"You've Gotta Do What You Love"

It seems like so many people in my world right now are coming up with statements along the lines of the above. I recognize that it's really good advice - and a few of them even have helpful suggestions of how you go about doing that -- most center on following your dream and figuring out what inspires you or determining what you would be happy doing for free. However, good advice aside, I have to say my response is rather Office Space...if I never had to work, what would I do? Nothing. And it would most likely be everything I thought it could be.

Don't get me wrong, I know that I'd end up doing a lot, it just probably wouldn't all be centered on one thing. I don't think I'd end up satisfied just sitting on my tail watching tv all day. But I probably would read a lot. Are there jobs for professional readers? (Dunno - maybe that's what an editor at a publishing company does, to some extent, but you have to do so much more like layout and grammar collection and reviews and...that's not that part of reading that I like. I just like reading.)

The other thing that amuses me slightly about these people's advice is that they then go on to tell you to hire people to do all the minutia of life - you know, clean the house, file for you, all the stuff you don't want to do and that you don't really have time to do because you're busy chasing your dreams. But what about those people? Is it really someone's dream to come and clean my house? Or file my papers? Maybe it is...but I think I would live in perpetual fear that my paper filer would listen to one of my CDs or read one of my books about doing what you love and decide to go out and do what they love and then I'm back filing my own papers. Or trying to find someone else who hasn't yet reached enlightenment to come do it for me.

And one other thing that amuses me about this is that clearly the advice is working out for the people who are giving it. Because they enjoy telling people how to achieve their dreams etc, etc. And that's what they're getting paid lots and lots to do. So what happens if we all take their advice and don't need their books and CDs anymore? Hopefully they have a backup plan. Well, maybe they don't need one - will we ever actually reach a point where there are no more dissatisfied workers?

So maybe what I need to do is learn to dream again, because right now I don't have an all inspiring dream. I know that what I'm doing right now isn't what I want to be doing in five years, but I don't have anything to replace it with, because life has conspired to systematically extinguish the possibility of all the things I thought I would be doing with my life by this point.

Maybe the real key though is to just learn to love what you do, whether or not it's what you set out to do when you were trying to figure out how to do what you love.