do what you love

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The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

For money to follow “Do what you love,” your love must solve a need and you must be exceptional at it. “Do what you love” sets the stage for crowded marketplaces with depressed margins. When you have the financial resources, you can “do what you love” and not get paid for it, nor do you have to be good at it. Slowlaners feed “do what you love” with “do what you hate.” Five days of hate for two days of love. “Doing what you love” for money can endanger your love. Passion for an end goal, a why, drives Fastlane success. Having a passionate “why” can transform work into joy. “Doing what you love” usually leads to the violation of the Commandment of Need.

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Offer the world value, and money becomes magnetized to you! “Do What You Love” and Die as You Do Beware of another guru-speak: “Do what you love and the money will follow!” Bullshit. That is, unless you want to violate the Commandment of Need. “Do what you love” is another mythical decree perpetrated by hypocritical gurus and so-called life coaches who are probably three clients away from broke. Sadly, the road of “do what you love” rarely converges with wealth. In fact, it might lead you down a road to destructive love. If you're like me, “do what you love” was never an option. Think about what you love and then think, will someone pay for it?

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He pays “do what you hate” with a weekend of boating, which is his “do what you love.” Then other people negotiate with “do what you love” into an alternative, or a derivative. For example, Pauline loves to knit, so she sells her knitting online. Jose loves automotive audio so he opens a car stereo shop. Janice loves to sculpt and sells her works at the local gallery. Gary is an avid bodybuilder so he becomes a personal trainer. There are two dangers to derivatives: They don't make money fast. They endanger the love. First, “do what you love” rarely creates money fast because more than likely, not only are YOU doing what you love but thousands of others love doing the same thing too (just tune into the first-week auditions for American Idol for proof).

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

The shittier the work, the higher the chances it gets affixed with a “cool” job title and ad—a means of convincing the applicant that an uncool job is indeed desirable and thus worth accepting the barely livable wage. That’s the logic of “Do what you love” in action. Of course, no worker asks their employer to value them less, but the rhetoric of “Do what you love” makes asking to be valued seem like the equivalent of unsportsmanlike conduct. Doing what you love “exposes its adherents to exploitation, justifying unpaid or underpaid work by throwing workers’ motivations back at them,” Tokumitsu argues, “when passion becomes the socially accepted motivation for working, talk of wages or responsible scheduling becomes crass.”3 Take the example of Elizabeth, who identifies as a white Latina and grew up middle class in Florida.

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Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017). 7. Ibid. 4. Do What You Love and You’ll Still Work Every Day for the Rest of Your Life 1. Amanda Mull, “America’s Job Listings Have Gone Off the Deep End,” Atlantic, June 13, 2019. 2. Ibid. 3. Miya Tokumitsu, Do What You Love: And Others Lies About Success and Happiness (New York: Regan Arts, 2015), 7. 4. Sara Robinson, “Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity,” Alternet, March 13, 2012. 5. Tokumitsu, Do What You Love, 7. 6. Ibid., 113. 7. “Great Recession, Great Recovery? Trends from the Current Population Survey,” U.S.

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There is just one long Möbius strip of a person pouring their entire self into a “lovable” job, with the expectation that doing so will bring both happiness and financial stability. As the artist Adam J. Kurtz rewrote the DWYL maxim on Twitter: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.” Within the framework of “do what you love,” any job can theoretically be lovable, so long as it’s what you, personally, love. But “lovable” jobs, at least in this moment, are visible jobs, jobs that add social and cultural cache, jobs where you work for yourself or with little direct supervision.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Other professions that haven’t regained many of the jobs lost during the recession include architecture, market research, data processing, book publishing, human resources, and finance—all of which either require or tend to attract workers with master’s degrees. Making this squeeze worse, to my mind, was the oft-heard mantra “do what you love”—the exhortation to members of the middle class that they should try to make a living pursuing their dreams. Well-meaning mentors and corporations recited this dictum. I myself have heard it often. Those exhorting others to “do what you love” manage both to look cool and to squeeze more labor out of their workers. This advice is meant to correct old ideas that labor should be dutiful and even servile rather than impassioned.

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Individual security and promise have frayed, wrote the University of Chicago professor Berlant, including “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy,” and yet we still believe we can “have it all” even when America no longer aids us in having our lives and careers “add up to something.” What creative-class members like myself have experienced by “doing what we love” could sometimes be likened to Berlant’s “stupid optimism,” which “is the most disappointing thing of all.” As Miya Tokumitsu wrote in her book Do What You Love: And Other Lies about Success and Happiness, “doing what you love” in America has been so co-opted by corporations to better exploit their workers that it’s a husk. Examples of this abound, from the technology companies to upmarket restaurant chains and stores like Trader Joe’s that all insist their employees are—or act—happy.

