LearnSometimes You Just Have to Work

It can be hard to admit how much I’m driven by the pursuit of fun. I’ve been conditioned by American culture to think life, work, marriage, and kids should all be fun. I look for things that are fun, satisfying, existentially meaningful, etc., and the place where I’ve sought this most is in my work.

I’m an entrepreneur and a dreamer at heart. I enjoy exploring new ideas and planning their execution. Actually executing, though, not so much. I avoid execution with a 10-ft pole. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Some of us are better at strategy than implementation and vice versa. However, it can very quickly turn into a bad thing. Just because you’re better at pushups than squats, doesn’t mean you should only do pushups.

But a lot of the career advice in the web industry is focused on finding your passion and zeroing in on it. Again, not bad advice, but a little misguided, in my opinion.

I’ve been searching for my passion since I was a teenager. I have yet to find it. And I think the reason I haven’t found it is because I have equated passion with fun. I’ve bought the lie that my passion, my purpose, is that thing which I love doing so much that it’s fun every time, all the time.

Recently I had a sobering conversation with a friend. We were talking about various business ideas and I was shooting them all down. Why? Because none of them passed my “fun” test. Meaning, there were elements to all of them that weren’t fun. I don’t literally have a “fun” test. It’s more of a subconscious screening process for the ideas that enter my brain. How could something be my passion if it felt like work?

My friend looked at me a little incredulously and said, “Dude, sometimes you just have to work.”

I felt like Homer Simpson having an epiphany. This seemed like very simple (and true) advice, yet it had never crossed my mind.

It’s strange how hard it is for this idea to connect. As a kid I played a lot of music. Hours and hours of practice every day from the ages of 5 to 15. It wasn’t fun at first. It took a lot of work to get to the point where sitting down at the piano felt like a pleasure and not a workout. Somehow I lost that concept in my later teens and 20s.

A big part of contentment and happiness is recognizing that you will not always be happy. It seems that many of the things that provide the most meaning in life are things that are not fun.

Raising children is not fun. There are times when I feel like I will end up on the floor in a fetal position, babbling to myself, if my kids disobey one more time. But raising children is satisfying. And it’s satisfying in way that is unlike anything else in my life. Watching them achieve success at something. Waking up every morning to hugs and kisses. Those things bring me great joy.

Realizing that things will never be perfect, that I will not always be happy, has a freeing effect. The pressure, guilt and the feeling that I’m doing something wrong, goes away.

The same is true in business. I’m not saying we shouldn’t pursue our passions. But understand that passion and meaning don’t equal a continual state of nirvanic-pleasure. (Yes, I made up that word).

Sometimes (often, I think), you just have to work and that’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t mean you’ve picked the wrong career, the wrong opportunity or the wrong life. Just the opposite, in fact. We have an opportunity to grow when we encounter resistance. At that point though, do we cut and run, or push through? Most of the time, I cut and run. And then I feel guilty. I feel like I’ve wasted my time. I begin to over-analyze all the choices that have led me to this place where life is hard. Lately, though, I think my failure has not been in my choices, but in avoiding that resistance. Avoiding what is not fun.

If happiness lives on the others side of resistance, it’s no wonder so many of us struggle to find it.

• productivity