Finding the work you love
Finding the work you love
100,000 hours, we may as well make it count
I was having dinner with some friends last week, we were talking about what technology we’d most like to see in our lifetimes. Most had differing answers. Carbon capture, indistinguishable-from-reality metaverses, and flying cars were among ideas thrown around. One thing most agreed on though was robots/ai doing work for us, reducing our working hours significantly, even completely. This thought made me quite sad.
We live in a world that sees work as an obligation, it's rare to encounter someone enthralled by their profession. We’ve even erected coping mechanisms around the drudgery of work, We talk about work/life balance, as if there was some sort of binary distinction between the time we spend on our craft, vs the time we spend truly living. We save and plan for retirement, that golden period when we're finally free to live on our own terms. We (privately) fall back on our paychecks as the yardstick of the worth of our profession, a justification for the hours sunk into something, given the choice, we’d rather not be doing.
There is a profession though, where none of the above holds true. The artist. The artist doesn’t make distinctions between work and life. Their work is a core part of their identity, it’s an element of their life that brings them joy, in extreme cases it’s one of the only elements. You can tell an artist through a simple heuristic. Artists don’t retire.
Hockney is 86 and as prolific as ever. Audre Lorde wrote poetry on her deathbed. Artisty is agnostic to proffesion. Buffet is 92 and probably the most powerful investor in the world. He’s an artist. Joe Biden is 80 and running for a second term, an artist.
The difference between an artist, and the rest of us is that an artist is internally motivated. The litmus test for internal motivation? Would you pay to do it? I guarantee you that if Wagner Group took over Yorkshire and sent Hockey to the Gulag for his Cannabis habit, within a week he’d be offering his entire fortune to paint, even if he knew his output would end up providing heat to guards quarters.
I know a handful of artists, and I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about them, they’ve just found the thing they love, so that’s what this article is going to be about, how to find the work we love. I feel qualified to talk on this topic because over the last few years, I’ve made progress to becoming an artist. I’d say in a standard working day about half the time I spend on stuff is stuff I would do for free / pay to do. The other half is work I’m indifferent to but have to do to meet the financial outcomes I want.
Purging your mind of mimetic desire
By far the hardest step to overcome (at least in my experience) to find the work you love is to rid yourself of mimetic desire. Mimetic desire, theorised by Rene Girard, is the idea that the vast majority of your motivations don’t come from your internal wants and needs (your intrinsic motivations), rather the desires of those around you.
While on the surface this theory might sound absurd, you only need to look around to see its validity. Fashion trends become more popular, the more others desire them. In universities most students want one of three professions (lawyer, banker, consultant) and the top firms in those professions are all vastly oversubscribed.
I’m sure if you look back on your own life, you’ll see that your desires will have fluctuated in accordance with your peer group. When you are young your desires are likely shaped by your parents. This might manifest itself in you doing precisely the opposite of what your parents want, but don’t make the mistake of thinking this indicates a resistance to mimesis, this very act of opposition is still defined in relation to Ma and Pa’s desires.
After your parents it’s your schoolfriends, then your college peers, then your work colleagues, until one day you wake up with an inexplicable need to see a dispenser of Aesop handwash perched majestically over every sink in your house. These desires didn’t come from the ‘authentic you’ they permeated your ego until you deeply believed they were yours, and then you acted on them.
Some people are naturally resistant to mimetic desire. From a young age, they’ve known what they wanted and stuck with it. Unfortunately, I’m not in this camp, and you likely aren’t either. If you want to find work you love you do need to get in touch with those desires that are truly yours. Here are a few things I’ve found that help.
Meditation. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but I started meditating about 8 years ago. 20 minutes a day with maybe a longer session once a week of an hour or more can have a pretty profound impact on how you think.
Writing. The reason I write this newsletter is to get my true ideas down. By writing you are forced to think, that’s all writing is really. I think writing once a week for a few hours is a great way to try and dissociate your true desires and wants from those of society.
Another pattern I’ve seen amongst people with strong self-directed desires is their connection with who they were as a child. I think this is important for finding work you love we’ll dedicate a section to it.
Silly things from your childhood
While it might not be accurate to say any belief is completely ‘pure’ and unaffected by mimesis, it’s quite evident if you spend any time around young kids that their wants are shaped less by what others expect of them and from what is authentically ‘them’
Last week I was walking with my partner and she was telling me how she was living her dream of being Indiana Jones. I didn’t really understand what she meant. We live in East London and spend the majority of our time between coffee shops, bougie stores that sell expensive candles, and our flat. She said that when she was young she’d always been obsessed with Indiana Jones. She’d always had that goal for herself, and now she felt like she was living it, she was studying for her PhD, she was wearing the same clothes as him, and was about to start teaching. Her vision of living out her childhood dreams didn’t involve scrambling through caves, swimming through rat-infested waters and blowing up Nazis, but it still did involve a lot of what Indiana Jones does.
The younger you are when desires begin to ferment, the more likely they are to be authentic, and the more likely you are to love working on them. I think too often we pass these desires or aspirations off as silly, unrealistic. It also seems we often don’t see past the medium that the desire is reflected in vs. the core desire that is being expressed. Video games I think are the most tragic example of this. Most parents would just view all games under a single blanket category, but they aren’t. When I was very young I pretty much only played strategy games (also the only games I play now), Settlers, Civilisation, Age of Empires. These are games where your job is to exploit different resource types (gold, military units) and focus these resources in a way that would most likely lead you to victory. You’ve just described the job of an entrepreneur.
My nephew is 2 years old, he has very little, if any, idea of the wants and needs of others. He is fully immersed in his world, the only thing that matters is the moment. evidenced by the fact he can go from hysterically laughing to crying to laughing in the space of 30 seconds. For him, there is limited past or future, just the now. His favourite way to spend this now? By intently observing the differences in the natural world, with 100% accuracy he can see the difference between a wasp and a bee, which his older sister cannot do. I have no idea how this interest will end up manifesting, but you can’t deny it’s not something that is intrinsic to him.
If you are not loving the work you do now, you could do worse than just take a few hours to think back to your childhood, go back to your young heroes, and to your interests. Don’t view anything as ‘silly’ or ‘juvenile’ be open-minded to what may come up.
Experiment, but don’t try and be well-rounded
One thing I think blocked me a lot and blocks a lot of others from finding work they love is a pursuit of well-roundedness. While there are huge advantages of being well rounded (namely that life is just a lot more interesting if you have some knowledge and can speak on a lot of topics) I think up to a point it can become procrastination. Even if you look at the classic example of the well-rounded Renaissance man, Leonardo Davinche, what you’ll really see if you study him is that he went through periods of years where he deeply focused on a single craft. First painting, then anatomy, then equipment design.
Finding work that you love is of course going to involve experimentation, while there are rare exceptions like Tiger Woods, Mozart and Bill Gates who found their art pretty much straight away in their lives, for the majority of us it’s going to involve a few dead ends. The approach I’ve found that works is to quote Paul Graham ‘Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more.’ I’d define ‘some’ here as one or two at a time. Go deep into a topic, and don’t leave until you feel you can with 100% certainty say this is not the work you absolutely love. Create a roster of work you are not suited to. With any luck, your list will be shorter than mine, which includes Engineer, Corporate Analyst, Product Manager, YouTuber to name but a few…
If you’ve made it to the end of this article you probably think that finding work you love is something that’s important. While there is no silver bullet to a good life (don’t believe the cold plunge bros) I do think if you find work you love you at least rid yourself of the doubt that comes with devoting so much our your only truly finite resources of time into something that, if given the choice, you wouldn’t be doing.