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There are also, of course, more subtle types of exploitation, as the adjuncts and schoolteachers and journalists who have gone down the virtual garden path of “loving their work” well know. They might, in time, find themselves forced by their professions to work for almost nothing, all in the name of pursuing their avocation. There is something uncomfortably classist in the insistence on doing what you love in the first place, I realized after putting my own “creativity” aside to edit for hire at various points in my life. If the insistence on “doing what you love” comes from a place of privilege, where risks are lower and failure is not the be-all and the end-all, what happens to those who don’t have that privilege? During our current age, what I sometimes think of as “The End of the Middle,” to choose to have children further rocks an unstable structure: we are playing an existential game of Jenga.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

Our attitudes to work are confused in part by being inherited from wildly contradictory traditions—ancient Greece, Puritanism, neoclassical economics. These influence the kinds of work we value, or whether we view a particular activity as ‘work’ at all. For instance, the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ exhortation to ‘Do what you love, and love what you do’ is a prime example. In an essay for the online magazine Jacobin, Miya Tokumitsu pointed to this mantra as a pernicious aspiration that manages to both exalt and undermine work, implying that the only really valuable labour is the enjoyable and satisfying (and photogenic) N.

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Craig (eds.), Work in the Future, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21134-9_8 73 74 N. Craig kind.1 By implication, if you do happen to love your work, you should want to do it all the time. You shouldn’t, of course, be so mercenary as to expect to be paid for it. In one sense the slogan of ‘Do what you love’ reflects the split between ‘labour’ and ‘work’ that Hannah Arendt identified, tracing the etymologies back to Greek conceptions of work and life.2 ‘Labour’, she said, is the endless, necessary work required to keep human life running smoothly: growing and preparing food; cleaning and fixing; bearing children and raising them.

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Slaves and women needed to labour and artisans needed to work so that citizens could be free from the daily grind and participate in a more fulfilling political life. Arendt herself, while not as dismissive as the Greeks were of labour, argued that in a consumer society, everyone becomes a labourer rather than a worker, since everyone is only working in order to keep consuming. Doing work for its own sake makes you a worker, rather than a labourer. ‘Do What You Love’, then, performs a similar sleight of hand: by ignoring the constant, unavoidable labour that goes into maintaining life, and concentrating only on those individuals lucky enough to be working out of enthusiasm, it manages to make most of the world of work disappear. The Stoic philosophers were the first Western thinkers to break with the Greek ideal and argue that hard work could be valuable and noble in itself.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

For years, Adam had depended on the circle of friends and family who populated WeWork’s senior ranks. His brother-in-law was the company’s COO; his cousin-in-law was its head of real estate; his navy friend was its first CFO. Rebekah herself had become more involved when it came to WeWork’s branding, developing its new logo and coming up with some of its slogans, like DO WHAT YOU LOVE. Adam admitted that he especially liked hiring his countrymen when he could. In meetings, he regularly switched to Hebrew when he wanted to convey something to the Israelis in the room; one WeWork executive joked about buying Rosetta Stone for his team. But WeWork had grown beyond the expertise of some of the employees whose primary qualification for their jobs was loyalty.

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only to miss the final question about Plutarch.) Real estate was a dirty game, and if there was an objection to Adam, it wasn’t that his tactics were especially dastardly, but that he was pretending to be something he wasn’t. WeWork’s warpath mentality undercut its rhetoric about changing the world and doing what you love, which had attracted members and employees to the business in the first place. Avril Mulcahy, the owner of a coworking space in London, decided to shut down rather than battle a new WeWork that opened next to her at five times the size. “Their emergence in our building did make a question that had been lurking in the corners for a while very obvious,” Mulcahy wrote.

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Lord & Taylor had opened the space in 1914 as an early version of what Adam now imagined for his own buildings, with a gym, a school, and a dentist for the department store’s employees. WeWork planned to put its new headquarters in the building; a rendering of the potential renovation replaced the cursive Lord & Taylor marquee on the exterior with a sign reading DO WHAT YOU LOVE. The plan for WeWork Property Advisors called for raising money from investors to help WeWork buy buildings. The team setting up the fund hoped to raise $1 billion. Adam had a better idea: Why not $100 billion? It would be a Vision Fund for buildings, and instantly among the largest such piles of money in the world.

