Many people, including some clients, a nephew and a niece have studied to become CPA’s.
It’s not exciting, it’s not titillating, it is not a dream profession… unless… unless…
If I asked a 100 people how they would finish the sentence, what comes after unless, almost all of them would say: unless you love it.
And to a certain degree they may be right… it is more fun to do a job that you love.
But what does it take to love someone or something?
We live in an age where people expect to be in love with a person to get married… and then 50+ percent falls out of love… and get divorced. The less, most of them stay together for the kids.
And the same trend is winning in choosing a vocation… same or higher “divorce rate”.
So maybe the order of things is messed up: first you get good at the job and then you’ll love it.
Here is an article I swiped because it’s so good:
Here’s the secret to finding work that pays you well and work that you love doing.
When you become exceptionally good at something (regardless whether you “loved it” at the start) you’ll start to ‘love’ it merely as a side effect of being good at it.
It is what makes the difference, getting so good at it, that you cannot avoid loving it
So many people simply chase ideas they “love” without giving thought to if the idea is actually something people want. Or if they can get really good at it. Or if they will love it if they have to do it eight hours a day…
I recommend you find something people want, and either get really good at it (and fulfill your need to love what you’re doing). Remember my story about getting good at violin before I was allowed to switch over to the guitar?
If an idea is bad, as in not accomplishing your end goal, you can still learn a lot how to become good at anything. You can learn to get so good they can’t ignore you. You can learn that you can follow through and you’ll love yourself and love it.
Think of something in your life that maybe your parents “forced” you to do, something that at first you thought you’d hate. Maybe it was a sport, or a job, or a musical instrument. At first, the struggle is real. As a novice it can be confusing and frustrating, but as you improve often you start to really find the hidden joys. It’s why when you talk to a professional or an entrepreneur in a seemingly “boring” field you often find that they’re ecstatic to talk about it!
Boring is all relative to how good you are at something.
Passion is a side effect of overcoming barriers and becoming great at something.
Most people teach the opposite.
–They say: it should be “easy” or you shouldn’t pursue it.
–If you’re not instantly passionate about it just move on, they say.
That’s dangerous advice.
Why do they keep pushing that message? Maybe that’s what most people want to hear. It tickles that dopamine part of our brain that wants to justify why you haven’t reached your goals yet, why you haven’t amounted to much. “It’s not my fault” is the implication. You just haven’t found what’s right for you… yet.
The truth is much less sexy, but much more profitable… as I mentioned, passion is grown through overcoming adversity and tasting the success of getting better at something. It’s almost always internal adversity… your desire to chase the exciting, the new, the easy, the sexy, coupled with your too low ambition, that says and is not heeded: stay with it. It will become sexy.
Passion is a powerful force, it’s part of what pushes the best to keep getting better. But passion isn’t the only force you can harness, one of the most powerful ones (and underrated) that I like to turn to is curiosity.
Curiosity, inmate curiosity, intellectual curiosity, the curiosity of the spirit is very different from the curiosity you so well know: the one that makes you check your cell phone every two minutes, click on links, and watch video after video.
Curiosity can keep you moving when passion fades.
Curiosity can keep you focused when the world is fighting for your attention.
Curiosity is the hidden force behind the greatest inventions the world has ever seen.
You can kill innate curiosity with external, idle curiosity or busy-ness… and most do. It takes saying a lot of no’s to cut off the “suckers” so the tree can grow. 1 Idle curiosity, excitement seeking act as the suckers on a plant, a tree: suck away vital Life Force for no value whatsoever.
And the best part is, everyone has innate curiosity. Maybe it’s been choked down a bit as you face the reality of growing up, but it’s easy to fire up again. The simplest way is to simply change your mindset on failure. Stop viewing it as something to be feared, and view it as something to be learned from.
You can’t have passion if you’re not learning. (The excitement you may be feeling is NOT passion, it is just dopamine rush! You’ll abandon the activity if dopamine rush is all you have!) Pushing against something… learning, is what separates routine from work that has energy and elan in it. You’re not learning if you’re not failing (mistakes, misunderstanding, difficulties). Failure is a feedback, it helps you get to the strait and narrow where workability lives. Feedback leads to clarity. Clarity leads to confidence. Enough feedback and self-correction and you’ll have confidence. Confidence comes from trusting yourself. Trusting yourself allows you to try new things outside of your current comfort zone. Trying things out of your current reach is how you grow.”
This article will rub you the wrong way. Especially the sentence where I say: if you don’t love it, you are probably not good at it.
But I wasn’t kidding.
It takes much more than you are doing to get good at something.
Being able to earn a living… that is not good enough. No fun. There is a whole lot more to excellence than what you are bringing to the “party”.
- A sucker is a plant growth that develops from the rootstock of a plant that has undergone grafting. A sucker does not originate from a seed but instead it grows from the base of the root of the plant at a certain distance away from the plant.
This undesirable part of the plant should be removed to prevent it from sucking away the plant’s energy.
It would have been more convincing, Sumpfmarie if you had said the whole sentence: I would have to get really good at it so I can love it.
Between you and me, you already guessed, or could have guessed from my questions in the Reclaim program: you need more skills and you need to get good at them…
This is what you meant in your comment… I hope.
Thank you, Sophie – this came at a perfect time! I had a few setbacks with my business and it was getting hard to hold on. This is what I need to read today!
wonderful Kawa. It will make a huge difference.
Thank you Sophie for this article. It made me to start changing perspective and I think I know what to do. Now I see that this is what I saw on vacation when I was in that village this summer and I valued it a lot and it resonated with me.