I once saw a famous author say that if you didn’t love 90% of the things it took to be in your industry, you were in the wrong industry.
That is so dumb.
That sounds nice on the surface and since she said it on Instagram she didn’t have to back it up with any degree of reality or fact.
That’s the nice thing about social media. You can just post a photo of Leonardo Dicaprio’s character from the Wolf of Wall Street with the caption, “Circle got smaller and the yacht got bigger,” and no one will bat an eye. (It’s scientific fact that the less friends you have, the bigger the yacht you’ll own. Lonely people have gigantic boats.) But there’s a problem with the idea that you’ll love 90% of what it takes to be in a certain industry.
Let’s run the math on that idea. In a 40-hour work week, that means there will only be 4 hours you don’t enjoy. For 36 hours each week you will be lost in bliss, dancing about your office with unabashed joy on your face, love drunk on the work you get to do. That’s ridiculous.
Most people have commutes that take longer than four hours each week. I’ve never met anyone who said, “You know what was awesome? Filling out my LLC paperwork!” I’ve never met anyone who said, “My favorite part of the year is when we have to prepare our budgets for the next year! Pulling together the numbers for the entire year and predicting with accuracy what next year will look like, knowing that the CEO is going to grill me on each line item, is heaven. I especially like that it happens at the end of the year so that Thanksgiving and Christmas taste like Excel!”
I work for myself and enjoy what I do, but I’ve never had a single week where I loved 90% of the things I did.
One day I had a 7PM book signing in Austin, Texas. I showed up at the airport for my 8AM flight and they told me it had been cancelled because the tower was flooded. (How the tallest facility at the airport got flooded is confusing to me.)
I called customer service and they said they could get me on a flight that left at 9PM. Given that I’d miss the book signing by a mere four hours, I had to come up with a different solution. Instead of flying to Austin, I had to fly to Dallas and rent a car.
I then proceeded to drive 220 miles across the plains of Texas. Because the rental was last minute they gave me a Toyota Yaris. It had crank windows. I didn’t even know they were still installing those on new cars. When I leaned down on the arm rest I just kept falling to the floor. There was no armrest, that’s also apparently a feature.
The third dial in the dash was empty and just said “Yaris.” One can only guess what info that was supposed to contain. There was no cruise control so for 220 miles I just had to constantly stay on the gas so that I could propel this sewing machine like vehicle across the desert.
Who knew that for all these years I had been driving luxury vehicles? I had no idea that when I used my push button windows and fancy armrests in my 2002 Toyota 4-Runner I was balling.
At no point during that drive, did I think to myself, “I am living the dream! This is what it’s all about right here! I love this!”
No, that sucked. It did. It took me about 24 hours of work to do a two-hour book signing.
If judged my day by the famous person’s standard of 90% love, I would have failed. A lot of weeks would be failures if I used that as my measuring stick.
But you know what?
Chasing a dream is hard.
It’s not all fun.
It’s not all enjoyable.
It’s not all delightful.
But, it all matters.
That’s the difference. Even the sucky parts matter when it’s something you care about.
Author Simon Sinek said it better than me:
“Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion.”
He’s right and more than that, it’s important to remember that great lives are very rarely created in great comfort.
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Some days, it’s going to be rough. Some days, it’s going to be heartbreaking. Some days, you get the Yaris.
Keep going. We need what you’ve got.
And, if you’re an entrepreneur, I dare you to do this with me.