How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents by Jimmy O. Yang

call centre, do what you love, Erlich Bachman, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Jian Yang, Peter Gregory, Richard Hendricks, Silicon Valley, Uber for X, Vanguard fund

Stephen Chow was my Hong Kong version of the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy and Peter Sellers. My dad RICH-ard, my brother Roger, aka Roy, my mom Ah-Mee and Jimmy the washed-up Ping Pong star. HOW TO PURSUE YOUR DREAMS WITH ASIAN PARENTS In America, people always tell me: “Money can’t buy happiness. Do what you love.” In my Chinese family, my dad always tells me: “Pursuing your dreams is for losers. Doing what you love is how you become homeless.” The most important values in American culture are independence and freedom. The most important values in Chinese culture are family and obedience. And by no choice of my own, I am caught in between the two worlds.

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He left the job that everyone told him he should do to become one of the most successful comedic voices in America. That speech spoke to my lost, hungover college self. I couldn’t imagine wasting my life away at a job based on an economics degree I never cared for, but I was too afraid to find my passion. I could hear my dad saying, “Doing what you love is how you become homeless.” Finding a passion seemed as unrealistic as the Yellow Panthers winning a Grammy. Mike’s commencement speech gave me the permission that my parents never gave me; it gave me the permission to quit what others thought I should do and find something I was truly passionate about.

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I’d save up enough money to go to either Denny’s or pig out at HomeTown Buffet once a month. Maybe Guam was right about trying to win the lottery. I was praying for a car to plow into me so I could get some insurance settlement. My dad was right all along: “Pursuing your dreams is for losers. Doing what you love is how you become homeless.” I approached one of the managers at the Comedy Palace about my dire financial situation, hoping he’d give me a raise from seven fifty to eight dollars an hour. “Jimmy, you’re great, but there are plenty of desperate comedians out there who would kill for minimum wage,” he frankly explained to me.

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”57 The only way to do great work is to love what you do, and to do what you love. Countless other entrepreneurs and innovators have confirmed this deep truth with their own life stories. But how we can create an institutional infrastructure that would allow us to operate from the same deep source on a collective systems level? What we have learned is that the inner principle “do what you love and love what you do” needs to be complemented by an outer principle of deep immersion in the world, particularly a deep immersion in the marginalized edges of our world, with the practice of “always being in dialogue with the universe,” as Alan Webber, the founder of the journal Fast Company, puts it.

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The third attack happens in the workplace in the form of management incentives, tying bonus payments to targets, and other best practices that are taught in business schools and that, as research tell us, kill creativity in the organization.19 These practices poison all real creativity because they disconnect what we do for a living (our work) from what we really care about (our Work or passion). All great inventors, creators, and entrepreneurs, all great social activists, share the same inner journey and source of satisfaction: loving what you do and doing what you love. That, according to the late Steve Jobs, arguably a good example of a Working entrepreneur, “is the only way to do great work.”20 It is recognizing the connection to this deep source of knowing that can help us in moments when all other navigation instruments fail. 4. Relinking work and entrepreneurship.

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When such a moment occurs, stay with it, connect with it, and then act from the now—that is, from what wants to emerge. Put differently, when you find yourself beginning to connect with a significant future opportunity, first say yes, then do it, and only then ask whether it’s possible. 5. Follow your heart—do what you love, love what you do. As we’ve noted, Steve Jobs once said the only way to do our best work is to do what we love and to love what we do. It’s the only reliable way to connect to our emerging future path. Make sure that at least some of the projects and activities in your portfolio are things you love doing.

Mind Over Clutter by Nicola Lewis

do what you love, high net worth, Mason jar, microplastics / micro fibres, TED Talk

You really can achieve anything you put your mind to. If I can do it, so can you. 10 ways to . . . be happy and feel good It’s easy to feel good about yourself and your life if you start counting your blessings, follow your dream and get organised. Here are some ideas to inspire you: 1. DO WHAT YOU LOVE There is a lot of truth in the sentiment that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. If you’re unhappy and can’t find a new job, try to shift your focus and look for the positives in your current one. At the very least, do one thing you enjoy every day. 2. FOLLOW YOUR DREAM Dream big. Since starting TGCO in 2017 I have had the best time!

