Don’t do what you love, but love what you do
To all my fellow millennials out there, here’s a guide to love any jobs you do
I don’t know about you, but I absolutely hate it when I ask for career advice and all people tell me is to “Do what you love.” I mean, if you really think about it, it’s such an irresponsible advice because essentially you’re painting this vague image of “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life” — another phrase I hate by the way — the concept is an illusion and most people don’t have the luxury to do what they love; most of the time, their hobby isn’t a profitable passion, and they have checks to make on time, rent that will not pay itself, and children that need to be fed.
“Do What You Love” has been widely and almost excessively used by mainstream media in the past 10 years. You’d see motivational speakers advocating it in their speeches, commencement speakers preaching about it during graduation season, photos with #DoWhatYouLove floating all over Instagram, and pretty much plastered on the walls of every WeWork office.
Job Hopping is the New Bar Hopping?
With the concept deeply embedded in our minds, we now have pools of millennials that are pigeonholed into finding the so-called dream job. It’s especially obvious looking at the turnover rate nowadays, people switch from one job to another like they’re swiping left and right on Tinder, without any hesitation. According to Gallup Polls, “21% of millennials say they’ve changed jobs within the past year, which is nearly three times higher than generations outside of the demographic.”
In all honesty, I believe everyone should explore their passions and go after their dreams and pursue happiness. However, not everyone gets to do what they love while making a living in reality. Even if you think you’ve found your dream job, chances are, when doing what you love turns into your job, you just might not love it as much anymore. I wonder does anyone ever thought about advocating the opposite of “Do what you love?” — telling people to “Love what you do?”
I consider myself fairy lucky when it comes to jobs and careers. For the most part over the past 6 years, I get to do what I love while making a living at it and I absolutely love what I do. (With a few occasional millennial burnouts and moments that I’d happily murder my boss, JUST KIDDING, this line was only added in for entertainment purposes)
Still, that doesn’t mean I’m not consciously aware of the fact that I would rather be binge watching my favorite show on Netflix at home while sipping on coconut water than frying my brain out over a project proposal or making a deadline.
I realized even with what it seems like a smooth career path for me, doesn’t mean it has always been rainbows and ponies. Instead of fixated on finding the balance between doing what I love and making a decent living, I try to focus on how to love what I do. You don’t have to love everything about it, after all love is complicated and we’re only humans. Over the years I’ve discovered a few tips from personal experiences that helped me to embrace and love what I do, whether it’s my true calling or not.
#1. Find Your Motivation
Ask yourself how does your job motivate you or what part of it motivates you — whether it be the connection, the people, the challenge, the fulfillment, the money, or the new knowledge you obtain from this job. Find your drive, set your goal and work towards it, no matter how big or small it is.
I got my first paid-job when I was 17, 4 months before high school graduation working at a Korean-owned stationery shop just right down the street from my high school selling Hello Kitty pens and stuffed animals. I generally worked 2~3 hours after school when I didn’t have sports practice and sometimes on the weekends if my boss needed extra help. On the weekdays, I’d walk over after my last class, take over the cashier seat, put on a smile and greet every customer that walks in. It was an easy job, almost too easy to a point that I got bored of it after one month because sometimes there wouldn’t even be a single customer walking it.
But I knew I wouldn’t quit, because it was the time when iPhone 3 and iPod touch 3rd generation had just came out, and I was still using my Motorola RAZR V3m Pink Verizon flip phone and a hot pink iPod nano.
As silly as it may sound, getting a new iPod touch so I can play Tap Tap Revenge was the biggest driver for me to ditch the after school hangouts with my squad and work at a store full of Hello Kitty willingly.
In the summer of 2010, I graduated from high school and left the job with $800 USD and got myself an iPod touch.
#2. Find Your Joy
No matter how dreadful the job is, try to find one thing that sparks your soul and grab onto that. If the job is not fun, make it fun!
My first unofficial official job, as I’d like to call it, because it’s actually my first “Big girl” job after I graduated from college even though it only lasted one month. Yes you read that right, one month. I graduated college half a year early and decided to move back home to the Bay Area. I was so desperate in getting a job right away since it wasn’t hiring season and took the first offer I got. Long story short, I was somehow tricked into accepting this underpaid, zero benefit, door-to-door sales job.
