Choosing the right career path can be stressful. There’s just so many options and you don’t want to choose the wrong one when you’ll be working those tedious 9-5s. The Betches, authors of WHEN’S HAPPY HOUR , explain how you should “love what you do” instead of “do what you love” in their new work mantra.
So, what’s the point of working? If you’re committing eight to ten of your sixteen waking hours five days a week to doing shit that doesn’t bring you any amount of happiness, why even do it? To make money. Fucking duh. So why not figure out a way to make money while doing something that you sort of like? First, a few not-so-obvious facts that most people tend to forget:
- It’s very rare that a person makes a lot of money doing what they absolutely love.
- You can’t succeed in doing what you like or love without making any sacrifices—at least in the beginning—i.e., your salary, location, title, industry, etc.
- No one is ever doing what they love 100 percent of the time. Maybe a little more than half your time spent in a dream job is unavoidable hard work that fucking sucks and makes you wonder why you’re not just inputting data into that Excel spreadsheet that no one’s reading.
- Once you start doing something you love as a job, you will probably stop loving it as much.
- Doing what you love doesn’t mean choosing your favorite hobby or pastime as your career. Just because you love movies doesn’t mean you should move to Hollywood tomorrow.
Normally we’re not cheesy people, but when the topic is like, introspection, we have to be a little earnest. You’ve been warned.
To start, how about we change the phrase from “do what you love” to “love what you do.” Because that’s actually the goal. If we all did what we love, we would be watching Netflix for countless hours and ordering in lo mein takeout, which would result in us being literally homeless and three hundred pounds in less than a year. Sounds amazing, right? Kind of yes, kind of no.
To be completely honest, when we started Betches, our time was filled with a lot more indulgence than with work. It wasn’t until we started taking the business side of things seriously that we started doing more tasks we didn’t enjoy and— not coincidentally—also started finding true financial success (not to mention moving out of our parents’ houses). Here’s the secret: pure, endless indulgence brings neither success nor lasting happiness. In truth, human beings feel much more rewarded in the long term when we have a balance of pleasure (Netflix and lo mein) and pain (work), because we need to experience pain in contrast with pleasure in order for pleasure to actually be pleasurable. If everything was just amazing all the time, it wouldn’t feel good anymore, because we would get used to it. Now that we have the privilege of suffering through finance meetings and difficult conversations with our employees, our pleasure comes in the form of creating new projects for our company that we feel passionately about, reaching goals we set for ourselves, and, in our case, getting to laugh at one another while recording podcasts together.
See how you can make the best of your 9-5 with WHEN’S HAPPY HOUR? by the Betches!
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Excerpted from When’s Happy Hour? by Betches. Copyright © 2018 by author. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
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