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And that’s the way it stayed until one blessed day when my whole team was called into the office – senior management and HR (human resources) at one end and the rest of us at the other – and it was announced that in December 2016 we would all be made redundant as our jobs were going overseas to India. And that was it! Strangely, I felt quite calm. It was almost a relief and I remember thinking to myself: this is God’s plan; this is your time, Nicola, to really do something for you. You need to be happy and this is your opportunity to earn money doing what you love. I’d always told my children that we should only do what makes us happy and had never listened to my own advice, but now the time had come. I felt liberated walking out of Canary Wharf that day and into the future. I was so excited to be leaving – finally, to have the opportunity to do something new and totally different.

Work Less, Live More: The Way to Semi-Retirement by Robert Clyatt

asset allocation, backtesting, buy and hold, currency risk, death from overwork, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, eat what you kill, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial independence, fixed income, future of work, independent contractor, index arbitrage, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, rising living standards, risk/return, Silicon Valley, The 4% rule, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

261 How Work Evolves in Semi-Retirement..................................................................262 More Money in Less Time.........................................................................................263 Cutting Ties to Past Work.........................................................................................263 Being Paid for Doing What You Love..................................................................264 An Illustration of the Evolution.............................................................................266 Making the Shift...................................................................................................................267 Have Patience...................................................................................................................267 Decide How Much to Work.....................................................................................267 Take a Sabbatical............................................................................................................270 Start Back Slowly............................................................................................................271 Common Work Options for Semi-Retirees...........................................................272 The Filler Job.....................................................................................................................272 The Avocation.................................................................................................................273 Your Former Job, But Less of It...............................................................................275 Consulting or Freelancing.........................................................................................276 Dealer, Agent, or Broker.............................................................................................278 Angel Investing................................................................................................................280 Real Estate..........................................................................................................................283 Innkeeping.........................................................................................................................286 Artist or Creative Worker..........................................................................................287 Hobby Turned Business..............................................................................................289 Teaching..............................................................................................................................291 260 | Work Less, Live More Unpaid Work Alternatives..............................................................................................292 Volunteering.....................................................................................................................293 Other Unpaid Opportunities..................................................................................296 Finding New Activities......................................................................................................298 Travel....................................................................................................................................298 Recreate...............................................................................................................................300 Get Healthy.......................................................................................................................301 Learn.....................................................................................................................................301 chapter 6 | Do Anything You Want, But Do Something | 261 I n semi-retirement, “work” can be defined as the things you enjoy doing that keep your brain fresh, activities in which people count on you or in which you develop and exercise your unique skills.

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In your still ample free time, you can dig more deeply into some personal interests—perhaps taking classes, earning certificates, or otherwise retooling yourself for a new field of work. You are starting to be guided in work choices by your intuition that speaks to core values and passions. Being Paid for Doing What You Love Those who become proficient in new areas of interest usually come to trust that there may be a way to earn some income through them and gradually switch to seeking them. If you are in this stage, you may notice that your relationship to money has begun to change. Perhaps your financial portfolio has grown while this process has been occurring, giving you a bit more breathing room.

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And you may begin to spend your days doing the activities that are not only meaningful to you, but in which you now have skills, contacts, credibility, and experience. From this base, you have truly begun to experience the promise of semi-retirement. With luck, over time, additional income-generating possibilities will arise in these emerging areas of interest. But income will have stopped being the defining driver in your thinking; now, you would rather do what you love and live within the income you can comfortably derive from it. You’ve arrived at a place of wholeness, where in some mysterious way your wide-ranging activities, friendships, and interests seem to reinforce each other. You couldn’t imagine trying to earn your income in a way that wasn’t consistent with the evolving understanding of who you are and how you should best spend your time.

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

The freer people are to earn as much as they can and keep it, the more likely it is that everyone will have the opportunity to make a living from his own unique skills and intelligence. Don’t misunderstand me—doing what you love will not be fun all the time. Nothing worthwhile is ever easy. Pursuing your passion, you surely will encounter obstacles and criticism. And it’s not the work of a day: you will have to work long and hard to discover and develop your talent. But here’s the great news: as the United States and the rest of the world advance economically, rising prosperity makes it increasingly likely that you will have the opportunity to do what you love. And the greatest gift of prosperity, beyond freedom from material want, is work that is engaging, absorbing, fulfilling—work that doesn’t feel like work.

