Falling in Love with What You Do

Filed under Articles on 18. December 2006 »

One thing that we know unites most people who are really good at what they do, is that they love what they do. Yo-Yo Ma loves playing the cello, and Tiger Woods absolutely loves the game of golf. And this is obvious to everyone. However, when we think about people like that, people that are at the top of their game in something, we usually have at the top of our minds an image of the glory of success. The triumph of their public performance is what we see on television, and so it’s easy for us to see how they love what they do.

But behind the glorified images of triumph are years and years of practice, repetition, iteration; willful submission to a daily routine most of us would not be able to sustain for a week. A dedication that cannot possibly be motivated solely by the promise of future success, which is the motivation most often associated with grand achievement. There is talk about the passion for winning or a burning desire to be the best, which of course is a factor to a certain degree, but that sort of motivation will never be enough on its own.

But, you may ask, isn’t it ultimately just a matter of self-discipline and determination? Obviously that is an important aspect, but to think that mere force is enough to achieve greatness in any endeavor is to dramatically underestimate the value of true greatness. There is always the tendency to think that all these people have is simply a higher level of self-discipline than the rest of us, and that what motivates them is the glory of the end result that we see in the media.

Did Lance Armstrong manage to win one of the most grueling tests of endurance there is, after recovering from cancer, with nothing but self-discipline and an ambition to win?

Hardly.

What we miss in the images we are shown of greatness on any level is that, in the words of Vincent Van Gogh, “great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” Greatness is not the final triumph, the idolized end result, but a series of seemingly mundane things done with care and attention.

The doubt

There is a habitual and socially conditioned error of thinking that will now tell you that sure, of course playing golf for a living is enjoyable. And who wouldn’t enjoy being a musical virtuoso?

It will tell you that the ability to which people are able to enjoy what they do lies entirely in what they do, and so is only available to those who happen to be doing something obviously exciting. That the love of what they do is determined by an external factor, and that they have simply earned the privilege through years of hard work and self-discipline.

And what they do is to us onlookers mostly limited to the images we see in the media, the aforementioned glory of the end result. So in our perception of what it is that they do we replace a number of smaller activities with a single mental label, further obscuring the actual reality behind these images. And thus, when we tell ourselves that of course playing golf for a living is enjoyable, for example, we are really only referring to our abstracted mental image of it rather than reality.

Here, when we discuss falling in love with what you do, it does not mean falling in love with an abstracted mental image of what you do. So, for the purposes of this article, what you happen to be doing for a living right now is largely irrelevant. And while this may sound confusing, your current situation should be considered an effect rather than a cause of the extent to which you enjoy what you do. But more on that later.

The insight

Simply put, falling in love with what you do is learning to appreciate the details in life. To give care and attention to even the most seemingly insignificant of things and activities, and to honor every little thing you do and so imbue it with quality. It is about doing little things well.

Again, when talking about falling in love with what you do, it is not necessarily to do with your profession or any of what you perceive to be the larger activities in your daily life. These larger activities are nothing more than a combination of several smaller ones, and the more abstracted these activities become in your mind the less you are able to appreciate the magic inherent in the details that make up those activities.

For an example if you are selling vegetables from 9-5, and you dislike your job, you may be inclined to put a blanket label of “an activity I dislike” on a large part of your daily life; which means that you have effectively reduced a significant part of your day to a negative mental image, and are unable to see anything in it that doesn’t fit (i.e. anything positive). But when you start appreciating the details, you will see that you are not merely selling vegetables all day long. Instead of being stuck in traffic for an hour in the morning, you are now sitting in your car and noticing how comfortable the seats are, or spotting a squirrel in a nearby tree. You may have been listening to music on your way to work for years, but now you start really noticing it and becoming fascinated by it. Once at work, the task of arranging vegetables becomes a play of forms, textures, and colors, and dealing with customers is transformed into a satisfying event of human communication.

In order to be able to enjoy these details, and to be fascinated by them, it is important to give up the habit of reducing everything you perceive to a mental label. To quote Rumi, you need to “sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.” And although this may take a lot of practice, you will gradually regain the ability to see the world around you as if for the first time. Instead of seeing a lake, you see this infinitely interesting and magical something that flows across the landscape, glitters and moves. Instead of merely signing your bankruptcy papers you give attention to how nicely the line flows from the pen, and to the faint aroma of your attorney’s cologne.

And although that last one may sound silly, just see how many curious and enjoyable details can be obscured by the negative mental image of “an undesirable activity.”

Practical implications

Before, when I said that this was not really to do with your current profession or life situation, I did not mean to say that you cannot initiate change in those areas of your life. If you want to change jobs, learning to appreciate even just a tiny aspect of your current job can actually help you a great deal in moving onto something else. Whatever you are doing, you need to always be able to fall in love with some aspect of it, some detail.

As I said earlier, what determines the particulars of your life- or work situation is mostly your ability to enjoy what you do. And so in order to find your way to a “more enjoyable” activity, it is important to learn to enjoy the details of what you are doing right now.

And to take it even further, we could say that enjoyment is not really dependent on what it is that you’re doing, but comes from within and then flows into whatever it is you do. When you can enjoy the little things, your chance of being able to do something great increases.

Want to be at work on your novel but find yourself stuck doing the dishes? Fall in love with how the water falls on a piece of glass, and how it plays with the light. The appreciation of the beauty of everyday life will transform even the most mundane tasks into an opportunity for enjoyment, and even elevate them to becoming a form of meditation. Which is then the ultimate balance between doing and being, a bridge between form and the formless. A way of operating in the world without getting lost in it.

When you fall in love with what you do, you invite into your life the divine influence of inspiration and enthusiasm; the realm of genius upon which all great things in this world depend for their realization.