Have you ever heard the phrase: if you love what you do, then it’s not work?
Well, I think it’s crap.
Let’s take my writing as an example – both fiction and non-fiction. I struggle through the first draft of whatever I’m working on, resist doing the necessary edits/rewrites then (for the fiction) agonize over the getting published part. That doesn’t mean that I don’t love it, however. After all, I gave up everything in my old life to write.
In fact, I’m insanely happy writing and wouldn’t give it up for the world. Yet it’s damn hard work.
Every single moment of it.
Now let’s look at Someday Syndrome. I’m in the process of building up my reputation before launching my mentoring services. I’m doing a whole bunch of marketing-related activities that take a lot of time.
Some of it I enjoy more than other parts, but it’s all work. I’ve learned how to cut out the stuff I hate doing, but even the stuff I really like doing is work.
I supposed it depends on one’s definition of work, but to me anything that you wouldn’t do if retired is work. And in my case that includes everything related to Someday Syndrome.
And a lot of times, the work is difficult, challenging and frustrating. Yet in the end, it’s all been and continues to be extremely rewarding, so I keep at it and celebrate the success my work brings.
But try to tell me that what I do isn’t work or that if I find it’s hard work then I’m doing something wrong and I’m going to strongly disagree with you.
Now your turn – I specifically want to hear from people who believe that passion-filled work isn’t work. Help me see your point of view. Why isn’t it work?
19 Responses to “Are You Working Hard or Hardly Working?”
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Please join in the conversation and leave a comment - I’d love to hear from you!
I think that anyone who devotes honest effort and focus to their creative projects understands that anything worthwhile involves risk and serious work.
Work is defined as “activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.” It’s pretty hard to say that writing doesn’t involve mental effort that is done for a purpose/result. Whether it’s earning you an income or not, it’s work.
I have to push myself every morning to sit down at the computer and open one of my stories instead of opening my e-mail. The writing, the editing, the endless pondering…sometimes it’s an enormous strain, but underneath it all, it’s incredible.
Zoe´s last blog post..Creating Time to Create
Also a writer. I wouldn’t say I put in mental effort in the sense that Zoe says. Effort implies strain, and there’s no strain at all for me.
I actually agree with you. It’s still work and it’s still valid. I encounter a lot of people who ask what I do, and I say I’m a writer. Sometimes they say “Yes, but what do you REALLY do?” as though you can’t actually be a writer for a living.
It just doesn’t feel like work. When I think of work I think of doing something I’d rather avoid. That’s work to me.
Joely Black (@TheCharmQuark on Twitter)´s last blog post..How much can you really know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?
Without getting into too much detail, basically:
Work = force X distance
So, if you’re exerting some kind of force by doing something, and something is moving ahead (maybe even metaphorically, rather than a real physical object), then you’re doing work.
So even if you love what you’re doing, it is still work.
(It might not feel like it is - but it is.)
It stands to reason that if you’re doing something and nothing is moving ahead, then you’re just messing around and you should try something else…
Brett Legree´s last blog post..fail to succeed - report card, week 4.
@ Brett - The physics explanation works even better than the word-definition of “work”!
Zoe´s last blog post..Creating Time to Create
I love horses. Horses love to eat. Horses eat a lot of hay.
Hay only grows in the summer and must be cut, baled and loaded into the barn in a few short days before it rains.
10 fingers covered in blisters from loading 1800 70-pound bales into the barn in one weekend.
Definitely work - and work worth doing.
I’m actually trying to cultivate the mindset that writing and work is about flow. If I’m struggling to enjoy it then I’m resisting in some way. For me it’s about letting go of this resistance.
I do this by noticing my reactions and not letting any one emotion take over - ie frustration. It’s hard, but it’s really helped me enjoy my work.
I still struggle through procrastination, fear and other problems. The most encouraging part is that each day adds to my skills and I can turn a bad mood into a happy mood much faster, which helps me accomplish great work.
Karl Staib - Work Happy Now´s last blog post..Creating A Project Ritual to Encourage Happiness
I think the saying reflects a shift from the industrial age to the information age. Knowledge work changes the game.
I could say a lot on this, but I’ll say a little for now:
* The biggest factor is the metaphor you use for your work: art, craft, comedy, tradegy, game, slogging, grindstone, flailing. This is your lens for making meaning.
* Another key factor is flow. Flow is one of the keys to happiness. Flow is where your response equals the challenge and you’re fully engaged.
* A big factor is the arena you play in. Your container either accelerates or limits you.
* Growth doesn’t always feel great. Resistance makes you stronger, but it’s painful at the time.
* Playing to your strengths is huge. You might be using your skills, but not your innate strengths. You might not even know it. One person’s work, is another’s play.
* Principal of contrast helps. Depending on what you compare your work too, it can certainly feel like play. Whenever I lose my reference point, I just remember carrying 100 lb. bags of cement.
* Spend 75% of your time on your strengths and 25% of your time on your weaknesses. I have yet to meet anybody that knew to design their schedule like this. It’s a night and day difference.
