Find What You Love and You'll Never Work a Day in Your Life... Is a Lie
I was reminded of the old adage, “find what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Lol, HATE. It echos “when you find the right person, it’ll be easy” garbage.
No, in business, relationship, EVERYTHING, there’s gonna be hard & gonna be work, but *the big difference* to look for is that you’ll be called to show up to the hard differently than you ever have before.
This “advice” (quotes cuz BAD) leaves out most of the story & puts the onus of our joy externally: finding something/someone outside of us to finally make life easy, make us happy, make life feel like sliding down a slide. Yes, the easy gets easier, the fun gets more fun, the happy gets potent, but I promise you, owning a business will also put all your problems under a spotlight & ask “so, whatcha wanna do with these?”
Moving throughout life with this as a guiding sentiment will also result in the INEVITABLE REALLY BAD DAYS that show up EVEN WHEN YOU REALLY LOVE SOMETHING suddenly MEANING so much more than they need to.
“O no, do I not love this after all? If it’s hard, does that mean it’s not actually aligned? Should I quit to go find the thing I’ll love enough to make it sparkles 100% of the time?”
The shift is not that the feeling of WORK disappears entirely, it’s that we love the thing enough to receive the hard days simply as Information, opportunities to refine the containers we’re building, and to allow ourselves to level up to meet the challenges.
It's part of the cycle of being a business owner. At some point, you'll look around and realize that everything that was once hard is now easy... and you've also unlocked a brand new level of hard. It's like a video game, every level is designed to be difficult for the stage your character is in; and it's always going to be leading up to a big boss fight you gotta get by before it gets easy again. If we can start to expect that things are cyclical, and recognize that the point of this game is not to avoid fighting the bosses, but to focus on leveling up our personal stats, gear, and understanding of how to play the game, then maybe we can even start looking forward to those inevitable moments where we get to test our metal and see how far we've come.
Just last week I had a full day of crying, confident that burning everything in my life to the ground was the answer (my old way of doing things, I’m a recovered runner). But instead, I felt to the very bottom of those feelings, and found what was on the other side: a big OHHH moment around boundaries/a realization that to scale the biz & preserve both my harmony & values as a manager, we gotta approach a giant new cliff side of scary, of HARD, of WORK. More on that later.
So let’s change the advice to, “when you find something you love, you get to commit to self-expansion & continuously become the person who can meet inevitable hard days with grace.”