In his recent post, Seth Godin writes:
Instead of, “do what you love,” … might be, “love what you do.”
“Love what you do.” It’s not a new thought. I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time and even surfaced it in a post about lifelong learning almost two years ago. Nevertheless, it’s not something I see often. “Doing what you love” sounds more poetic and is regularly portrayed as one of the biggest life goals you can achieve. And I agree with a part of it—if you can choose, choose what you love over other things.
However, there are a few caveats with blindly pursuing that poetic vision. Life usually won’t provide perfect situations. Instead, life will serve a combination of good and bad things alike. There are a lot of boring and repetitive tasks that have to be done for something to be successful. For every line of code in a new trendy language or any mobile screen perfectly designed for the newest platform update, there are docs to be written, bugs triaged and fixed, field and user research conducted, and customers called. And they often take the majority of your time.
Realizing that tedious tasks are a necessary and critical part of your work is just the first step. You also have to stop dividing work between “love” and “hate” buckets because it creates tension and internal struggle every day for not working on “what you love” all the time.
Instead, try to embrace all aspects of your current job and do it the best you can. Fall in love with it, not because it’s a good mantra, but because it’ll make your work outstanding.