Here’s an overview of what a typical schedule looks like to give you an idea how the job is like:
7:45 am: Arrive at office, pitch practice with other consultants
8:00 am: Team bonding, usually end up with playing charades with the team because the game “helps with the body language”
8:15 am: One-on-one session with mentor — basically learning about how to sell and approach client
9:00 am: Team chant (literally like the scene from The Wolf of Wall Street movie) & drive out to “territory” (a zip code that’s assigned to you)
9:30 pm: Start pitching to businesses about our service (door-to-door, face-to-face, on foot, all by yourself). On average I talk to 60–80 people per day
1:00 pm: Break! Find somewhere to sit down & eat my sandwich
2:00 pm: Talk to more people
4:45 pm: Drive back to office to turn in sales sheet
5:30 pm: Back to the office and do closing- stand in circle and there are 3 bells from big to small in the middle of the circle, if you profited more than $100 in sales that day, you get to ring the smallest bell and high five everyone around the circle. $200 medium bell, over $300, big bell
6:00 pm: Leave office and go home
Two days into work, I already wanted to quit, but I signed a one month contract when I first got hired so I knew I was stuck for at least 30 days (another trick they pulled!). The first week was unimaginably painful, every minute felt like a decade, I’d go home and complain to my mom how sore my legs are, how I got rejected in the face, and how hard it is to find cheap parking in San Francisco — where my main territory was at.
Starting second week, I decided to treat every day like a field trip, an exploration of the city. I’d go on Yelp and bookmark all the restaurants, taco spots, cafes I want to try that are nearby my territory, and pin them on my Google map so I can visit these places one by one during lunch hours.Work then became so much more interesting. Walking up and down the hills of SF suddenly became enjoyable. For the last 2 weeks, I had something to look forward to at work everyday and it was exciting.
Nevertheless, it was still a shitty job. Do I regret that experience? No. Would I do it again? No. I immediately left after the 30th day mark.
#3. Find Your Interest
Don’t blindly follow your passion or what you think your passion is, find your interests first and foster your passion.
So now let’s talk about my first official job on record. I worked for an advertising agency for two years. It was quite a challenge for a fresh college graduate who came from political science background and had no clue what she was doing. I learned about foreign policies and presidential campaigns at school, not alcohol regulations and marketing campaigns.
I’ve also heard advertising agency can get crazy with work hours but didn’t expect it’d be that crazy. Getting off at 8pm is considered a good day, working past midnight during pitch/campaign period is normal, canceling dates with friends last minute is nothing surprising.
Even with all the downsides, I loved working at the ad agency. There was NEVER a day when I thought to myself, “Ugh I really don’t want to go to work today.” I think the reason is that as a project coordinator, you get to work with different clients, vendors, internal support teams on various projects. I was constantly being thrown into unexpected situations, both good and bad, overwhelmed with information and emotions. I began to see a clearer picture of what my work interests are. I came into the job thinking I like marketing, and came out of the job confirming that it’s exactly where my interest lies and it’s something I’d like to pursue long term.
#4. Find Meaning in Your Work
I find that asking questions such as “how does my work impact others” helps with creating a sense of purpose thus motivates you to thrive at what you do.
I decided to work as a part-time Mandarin teacher at a local Chinese school in Irvine, California teaching kids ranging from 3–12 years old in my junior year at college. I taught there for an entire year and it was not only mentally but also physically challenging. Mentally being the pressure you get from hopeful parents who constantly check on their child’s progress. Physically being having to deal with kids that are somehow all equipped with 100 AAA batteries that never run out of energy.
I had a cracked voice pretty much throughout the year especially during summer camp. THERE WERE A LOT OF CHILDREN, like 100 of them. Even with a mic on at all times but I still lost my voice the second week into the camp. Not to mention every teacher’s most nerve-wrecking moment — parent teacher conference.
Despite the mental and physical toll, watching my 4-year-olds finally managed to finish the entire Chinese alphabet song without skipping a letter, the 5-year-olds wrote down their first Chinese character without messing up the stroke orders, and the 6-year-olds successfully carried out a full Chinese conversation with me, man it was the best feeling ever. To this day, being a teacher is still by far the best and meaningful job I’ve ever done.
In My (and Steve Jobs’s) Humble Opinion
“…When you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.” — Steve Jobs
As Jobs said, “the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
At the end of the day, you can’t always do what you love but you can always try to love what you do. So LOVE IT, embrace the ups and downs, the good and bad, the glory and the ugly, love the people, the challenge, the stress and the accomplishment that come with it, love every aspect of your work and love it so much until one day it would only take less than a heart beat to say — Yes I am doing what I love and I fucking love what I do.
