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.
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