you try out different industries. If you talk to very successful people, you’ll find that they did a lot of things before they found what they were passionate about. Give it time, but don’t settle for something you don’t love. Life is just too short.