[Off-Topic] DO NOT Do What You ("THINK") You Love

Today I read a series of tweets from Marc Andreessen where he starts by saying:

"Do what you love"/"Follow your passion" is dangerous advice and can destroy your career.

Another recognized celebrity in the US is Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who, in 2012, said the same thing:

"Don't follow your passion, follow your effort."

Apparently, the famous Confucius was the first to say the phrase that would become one of the biggest clichés for young people coming out of adolescence and having to face adult life with real responsibilities:

"Do what you love and the money will follow."

By the way, Confucius is kind of a generic for everything: don’t know who said it? Say it’s from Confucius. (And the usual disclaimer: just because I quoted people doesn’t mean I agree with them or with everything they say — they’re mere references!)

Besides Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen, several others have raised the subject before — and I recommend you read “Don’t do what you love.” by cartoonist Rachel Nabors, where she concludes with a new phrase:

"Just don't do what you hate."

On the renowned site Slate, Miya Tokumitsu also wrote “In the Name of Love” where she begins with the excellent subtitle to the article:

Elites embrace the "do what you love" mantra. But it devalues work and hurts workers.

I have to say I was even a little surprised that this subject is also in Brazil. In March 2014, Daniela Carasco wrote the article “5 reasons why ‘do what you love’ is not the solution” that was published by EXAME.com, talking about Bárbara Castro, a sociologist specialized in work issues and professor of the sociopsychology course at the Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo (FESPSP). And she also already identified the obvious that many still remain blind to:

According to her, the big problem with the "love what you do" narrative is that it's tied to a discourse of happiness that means "being at the top of the rollercoaster all the time." As if a normal, day-to-day, routine life couldn't be a life of satisfaction. All of this makes this scenario worrying.

Finally, blogger Dani Arrais analyzed the subject in February 2014 in her post “THE TRAP OF ‘DO WHAT YOU LOVE’”, who coincidentally is also a friend of the same sociologist Bárbara Castro (something tells me I should try to meet her), and she says:

Do we need to be happy all the time with the work we do? Even if we love what we do? Can't we suffer with the contradictions that this work imposes on us? Why can't we admit that it doesn't make sense? Who does this interest?

You may be confused reading all this. I imagine the vast majority of my readers have always identified with the “Do what you love” mantra. After all, if you’re on a blog that talks about Ruby and — with less emphasis — technology in general and Entrepreneurship, it’s probably because you “love” the subjects of Ruby, Technology or Entrepreneurship.

And you probably read what I post because you assume that I’m “passionate” about these subjects. And here comes the important part:

• I don’t love Ruby or programming
• I don’t love entrepreneuring or owning a company
• I don’t love technology or the equipment I buy
• I don’t love writing or the time I spend on it

And to be honest, over the years, because of this so-often-repeated mantra, so many brainwashing attempts, a few times I almost succumbed and believed in this idea, but fortunately I always managed to bring myself back. And I have no problem saying that I don’t love any of these things.

But if that’s the case, you might want to ask me:

• Why so much effort writing so much about these subjects? (1000 posts!)
• Why so much effort working in programming? (almost 20 years!)
• Why so much effort organizing events? (7 Rubyconf Brazil!)
• Why so much effort traveling the country to evangelize these subjects? (more than 100 talks!)
• Why so much effort creating a company? (6 years in consulting, 3 years in my own!)

I’ll try to answer at the end. And there’s nothing wrong with what you think you like, love, or are passionate about. The idea of the article isn’t to say why that’s “wrong” — it’s just the way the phrase is used that I want to explore within my own personal context.

First of all, don’t follow advice blindly. The first time I understood this concept consciously was watching the famous viral video from the beginning of the century, Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen, where one of the parts says:

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.

Advice is a form of nostalgy. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it's worth.

That said, I don’t want to advise you on what to do, but I want to explain a few points that may go unnoticed.

First, the Obvious.

First of all, if you think “Do what you love,” you’re actually thinking “Do ONLY what you love.”

• “I don’t love waking up early”
• “I don’t love obeying orders”
• “I don’t love sitting in traffic”

And this list will grow, because there are millions of things we need to do but obviously don’t “love.” Deep down, the most generic would be: “I don’t like doing anything (working).” I just don’t know how that derives into the other great cliché of our times:

"I'll become my own boss to follow my own passions and not someone else's dream."