Personally, I’m a fan of work hard, play hard. I enjoy my work when I challenge myself. I find that I play better after I work hard, and I work better after I play hard.
At the end of the day, I think the mindset makes the biggest difference. I remember doing running drills and hating them. I remember one of the team captains smiling and running backwards. It was play for him, work for me. At some point, I decided to just make it play, and started running in the lead. The mindset came first. This reminds me of the Last Lecture where he says decide if you’re an Eeyore or a Tigger.
J.D. Meier´s last blog post..Lessons Learned from the Dip
@Zoe
Good for you for starting off writing instead of email. I did that for the first week of NaNo, then dropped it. I find I’m too fuzzy in the morning and need to wake up before writing, but then by the time I’m awake a million other distractions lure me away from the novel.
In January I’m changing up my teaching-English hours, so I might just get back to morning writing.
@Joely
Yes, for a lot of people work is that definition, but I actually like work (must be my Protestant Work Ethic upbringing) as long as I can see results. It’s when results don’t happen or happen very slowly that I start to resist.
@Brett
Great description of work. Physics does a lot to explain mental stuff too.
@Jacki
And then there’s the cleaning out the stalls. Last spring I cleaned out a winter’s worth of packed donkey manure from a barn. Killer on the arms and lower back, but wow, did the place look good when we were done!
@Karl
Flow, yes. That’s what I’m missing right now. Thanks for that. I’m going to have to think about how to get flow back into my writing. It’s present in almost everything else I do, just not the writing. Must go think about that…
To quote Charlie Gilkey who wrote it earlier today:
“you get to do what you love - but in doing that, there’ll be a lot of things you’ll have to do, i.e. taxes and such. But they’re worth it if it helps you do what you get to do.”
But the stuff that you love, the stuff that you’re passionate about, if that feels like you’re having to make an effort then I’d say there’s something not quite right.
I think it is possible to get into a state of flow with something you don’t love, and it still makes it seem like a lot less effort.
So, the point that I seem to be trying to make is that it’s about your perception of the effort involved.
The physics equation tells you the actual amount of work, but the issue (to me) is more around whether or not it feels like hard work or easy work (which we are told is not really work at all, but play).
If you perceive the amount of effort (force) you put in to be disproportionate to the amount of result (distance) you get out, then it feels like hard work.
Back to thinking about doing the thing you love:
If doing the thing we love feels like we’re putting in a lot of effort to get not very far, then perhaps our expectations are skew. Or we need to look at how we’re applying our effort (ever tried pushing open a pull door?)
There may be the non-fun stuff you have to do too (e.g. taxes) but the bit that you identify with, the stuff that you connect to, if that’s hard work (and that’s a personal, subjective assessment) then that’s not wrong (because it’s how you feel, no-one can tell you what you should feel) but it may be possible to adjust slightly and get the results you want with a whole lot less pain.
James | Dancing Geek´s last blog post..Day 2: Already getting bored!
I have to agree with the author of this post. Just because you love an activity, doesn’t mean that it isn’t hard and sometimes painful to accomplish greatness in that activity. I’ve experienced this both as a writer and a musician.
I love music and writing (maybe I love music a little bit more), but both are essentially what I’d choose to be doing if I wasn’t sleeping or goofing around with my husband. Music has been an extreme struggle throughout my life, and I would say that I’m pretty talented to begin with. Even the most talented person has to focus and practice and suffer to achieve musically (except maybe Mozart).
The same is true of writing. Yes, I love to write - and not fiction either. I’m enamored with educational pieces. Articles that teach people how to do something, or tell them how they can do something better. I love organizing the headings, the subheds, the paragraphs and each point down to the last shred of information. I love tinkering with the flow and editing the copy down to the most polished version. Unfortunately, as a writer, that’s about 10% of what I do.
I spend the other 90% of the time hunting down people to interview, researching the topic, gathering the facts and assisting my editors with the artwork collection. Similarly, when it comes to music, I love the exhilarating and electrifying moment on stage at Severance Hall when Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem reaches its glorious climax and 200 musicians are coming together to weave a beautiful tapestry of sound. What I don’t love is the three months of rehearsals leading up to it and the dress rehearsals where the conductor spends forty minutes on two notes in the strings.
Even when we are doing what we love the most in this world, I think it often ends up only being the culmination of a lot of unrelated work, or the initiation of a lot of other work (in the case of writing fiction and editing) that is less enjoyable, and makes what we love into work.
Ok, enough ramblings. I’m actively procrastinating a project by leaving this comment here. I need to go work on an article.
Thanks for the great post though!
It’s kind of like saying “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.” Well, you might not mind carrying him, but he’s still heavy!
Some people laugh when I say that I consider my full time blogging to be a mini-retirement. Fine, it’s work, but it’s not “work” work. A lot depends on our definition of work.
