"Find what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life"

There’s a problem with this quote. Like all platitudes — e.g. time heals all wounds, love is all you need, etc. — it’s true but not helpful to getting there. These quotes are always spoken by people who’ve achieved them but can’t articulate how, or those who haven’t yet and need t reason to hold on to hope. This post goes past the platitude (although not by much!) and hopefully brings some useful visibility on the way to never working a day in your life.

The main thing is we’re really good at finding what we love, but bad at doing it long enough to make it our livelihood. Understandably too, become good enough that people will pay you enough requires skill. People pay good money for experts; they pay little to no money for amateurs.

So what does it take to become an expert – there are four stages as I see it:

1. The excitement of the new

You’ve found something that captures your imagination and attention; you want to learn everything you can about it. Excitement is your fuel and you burn it liberally. Everything feels natural and effortless.

2. The Desert of Mediocrity

A few months of voracious learning and play has past and your progress slows. You’ve tried a few things that didn’t go well; you’ve seen complexities you didn’t know existed; and you’ve met people that are so good they seem like aliens. A doubt about whether you can cut it is creeping in. You’re in the desert of mediocrity… a long, miserable slog of thousands of hours where you don’t seem to improve and make regular mistakes, while working harder than ever. All the excitement from those early days is a distant memory and you question whether it’s worth continuing at all. This is where most people quit and find something else (so they can go back to the exciting and fun Stage 1).

3. Emergence into proficiency

You’ve survived the multi-year, 10,000hr trek through the desert of mediocrity and finally emerge into proficiency! Seemingly overnight, you find yourself thinking, “Damn, I’m pretty good at this!” Your day-to-day work feels easier, your intuition is right more often then not, and you’re making connections you never saw before. People even compliment your work, something that didn’t happen in the desert years. And because you understand your craft, your strengths and weaknesses, and have a friends that can help, you’re able to get better quicker than ever. It feels like those early days again.

4. The joy of sharpening

By the time you reach this final stage, you’ve been doing the work for many years. You’re a grizzled veteran, confident in your accomplishments. There isn’t much you haven’t seen but you still appreciate the depth of your craft and know you could live another lifetime and still not learn everything. That brings you peace of mind so you set some new challenges, mentor some people coming up through the desert, and smile to yourself as you tell them, “Find what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life."