The irony is that if someone believes this, they’re already following the dream of whoever made that phrase for the first time. You’re already living someone else’s dream, whether you want to or not. Think about it.

Phrases like that naturally lead to other self-help fallacies. One of the most famous would certainly be the dreadful and dangerous “The Secret”, whose definition is as follows (according to Wikipedia):

The Secret states that the law of attraction is a natural law that determines the complete order of the universe and our personal lives through the process of “like attracts like.” The author claims that the way we think and feel, a matching frequency is sent to the universe and that attracts back events and circumstances of the same frequency. (…) and if you think positively, you’ll attract positive events and circumstances. The proponents claim that desirable results like health, wealth, and happiness can be attracted by changing your thoughts and feelings.

The idea of “doing what you love” is unequivocally linked with “thinking positive to attract positive,” even though rationally trying things like “dropping everything to pursue what you love” — to work out — has the same odds as winning the lottery. And whoever thinks this way should look at the child in the photo below and tell them:

"You certainly aren't thinking positive enough."

Exaggeration? Not so much, it’s the same result: you believed an idea blindly, without thinking about it. We do this every day, and I know it takes a conscious, big effort not to be a victim of it. I myself almost believed these ideas before.

Hold what you want to troll in the comments right now: I’m not saying that thinking positive is wrong, that pursuing your dreams is wrong, or that doing what you like is wrong! Follow to the end.

Second, What Do You Love?

What’s the difference between Passion and Love? And what is Passion? And what is Love?

These are questions humanity has already spent millennia exploring and will have to explore for more millennia. How many poems, literature, songs, paintings, sculptures, speeches, revolutions have already happened because of Passion and Love? This post on a mere blog will not be where you find an answer, and this author doesn’t even presume to imagine he knows the answer.

But for the sake of continuing this text, I like this brief summary:

• Love is a state of way of life, while passion is a state of being.
• Passion lasts for a short time, but Love lasts longer.
• In Love, deep understanding is the essence, while passion doesn’t require it.

Reread the phrase “Do what you Love,” or similar ones like “Follow your passion.”

You are passionate about or love many things at the same time. And this changes over time. You rarely find something or someone you’ll love forever (and you’ll only know it close to your death).

ONLY following something that changes all the time is a race without purpose. And the only guaranteed result is that you’ll get frustrated in a worse way.

But does that mean we should ignore our passions? Of course not. I’m just saying that a life where you think it should be filled only with what you’re passionate about and ignoring the rest of the world is an absolutely childish stance. It’s like any child, so excited about the Nintendo 64, who goes days without bathing, without sleeping, without talking to anyone, without wanting to go to school, because they’re deeply passionate about it. And, as we all know, it’s the typical case where most will get bored in a few days and, in a few weeks, the so-passionate object of desire will be in a corner of the closet gathering dust. And the child will be in search of what to love next, every children’s day, birthday, and Christmas.

Doing “ONLY” what you “THINK” you “LOVE” (note the emphases in this phrase) means simply ignoring the real world. Ignoring brushing your teeth, ignoring going to school, ignoring working, ignoring responsibilities — which is what every adult would call “still being a child.”

Third, What Do I Love?

Talking this way sounds like another cliché: that an adult is a child who has set their passions aside. And that’s perhaps why the later evolution, where 30-year-old “adults” still try to be the same children they were, and this usually means being irresponsible, egocentric, anti-social, since the so-called “adult world” demands responsibility, collaboration, interaction, and commitments. No one “loves” that kind of thing, no one loves “negotiating middle ground.” Every child wants all or nothing.

If you’re a reader who has followed me for the last 8 years, up to this post 1001 (which my friends have affectionately pre-nicknamed as the “Bombril post, of 1,001 uses”), maybe you have an idea of what I want to say now.

And here comes a disclaimer: don’t quote me as saying this is the solution or the answer. What I’m about to say is absolutely personal.

I do indeed pursue some of my “passions.” Like every human being, I get passionate very easily about a lot of things. It means I also get frustrated a lot, all the time. I’m human: cut me and I bleed. And much of what I like is superfluous, and the difference is perhaps that I’ve long understood that they’re superfluous. That is, I make mistakes, trip, fall, all the time, and I learn how to get up every time.

