On Doing What you Like at Work

I see many young men dreaming on loving what they do at work, regardless to other job properties. I disagree with the position. There are many more to consider: environment, people, remuneration, growth and career opportunities. The point is to prioritize the job qualities to ensure own growth. Considering you are young (up to 30), you need to prioritize in the following way

  1. Remuneration must be enough to sustain your living: rent, food, clothes. (Do not expect to have much in the beginning. You would be lucky to have enough)
  2. Growth and career opportunities (must be. If you do not rapidly grow at your first employment, you get stack as a junior forever. There should be expertise and a career opportunities)
  3. Environment and people (Good environment and nice people around will help you to develop yourself faster in a better way.)
  4. Loving what you do (is a top of the priorities pyramid. Is a luxury available to a few.)

It does not matter whether you love or not what you do. Unless it impacts your efficiency (if it does, you have a lot to work on). You must perform in the best way in any assignment regardless to your attention to it. The are cases when people are lucky enough to love the outcome of their job. It is a rare coincidence. But there is another side of the coin too.

If you invest all your commitment into your assignment, you have no choice,but to love the result. Even if you didn’t like the assignment at start. sometimes is hard to love job in the process, but the results are always paying off. Aim for the result. The result will pay off your emotional investment. Nevertheless, any skill developed in the process of doing something non-exciting will pay off some day. And you have a chance to fall in love in something new in the process.

Developing emotional immunity to seemingly boring tasks is rare, but some people have the skill. It makes individual flexible enough to handle tasks of large complexity. It also removes emotional distractions from the task, boosting one’s performance. You really forget what the procrastination is. Once I found myself procrastinating which made me realize I didn’t  do that for a hell lot of time lately. Figuring this out was quite motivational.

Ideally, individual should not rate tasks by ‘likeness’ scale. Rating as a process takes time whoch distracts a person from following schedules and deadlines. Forcing oneself to do you what you dislike is step 1 towards enlightenment. Step 2 is having no tasks you dislike or loving each task you do.