The Dangers of Loving What you Do

“I don’t need to love my job.”?

I remember saying this to a friend in 2016 as I was thinking about the next steps in my career. While I’d been fed plenty of motivational advice to “find your passion,” I looked around at my peers and realized that I didn’t know anyone who loved their jobs. That didn’t mean everyone was miserable; there were plenty of people who liked their jobs, who found their work interesting, who enjoyed their colleagues… but at the end of the day, it was still “a job.”?

And this realization actually brought me some relief. Finding a job I would love felt insurmountable, possibly out of my control…but finding a job I liked? That sounded like something within my reach.??

The dangers of “do what you love…”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the expectation of “find work that you love” hurts individuals and companies. This article from HBR titled When Passion Leads to Burnout frames it well:

When we equate work we love with “not really working,” it propagates a belief that if we love it so much, we should do more of it — all of the time, actually. Who needs a day off when you’re not really working?! There’s a whole cottage industry committed to proliferating this mindset — from books, to talks, and even kitsch stores selling piles of “Work is Bliss” quotes on merchandise. This type of mentality leads to burnout, and the consequences can be both dire and hard to detect.?

When you love what you do, “it gets harder to create healthy boundaries and detach yourself from your work,” as Chantelle shared on twitter. Without strong boundaries, we work beyond our point of productivity, we say ‘yes’ to things that may not be a good use of our time or resources, and the quality of our work suffers because we are not setting ourselves up to do our best work. Not to mention the impact on other priorities in our life – not giving enough attention to important relationships, putting off essential “adult” tasks, being left with no time or energy left to find joy outside of our work.?

Loving what you do can also impact how we define ourselves and our worth. When you are passionate about your work and things are going well, it’s easy to feel great about yourself, but when something goes wrong (a bad decision, a mistake, layoffs) it can be a much bigger hit to your self-esteem. Putting so much weight and value on our work is often detrimental to our mental health.?

And when you don’t love what you do (most of us, I’m betting), the expectation around finding your dream job can also set you up for disappointment.?

I recently caught up with an old boss and was sharing my motivations behind Firefly Advising – that I was frustrated that so many people were unhappy in their jobs.??

His diagnosis: “People were lied to.”?

We, especially millennials and younger generations, have been told we can find our passion through our jobs. But, my ex-boss argues, “That simply is not true;” and I have a tendency to believe him.

Yes, I’m sure there are exceptions to this statement. I spend a lot of time watching comedy specials, going to stand-up shows, listening to comedy podcasts… and you could convince me that many of these comedians do, in fact, love what they do. (Now is when I pause and reflect on whether I should have pursued my “dream job” of being a talk show host…)?

But for those of us spending most of our days in meetings, on email, and in Google Docs… “loving” our jobs is likely out of reach.?

Thinking you should love what you do sets us up with unrealistic expectations that makes it difficult to be fulfilled in a good job. Again, I’m not saying you shouldn’t like your job – you should. We spend so much of our lives working that you deserve to get more out of it than a paycheck (though I fully support people who get enough satisfaction from their paycheck!). However, every job will have things that annoy you, every job has tradeoffs, every job is… in fact… a job (and that should be ok, as Joel Lalgee points out). Where we get into trouble is when we think “the job I can love must be out there…” it’s the “grass is always greener” of the working world.?

There are plenty of good reasons to leave a job, and I’m happy for people who’ve found work that is a better fit for them during this period of Great Resignation. But, I also know that there are many people out there who have found themselves 3-6 months into a new job that hasn’t lived up to their high expectations… they don’t love it, they still get annoyed, they still have some tasks or projects that are boring.

This creates a feeling of failure – like they didn't do the job search right or didn't ask good enough questions or didn't look for the right roles – which in turn makes the work less desirable, more frustrating, and increasingly unfulfilling. Especially if they haven't yet realized... the problem likely isn't the way they approached the job search or the questions they asked (though you can be "better" at those things), the problem is that work is still work. The problem is... we were lied to.

So what do we do about it?

That’s the topic of my next post (this feels like enough to marinate on for now). But the answer starts with reframing our relationship with work. Subscribe to this newsletter to get alerted about my future posts, and if you want to chat about how you can find better work-life satisfaction, grab some time on my calendar here.?