how to do what you love

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To do something well, u have to like it.That idea is not exactly novel.We've got it down to 4 words: "Do what u love".But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what u love is complicated. The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had 2 states; some of the time adults were making u do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time u could do what u wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made u do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't - for example, if u fell and hurt urself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much definec as not fun. And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, it was tedious bcoz it was preparation for grownup work. The world then was divided into 2 groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didnt, but they did have to go to school,which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy. Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? For the same reason, they had to watch over a bunch of kids instead of lying on a beach. U couldnt juz do what u wanted. I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later. Once, when I was about 10 or 11, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely becoz it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didnt think he meant work could literally be fun - fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that...=)