How to do what you love

How many people do you know who really love what they do? How many people would keep on doing what they do even if there was no pay? I bet there aren’t so many such people, are there?

But yet, we are always told that to really excel at something, you need to love doing it and be passionate about it. How do we get there, how do we find such things?

An interesting and practical way to do what you love is to “keep producing”. For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? Or are you waiting for that undefined moment in time when you can *start*? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate.

“Always produce” is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you’re supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof. (Paul Graham)

So that’s my advice to you, don’t wait till God-knows-when to start doing what you love. Do you even know what you love? How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions. That’s why you need to start doing something, anything. “Always Produce” until you find something that really tickles your fancy.