I’m passionate about technology, programming, methods, processes. And at the same time they frustrate me, upset me, leave me frustrated, leave me irritated and wanting to throw it all away. As every passion always is.

I’m passionate about communication, sociology, people, sharing knowledge, whether writing or speaking. And again, this leaves me tired, stressed, frustrated when I’m not understood, upset when people assume things without asking, but again, it’s how a passion should be.

But as I said at the beginning, I don’t Love any of these things. They aren’t my “life goals” or definitions of my identity or any philosophical thing of that kind. They are things I like, that I pursue, that bring me both pleasure and suffering at the same time, and that are means to another end, which isn’t to make me “happy” (in the sense of being comfortable in the short term, as it is for everyone).

Being happy all the time is the realm of LSD addicts. Have you ever seen someone who is honestly happy 100% of the time? That’s impossible. And thinking your work should be your greatest passion will only bring as a result a state of misery and frustration that’s the realm of psychologists and psychiatrists, the realm of tranquilizers and antidepressants.

(By the way, if I were neurotic, I’d almost conclude that self-help phrases like the one discussed here are a Psychiatrists’ Conspiracy to generate more Depressives. #troll)

No one should ever be “comfortable” or “happy” 100% of the time. Passions, Love, Happiness are always a dynamic balance between things that satisfy you and things that don’t satisfy you. You can’t have Light without Darkness existing. You can’t have satiety without hunger existing. You can’t have warmth without cold existing.

Another derived phrase is “Love what you do,” but that’s an exaggeration. I think of it another way that I think my mother told me for the first time and that is true:

"It doesn't matter what you're doing, but since you're doing it, do the best you can."

Confucius didn’t only say the phrase that gives origin to this post. Perhaps you remember Confucianism and that the ancient Easterners may have already defined this better: Yin and Yang, the concept of how opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how one gives rise to the other. Yin and Yang can be seen as complementary rather than opposite, interacting in a dynamic system where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Without ever having suffered, how is it possible to know what happiness is?

My Conclusion

In the end, Ruby, programming, technology, projects, entrepreneurship, talks, blog, and all of this are just means that don’t define what I really like and always liked: learning and improving myself, purely.

If you’ve at least once heard of Agile, Lean, Kanban, Toyota (recurring themes on this blog), you’ll remember the Japanese concept of Kaizen (改善) or “continuous improvement.” For me it’s something conscious. I remember as a kid seeing a very simple thing in an allegory: how does a ninja jump so high and even over a tree (in cartoons)? Simple: he starts by jumping a little bush on the ground, then a small shrub, and so on.

Perfection isn’t an achievable goal — continuous improvement is the infinite process for an unreachable goal. And what I love is the challenge of improving one aspect at a time in each of the capabilities I have today (programming, communicating, teaching, producing).

My foundation is that I’m passionate about producing, and everything I produce is nothing more than a draft of the knowledge I have today, and always worse than I can produce tomorrow. My only, true “passion” is the certainty that I will never really be “good” and that I am today a little better than I was yesterday. That’s all. It doesn’t matter now whether I’m doing a programming project or writing this post or if tomorrow I decide to paint paintings.

Learning means I don’t like easy things. Anything that everyone says is hard, boring, that they would never do, or that they can’t do, naturally attracts me. Because I like to solve problems, which is one of the best ways to test what I know. Doing what everyone already knows gives me no pleasure.

In particular I like producing something that is useful to someone. Whether it’s a post or a talk that helped someone learn something, or a work opportunity someone can use for their own goals, or a project a client can use to reach their goals.

Deep down, I have the impression that if I could summarize it, I love and am passionate not about the “what” I do but the “how” I do it. Especially when there are obstacles in what would be the “ideal how” and how I can solve that problem to reach the “what.” The “what” isn’t the part that interests me most.

The phrase “Do what you love” is always taken as “Do ‘only’ what you love,” and what I wanted to summarize was: “Don’t do ‘only’ what you ’think’ you love.” That’s all.

My only inviolable principle is to live through voluntary exchanges for mutual benefit. That’s why nothing I say is absolute and inviolable truth, but rather teachings on how to think, how to counter-argue, how to be conscious, how to be an individual who doesn’t live by others’ clichés. I don’t want blind followers in the same way that I don’t want and don’t need charismatic idols to follow.

I hope this can be my legacy.