Lessons In Business. #LoveWhatYouDo
One things’ for sure: 25 years have flown by and some days I still feel 25! Clearly, I am not.
Mark Anthony (apparently) said it first “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life” Of course he’s a singer-songwriter and a romantic, so let’s be realistic, obviously you can’t love your work every single minute of every single day… so it’s more of a metaphor. As I reflect over my career, I have to say
I consider myself lucky, because I love what I do.
There’s a great deal of talk about passion projects and side hustles and the need to pursue them. Whether it be for financial freedom, mental health, work-life balance, or just for joy. For many years (about a decade) I sought a hobby, mainly because all my friends had them and I felt guilty - constantly declining lunches, mid-week catch-ups, and girls trips away. When my kids were small many of my friends chanted about ‘work-life balance’ so I turned to trying to find a hobby; jewellery making (expensive and didn’t last long), painting (furniture and my house!), writing a book (not very successfully - but there’s one coming), tennis - even furniture restoration (which I intend to get back too to balance my life).
Alas! It never lasted. I couldn’t find satisfaction, work always surfaced as my priority, and the paint, the pens, the racquet, and the jewel tools were put away (or given away). After said decade I came to realise that I should just embrace my passion - work, and so I did.
The reality is whatever the thing is you love to do it may (on occasion) require being up until all hours of the night, it may cause stress, seem too hard, make you cry, worry, lament so don’t search for a nonexistent light at the end of the tunnel, because sometimes you may want to give up if it all seems a bit too hard. The reality is; if it’s easy everyone would do it.
The “find a job you love” is easy to buy into if you love your job. But if you don't love your job, should you quit and chase the dream of the job you would love? Or can you learn to find meaning and success in your current job?
The answer is ‘yes.’ And here’s why.
Research shows that great work (award-winning work) is produced when people focus on doing something others love.
The Great Work Study showed that 88% of projects that earned awards began with an employee asking their own version of the question, “What difference could I make that other people would love?”
Maybe Steve Jobs was onto something when he said, “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
Over the next few weeks, I will ask my team to pen a blog about what their key lesson in business (this far) is for them. So stay tuned. I’m looking forward to reading them.