You said “to me anything that you wouldn’t do if retired is work.” But then what’s your definition of retired? Some people plan to take it easy on a beach in their golden years, but others don’t plan to slow down at all–they still want to “work” in “retirement.” “Definitions” can get “confusing!”
Hunter Nuttall´s last blog post..Does Work Suck? Fix It With ROWE!
Well, who says “hard” can’t be enjoyable?
When I go to the gym, I work my muscles hard. I may work hard, I may feel the effort, but I still enjoy both the workout and the results that come from it.
Same with my consulting work. Sometimes it can be very intense - hard work! - but I enjoy doing it because it is challenging AND because I make money at it.
Writing? Well, probably I don’t take it seriously enough, but I never find that hard - for me, that is just fun and enjoyable, so I never see my website “work” as being onerous.
But you mentioned “anything that you wouldn’t do if retired is work”. If that’s the definition, then I never “work”. There might be some customers I’d drop if I were fully retired, but that’s only because of travel time, not the work I do for. Put $5 million dollars in my bank account tonight and I’ll be doing exactly the same things tomorrow as I did today.
So I guess I really do have to say that if you find it’s hard work then you are doing something wrong .. if by “hard” you mean that you don’t enjoy it and wouldn’t do it if you had another choice.
Anthony Lawrence´s last blog post..Starting your first commerce web site by Anthony Lawrence
Hi Alex! i hear you and empathize with you - I just started my personal development blog a few days ago and the writing, traffic building, etc is definitely hard work. It was only when I started surfing around that I realize there are so many blogs out there cluttering the whole internet and having to cut through the clutter is no easy feat by any means.
That being said though, I actually belong to the group of people who believe ‘passion-filled work isn’t work’. I think the difference really lies in our definition of work - I totally agree that everything we have to do in pursuit of our passion, interests, purpose require energy and effort, but it just doesn’t come to me as work because everytime I am doing it, I know it is ultimately laddering up to something I am passionate about. As opposed to ‘work’ work, which just feels hollow and empty with no end in mind.
Celes | EmbraceLiving.Net´s last blog post..Why ‘Earning Money’ or ‘Being Successful’ Is Not Your Real Purpose
Hey, I just found your blog - quite interesting!
My take on this “work isn’t hard” thing is this: my grandfather worked for over 50 years on his farm. And it was HARD work. That was his job, there were parts he didn’t particularly like, yet he LOVED his job. And while he admits it was work - hard work at that - he also doesn’t think it was as hard as doing something he would have dreaded doing.
So I think that this is where that phrase/idea comes from. If you dislike what you are doing - to the point that you dread going - then just getting up in the morning seems like work. However, if you LOVE what you do - no matter how physically or mentally taxing it could be - then getting up to do it is easy.
And I think that that’s the main difference - does your life seem like work, even while you seemingly get “nothing” done? Then your work is hard on you. Does your life seem great, even though your work is very taxing? Then your work is “easy”. That is what people are looking for - meaning in their life and a reason to get up in the morning - and if it seems too difficult to do that, THEN I would suggest that a person change jobs. At least, that’s how I’ve always justified saying that “work should be easy”.
@JamesDG
I always love how you make posts out of your comments. Ooh, there’s a blog idea - write post-length comments on other blogs then populate your own blog with those posts. A kind of “James says” thing…
@Julie
You describe the process so well. It’s amazing how similar the challenge of producing art is for so many artists, eh?
@Hunter
My definition of retired is choosing what I want to do every single day and not ever telling myself “if I want X I have to do Y” - Being retired to me, is saying “I feel like doing Q, today but nothing tomorrow.”
@Anthony
Put $5 million in my bank account today and I would set up a trust fund and figure out a supportable so that I don’t need any more money until I die. I spent 8 months in France last year doing nothing (other than writing the first draft of a novel) and I could easily do that for the rest of my life.
@Celes
Good for you! Congrats on the starting. Definitions are really important, aren’t they? Thanks for all the comments this week, by the way - you’re off to a great start with the blogging career!
@Jesse
Hard versus dreaded is an important distinction. I’m working on removing the dreaded, but I’m good with the hard/enjoyable stuff.
I think the common theme here is things that are worth doing. You might not enjoy everything in your line of work, but if spending a few minutes of pain gives you rewards that are worth it, then I say go for it!
Ever read those interviews where the person says “I can hardly believe someone pays me to do this?!”. Try imagining doing what they do. For you it might feel like really hard work, but for them it doesn’t feel like work at all.
This is what I am determined to find.
James | Dancing Geek´s last blog post..Day 9: Making a promise to myself
As a teacher, I always tell people that I love it so much that I almost do it for free, and it feels like I almost DO! Twenty two years, still in the eighth grade!
I teach, and I teach needy kids in a low-income neighborhood. There is a lot of passion in my work: in my training, my efforts, my time spent preparing each day. It’s definitely work, and I wish it paid better. Passion + effort = work, definitely. That the work is fascinating and at times grueling doesn’t make it any less valuable.
Daisy´s last blog ..Thanksgiving Preparations at Chez OK- Reprise