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It was a dream, and I’m forever grateful to Chris McEvoy (National Review) and Nick Schulz (Tech-CentralStation) for giving me a chance to opine on economics as “a writer based in Washington, D.C.” Cato wasn’t interested in employing me as a policy analyst, and no one else seemed to be either. That stung too, but if you’re doing what you love it’s important to embrace the snubs. That’s what I did. If no one thought me worthy, I’d prove them wrong. The more I wrote, the more notice I achieved. In 2006, one of my heroes, Steve Forbes, cited me as a “monetary expert” in his influential magazine column.3 Not long after that, David DesRosiers of the Manhattan Institute asked me to consider succeeding him as director of fundraising there.

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose by Nik Halik, Garrett B. Gunderson

Airbnb, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, business process, clean water, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Ethereum, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, gamification, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Isaac Newton, Kaizen: continuous improvement, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, market fundamentalism, microcredit, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Skype, solopreneur, subscription business, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, traveling salesman, uber lyft

As a 5 Day Weekender, you reinvent yourself and break through your financial glass ceiling. You generate your own income doing what you love. You don’t hand your money over to someone else to manage, where your risk is high and you have little or no control. Rather, you stay in control of your own money to reduce your risk and dramatically increase your cash flow and profitability. Instead of accumulating over long periods of time, you leverage and utilize to create exponentially greater returns. You’re not working for money. You’re working for the freedom of a 5 Day Weekend lifestyle. Are you doing what you love? Have you built a life you don’t need a vacation from?

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As you create more choices and more free time, you can spend your life in ways that provide your greatest joy, achieve your grandest goals, and share your abundance with your community. You are free to fully live your highest purpose. You crush the word “someday” and do the things you’ve always dreamed of doing today. You stop wishing and start truly living. The ultimate quantification of success is not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate. Most people work for their money. I’m going to show you how to get your money working for you. “There is no small passion to be found playing small — in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” —NELSON MANDELA CHAPTER 2 NEW MINDSET, MORE FREEDOM Retirement.

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You’re not lacking anything you need to succeed. Everything you need is already inside you, just awaiting activation by your unwavering commitment to a goal. Every resource you ever need will come to you as you commit wholeheartedly, work diligently, think creatively, and initiate boldly. “Doing what you love is the cornerstone of having abundance in your life.” —WAYNE DYER CHAPTER 13 EXPLORING ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAS The world has changed drastically and fundamentally. In the Information Age, technology, communication, and a global economy have democratized opportunity like never before.

Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff by Dinah Sanders

A. Roger Ekirch, Atul Gawande, big-box store, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, clean water, clockwatching, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, credit crunch, do what you love, endowment effect, Firefox, game design, Inbox Zero, income per capita, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Kevin Kelly, late fees, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Merlin Mann, Open Library, post-work, side project, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand

Didn't you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value? And that the sort of pleasure which the book and the walk gave him was the most dangerous of all? That it would peel off from his sensibility the kind of crust you have been forming on it, and make him feel that he was coming home, recovering himself?” Do what you love whenever you can. Even if the busyness of life only gives you a few minutes—my sympathies to you new parents out there—make good use of it and don’t put off activities that matter to you. Read a chapter of a book, practice that guitar, cuddle with your sweetheart, plant a few bulbs in the garden, or look through the bulb catalog and think about what you'd like to get—whatever feeds your soul.

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Third, note the commitments you made to other people and social possibilities you'd already been considering that still sound appealing. Now, build a day that has all three represented, with adequate time between so you don’t feel rushed. I recommend cutting from piece three to ensure you get enough of piece one. You can’t do everything, so do what you love most, what helps you avoid hassles, and what keeps you connected with those who matter to you. Of course it’s hard to have those perfect days, especially when you’re first starting out, but know what they look like so you can steer the days you do have toward them. Prime your pump When your energy is low or you’re recovering from a big disruption in your normal routine, try the advice of writer and minimalist Erin Doland: “Schedule the task you will feel the greatest reward from accomplishing first.

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We have traded presents for presence. Symptom #29: No Home Position Solution #29: A Room of One’s Own A house is a machine to live in and from which all superfluous and irritating ornaments should be banished. —A. L. Sadler, professor of oriental studies Does your home support you in doing what you love? As you focus on only the best parts of the holidays, take some time to mull over what you love to do now and in general: Are you planning to get out and do some backpacking this year? Think about where you keep your equipment. If it’s buried in the basement or the back of a closet, or scattered around the place, store it in a more convenient and organized way so you don't have a roadblock to getting out of town.

