Written in 2014, while I was running a home care business and a senior care advisory franchise.
I’ve heard it said over and over that if you do what you love, it will seem right, and you’ll do better in your career. It’s worth noting that you are going to spend a large percentage of your waking hours working. If that work makes you miserable, the quality of your life is going to be very different from what it would be doing something you love.
One of the reasons I started my companies is that I began focusing on what I like doing, and what I’m good at. I also started thinking about what I don’t like doing. And I found some interesting opportunities I realised were available, and seized them.
Do you do what you love?
Entrepreneurship is hard work, and frequently involves long hours. It is not unusual for me to spend 16 to 20 hours a day working. The upside is that I’m able to work when it’s convenient for my family, and move my schedule around their needs. If I didn’t like what I was doing, it would frankly be miserable. But I like what I’m doing — even if my daughter says I don’t have a “real” job.
I recognise that I’m making a difference in people’s lives with the work we’re doing. We’re doing things the way we think is right, by treating people the way they’d like to be treated. We follow through on our promises, and follow up to see how the client is doing. And it makes me happy.
Entrepreneurship is sweat and tears and hours and hours of work. But it’s worth it, and it’s something I love.
What I’d add now
Two things about that, written years later, and the first is uncomfortable.
Sixteen to twenty hours a day is not a badge. I wrote that as evidence of how much I loved the work. It’s also a description of a business that could not run without me being in it constantly, and that is a structural fact rather than a measure of commitment.
Loving the work is precisely what makes that easy to miss. If you hated it, twenty-hour days would register as the emergency they are. Because you love it, they register as dedication, and years pass.
The founders I know who eventually got out from under it did not love the work less. They noticed that “I’m the only one who can do this” had stopped being temporary.
And “do what you love” is incomplete advice. The version that holds up is narrower: do something you don’t mind doing badly at first, for people whose problems you find genuinely interesting, in a business model that can survive without you personally doing every hour of it.
That’s less quotable. It’s also the difference between a business and a job you invented for yourself.
Where the original still holds
The underlying point survives, and I’d defend it.
You will spend most of your waking life at this. That arithmetic doesn’t change. Work you actively dislike is a very expensive way to fund a life you enjoy in the gaps.
Knowing what you don’t like is the more useful half. The original mentions it in passing and it deserves more. Most people have a vague sense of what they’d love and a very precise sense of what they dread. The precise list is more actionable — it tells you what to delegate first, what kind of client to stop taking, and which opportunities to decline no matter how good they look on paper.
And meaning genuinely sustains you through the hard parts. Believing the work matters is what gets you through the years when it isn’t paying properly. That’s real, and it isn’t sentimentality.
The better question
Not “do you love what you do” — which tends to produce either guilt or defensiveness.
Try these instead:
- What part of this week would you happily do again? If nothing, that’s information.
- What did you dread? That’s your delegation list, in priority order.
- If this business ran perfectly without you for a month, would you be relieved or lost? Both answers are worth knowing about yourself.
Loving your work is a genuine advantage. It just isn’t a substitute for building something that doesn’t require all of you, all the time — and the risk is that loving it delays the moment you notice.
What about you? Have you created a career for yourself that you love?
