I’ve heard so often that you shouldn’t pick a career doing something that you love, because then you’ll just get tired of it. Well I think that if you could get tired of something so easily that you must never have really loved it in the first place. At most you might have strongly liked it; it might have been something like a childhood crush. You grow up from things like that.
There’s a difference right there, between liking and loving. Let’s say you fall in love with someone and spend your life with them. You grow old together. You support and cherish each other. That’s love. That’s passion. You don’t get bored with that.
It’s the same for your work life. You can have a job, or you can have a career; and it all boils down to one thing.
It’s all about passion. You have to be passionate about it. That’s the whole point. Let’s say that you want to make good work as a designer. Well there are thousands of designers out there that can put out good work. That’s a fact. You can do good work and get by, but you can’t have great work without passion. Passion is what’s important. Passion is what helps you make that turn from just good to great.
I don’t agree with the mindset of doing something you don’t love and saving your passions for the weekend. Thinking that if you do something sparingly that you won’t get tired with it.
Weekends are for hobbies, not passions.
Sure, you could have a job filing paperwork or stocking shelves and get by. I’ve done it. I didn’t love it. The idea that you do that to get by and then deal with your passions on the nights or weekends, that just doesn’t work for me. If you have the opportunity to do what you love, then you should do it. Don’t put off your passion. If you are truly passionate about doing something, then you will always want to get better at doing that something. Procrastination will be the death of your passion.
Once you start telling yourself that “I’ll just do it tomorrow,” you start a domino effect. Work to get better today, or things will always get put off until tomorrow. If you are truly and honestly passionate about something, then keep getting better at it.
You are always going to be learning. And the honest truth is, you can never be the best. Because no matter how good you get at doing something, there will always be someone who can do it a little bit better, or a little bit faster or with a little more style. But the courage to not give up, not quitting and continuing to learn; that determination will keep you at the forefront of your passions.
If you’re passionate about art and design, well here’s the beauty of that: there’s so much of it. There are so many different areas of art and design. And what’s even better is that most of it can be interrelated. You can be a web designer and have a passion for photography and those work together beautifully. You can be a screen-printer and love typography and those go together. You can be passionate about designing websites, and you can do that for a career. And then, you can go home and want to learn more about screen-printing and do that as well.
That’s being passionate about design. You’re keeping things together and chasing your dreams every moment you can, and that’s beautiful.
But you have to do things. You can’t just dream them. An dream without a plan is just a dream. You might feel strongly about it in the morning, but you’ll be lucky to even remember what it was about by the next day. Success requires action.
Now when I say success, I don’t mean million dollar homes, fancy suits and fast cars. That’s wealth. Wealth is a goal. Success is a dream. Success may breed wealth, but they’re not the same.
Let’s say you want to learn how to screen print. You get access to some equipment. You coat your screens and after some trial and error you figure out the right amount of time to expose the screen for. You wash it out and try to make a print but it sucks.
You just failed.
But you do the whole process again. And you might not get it the second time or the third time; but eventually you do. You get the exposure times right, you wash out the screens correctly and you make a beautiful print. That feeling that you get from accomplishing that feat, that is success. And you didn’t get there by chance. You got there because you didn’t give up. You didn’t let failure scare you. You were determined. You were passionate.
That’s what it takes. You have to set goals. You have to follow your dreams, not just let them follow you. If you want to be good at something, then put forth a little effort and you can be good. That’s all dandy. But if you want to be a great designer, or a great chef, or a great athlete, or analyst, or musician; if you want to be great at something, you have to have a relationship with that something. You have to want the ups and accept the downs. You have to try and you have to fail sometimes. You have to put aside ego and you have to love that thing. You have to have a passion for that thing. Whatever it is, once you have that passion, that’s when you become great.
