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What My Spectacular Failures Taught Me About Jobs, Passions, and Finding My “Life’s Work”
How NOT to be naïve about your passion and find something you love doing.
My father worked for almost 40 years — for 12–16 hours per day, at a job that he hated. He worked all sorts of crazy hours, was shuffled from location to location, and by his account — hated every minute of it.
Also by his account, he was in this situation for 2 reasons:
- He didn’t go to college, but rather chased after an immediate paycheck
- He didn’t pursue his passion, and so ended up working only for money
As a result, my primary directives in live came to center around not repeating those two mistakes. My journey into work thus began not through money, but through trying to find my passion, my “life’s work”.
Unfortunately, my naïve understanding of that concept did me more harm than good. And it took me a lot of mistakes and pain to learn a better way to look at the idea of passion, loving what you do, and the concept of “life’s work”.
The First Mistakes
From the time I was about 5, art seemed to be the candidate for my passion. I had been drawing since I could remember doing…
