You Will Learn To Love the Work You Choose Cover

You Will Learn To Love the Work You Choose

Our brain turns memories into stories. The difference is that a story will always make sense, while your memories may not.

If you’ve ever told an anecdote at a party and left out a tiny detail in service of the punchline, you know what I’m talking about. Maybe, the car had already stopped when you jumped in to save the puppy. Maybe, the wall you climbed wasn’t all that high. Shhhhh! It’s ok. I won’t tell anyone.

The most curious aspect of this is that the more you retell a story, the more polished it becomes. With every iteration, your memories warp a little more to match the consistency of the story — until the line between them gets so blurry, you start believing the story is the memory. That’s how strong our brain’s desire for coherence is.

While it’s harmless to take some liberties with a childhood adventure to make others laugh, when it comes to your career, you must resist your brain’s addiction to narratives.

If you don’t, one day, you’ll no longer be able to make good decisions — simply because they don’t fit the story arc you’ve created in your mind.

Ready Player Zero

I didn’t enter this world as a writer, gamer, or football freestyler. Like every human being in history, I was born without skills — and yet, I became all of the aforementioned things and then some.

It’s easy to stick to the labels we know once we’ve acquired them. I have been a writer for seven years. I’ve spent thousands of hours doing it. I’ve written millions of words. I’ve even made some good money.

Looking back, it’s tempting to say: “Oh yeah, I was always meant to be a writer. Writing is my destiny.” That’s where your brain’s retrofitting powers get dangerous. I’ve thought long and hard about it, and, actually, my true beginnings looked less like a painting and more like a swamp.

When I started writing, I had no more of a propensity for it than I did for editing videos or playing games. In fact, I had a Youtube channel where I made animated music videos long before I had a blog. I had a good enough Xbox record to be a streamer — if not a pro, then at least an entertaining one.

But no one told me I’d be able to make any money doing those things. Writing, on the other hand, has been in demand for hundreds of years. I was already routinely doing it for college. My English teacher used to commend me. I chose writing out of tradition, practicality, and context, not because of some magical revelation — and I still made most of my money elsewhere early on.

The first year, I said yes to everything. The earliest dollars in my PayPal account came from coaching. That was my main source of income for a few months. I translated. I built websites. I helped a company form their corporate identity.

It took me two years of barely getting by to spot writing as a consistent pattern in my work, and another to double down on said pattern and generate a decent full-time income ($40,000). In my third year, I wrote the first article I’m proud of to this day. It was also premiere to think: “Hm, yeah, maybe writing could really work out.”

Now, with every passing year, I can see myself writing a little further into the future. It’s like the Lindy effect: The longer I am a writer, the more likely I am to remain a writer.

What does all this mean for your career? It means stop waiting around. Pick something and get started.

Where the Magic Really Happens

When you make a commitment to a kind of art or work you think you’ll enjoy, several things happen:

  1. Your passion is stress-tested. Immediately, you’ll see how the relationship with your favorite activity transforms under pressure. Is it still fun if you do it regularly? Is it still fun if you try to do it for money?
  2. Your true priorities appear. Is it easy to get back to singing after working a day job for eight hours? Does your focus naturally return to your chosen task? Or do your distractions seem more interesting?
  3. You’ll love it more as you get better. No one loves something they are bad at. Chances are, you’ll grow to like any job once you become above-average at it — even one you don’t want to do for the rest of your life. Of course writing is more fun with more readers, more compliments, and more earnings. The same is true for anything else — and anything else you can become reasonably good at. You have more options than you think.
  4. Your failure tolerance grows. At first, I published a lot of pieces because I itched to get them out. Now, I routinely sit on articles for months. I’m okay staring at a blinking cursor for two hours. When I edit videos, I still want to throw my laptop out the window every time the rendering fails. That’s because I’ve never done it professionally. I never built my failure tolerance.
  5. You’ll get more comfortable the longer you do it. Initially, new labels feel like oversized shoes. How can you call yourself a poet if you’ve barely written any poems? You can’t skip the slow burn of “becoming it by doing it,” but with each thing you ship, your new identity will feel a bit snugger.

It is important to pursue these five patterns in your quest for work you’ll enjoy, and when you commit to your best guess, you’ll get all of them as side effects.

Meanwhile, none of the above depends on some magical, passion-imbued discovery. You can pick anything and get started — and if you haven’t, you really, really should.

Don’t Milk the Same Cow

Right now, my brain will assess every career opportunity I get in the context of me being a writer. I’ve spent the last seven years building a construct against which, now, all else is being measured.

Will this further my growth as a writer? Where is my writing trying to go? Where do I want to end up? It’s good for your work to follow a trajectory, but sometimes, staying on one can make it difficult to realize when it’s time to jump to another. You don’t have to commit to one track for the rest of your life, you know? You’re not a train.

Tim Urban from Wait But Why recently visualized this in a graphic:

Image via Tim Urban on Twitter

Just because I can imagine being a writer for the rest of my life does not mean I should.

As an example, I recently realized that I’ve made more money from investing than I have from writing. What does that mean? Should I be an investor instead? Probably not, but it’s uncomfortable to even call my writer-label into question — and that’s exactly why doing so is important. We must not box ourselves in just so the story may keep making sense.

It might not feel this way when you’ve done the same thing for 20 years, and it definitely won’t seem like a certainty while you’re waiting for passion to knock on your door, but trust me: You will learn to love the work you choose.

You won’t adore it overnight. You’ll have a few rocky mountains to climb. But if you stick to the path and persist, you can extract stupendous amounts of joy from almost any career — and once you’ve done your fair share, you won’t even have to milk the same cow to keep doing it.