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Personal growth: Misconceptions on “doing what you love” December 28, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Development Potential.
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One of the ironies of our wanting to earn our living by “doing what we love to do” is that we may not be very good at what we love doing, and in fact, are actually more talented at doing something else; something we do not find as fun and enjoyable.

Moreover just because we may love doing something, it does not necessarily follow that, financially, we should be able to make a livable income through doing it.

To keep insisting to ourselves that we should be able to earn our living by doing what we love can be a needless source of frustration and, ultimately, disappointment

We need to seriously consider, for example,  if what we love doing, such as creative writing, is a vocation for which we are actually  willing to spend a huge amount of time in learning the skills needed to convert our interest or “love” of “doing” to a professional level of ability.

I think the word “love” is overworked and perhaps misused and misdirected in the self-improvement context of it being a requirement to love what we do in order for it to matter, or be fulfilling.

Does a brain surgeon “love” doing the work of the surgery itself, or does the surgeon enjoy the work, but love the endgame of improving and often saving the lives of their patients.

We sometimes ask too much of ourselves in our personal growth efforts, and in thinking we are not respecting ourselves unless we “love” our work is an example of this.

What’s wrong with simply “liking” and enjoying our work, but saving our love for something deeper?

We can like our work, but love the ultimate objective, or reason, of why we are doing the work.

—Dennis Mellersh

Personal growth: Difficulties in “doing what you love” July 11, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.
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Taking Joseph Campbell’s advice to “Follow our bliss” is tempting. It is appealing to imagine ourselves in a situation where we are always “in the zone” and a state of rapture with our major personal choices, particularly in our careers.

But in our efforts to reach our personal development potential, It can be frustrating and ultimately counter-productive to make our happiness contingent on a simplistic and restrictive interpretation of “doing what we love.”

In a somewhat fuzzy and imprecise explanation of what he meant by following your bliss, Campbell told Bill Moyers, “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time” (1)

Or as interpreted by many, “Do what you love, the rest will follow.”

But pure rapture or bliss derived from any endeavour is impossible to sustain indefinitely. It’s like burning the candle at both ends – more light, but it burns out quickly.

No matter how much we might love doing something, if we do it in any depth, with thoroughness and with consistency, it will have elements that we don’t love.

It’s nice to imagine a life of vocational bliss, but it’s probably more realistic to think in terms of doing what is satisfying to us.

(1) Cited in Wikipedia article on Joseph Campbell – Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, edited by Betty Sue Flowers. Doubleday and Co., 1988.

— Dennis Mellersh