Now for an industrial, career-oriented session of…
SHUT THE HELL UP!!!
It’s a cute little bit of “advice” often given: find a career you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. It’s often told to young people to encourage them to choose enjoyable careers. And, like most things commonly told to youth, it’s utter bullcrap.
Doing something for money has a strange effect on you, no matter how much you might normally enjoy that something. It still becomes work. Your job could be testing water slides and shooting off fireworks and eating ice cream, but everyday you’d still be grudgingly getting up to go all like “ugh, another day, got to go down another damn water slide and shoot off another damn firework and if I see one more spoon of ice cream, I’ll puke”.
So it’s kind of bad advice to give people. It causes people to have a very low threshold for when a job is considered unenjoyable enough to leave it to find another in the hope that it will be more enjoyable, only to repeat the process when that one loses its appeal. Not to mention that even the most consistently enjoyable jobs will still hit some very stressful spots here and there.
The trouble is that, of course, not everything that you enjoy and/or are good at is really all that marketable. Or even if it is, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily in your own best interest to make a career of it. Just because someone enjoys cooking and is very good at it, doesn’t mean he should become a professional chef. Sometimes things are better off remaining a fun activity and kept outside of the career realm.
Yet this mindset is quite common. Leads people to look at anything they enjoy and start thinking “okay, how can I cash in off this?” And when all these extra and perhaps unrealistic expectations start getting placed on the things you enjoy in life, they become a burden.
So stop telling people they must choose a career that is something they love. It’s dumb and often not feasible. Instead, pick one you can tolerate and are reasonably good at, and leaves you free to do the things you actually love. Though you’ll still work, at least you’ll still have fun. If you never work a day in your life, you’ll never have fun either.