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, digital nomad, do what you love, fixed income, follow your passion, if you build it, they will come, index card, informal economy, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, late fees, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, price anchoring, Ralph Waldo Emerson, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, web application

Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Guillebeau, Chris. The $100 startup : reinvent the way you make a living, do what you love, and create a new future / by Chris Guillebeau. p. cm. 1. New business enterprises—Management. 2. Entrepreneurship. I. Title. II. Title: One hundred dollar startup. HD62.5.G854 2012 658.1′1—dc23 2012003093 eISBN: 978-0-307-95154-0 Illustrations: Mike Rohde Jacket design: Michael Nagin Jacket photography: Comstock/Getty Images v3.1 This book is for: those who take action and those who provide the inspiration ROAD MAP Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication PROLOGUE: Manifesto A short guide to everything you want.

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HD62.5.G854 2012 658.1′1—dc23 2012003093 eISBN: 978-0-307-95154-0 Illustrations: Mike Rohde Jacket design: Michael Nagin Jacket photography: Comstock/Getty Images v3.1 This book is for: those who take action and those who provide the inspiration ROAD MAP Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication PROLOGUE: Manifesto A short guide to everything you want. PART I UNEXPECTED ENTREPRENEURS 1. Renaissance You already have the skills you need—you just have to know where to look. 2. Give Them the Fish How to put happiness in a box and sell it. 3. Follow Your Passion … Maybe Get paid to do what you love by making sure it connects to what other people want. 4. The Rise of the Roaming Entrepreneur “Location, location, location” is overrated. 5. The New Demographics Your customers all have something in common, but it has nothing to do with old-school categories. PART II TAKING IT TO THE STREETS 6.

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Most people want more of some things (money, love, attention) and less of other things (stress, anxiety, debt). Always focus on what you can add or take away to improve someone’s life … and then prepare to get paid. *See the “Fish Stories” appendix at the back of the book for twenty-five more examples of how to reframe a descriptive concept as a benefit-driven story. GET PAID TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE BY MAKING SURE IT CONNECTS TO WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WANT. “Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.” —RALPH WALDO EMERSON Like many of us, Gary Leff begins his day with email. As a CFO for two university research centers in northern Virginia, he’s in touch with colleagues from morning to night.

Your Money: The Missing Manual by J.D. Roth

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, book value, buy and hold, buy low sell high, car-free, Community Supported Agriculture, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, estate planning, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, index card, index fund, John Bogle, late fees, lifestyle creep, low interest rates, mortgage tax deduction, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, passive investing, Paul Graham, random walk, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, speech recognition, stocks for the long run, traveling salesman, Vanguard fund, web application, Zipcar

Or should you focus simply on the money? In his essay on how to do what you love (www.paulgraham.com/love.html), Paul Graham writes: Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically there. Some folks claim that if you do what you love, the money will follow. Others say that a job is just a job—you're not meant to like it.

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Some can't stand working for somebody else. Others see it as an opportunity to make more money. And a few recognize it as a way to do work they're passionate about. Working for yourself can be freeing, increase your income, and let you focus on doing what you love. But as wonderful as self-employment is, there are plenty of pitfalls. The Pros and Cons of Entrepreneurship There's a big difference between doing what you love as a hobby and having it for a job. When you make a little money from your hobby (see Money-Making Hobbies), that's extra income, which is part of the fun. But when you flip the switch and it becomes your sole means of making a living, some of that fun vanishes—sometimes all of it disappears.

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Money-Making Hobbies Even if you're not interested in owning a business that you work at full time, a small-scale venture might be right for you. Why not build a business around one of your hobbies? You won't get rich by playing your violin at weddings or weaving baskets, but it never hurts to earn a little extra cash from things you'd do anyhow. This section suggests some key ways to make money from your hobbies. Do what you love Choose a hobby you enjoy, and then try to find a way to make money from it. Don't dive into a hobby simply because it might be profitable. You should do this thing because you love it; any income should be secondary. Keep it fun and it won't become a chore. Example: I love to write. When I was struggling with debt, I read personal finance books, and then summarized what I'd learned on my website.

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

adjacent possible, Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, deal flow, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, web application, winner-take-all economy

We’ll also return to Thomas, who after his dispiriting realization at the monastery was able to return to his first principles, move his focus away from finding the right work and toward working right, and eventually build, for the first time in his life, a love for what he does. This is the happiness that you, too, should demand. It’s my hope that the insights that follow will free you from simplistic catchphrases like “follow your passion” and “do what you love”—the type of catchphrases that have helped spawn the career confusion that afflicts so many today—and instead, provide you with a realistic path toward a meaningful and engaging working life. RULE #1 Don’t Follow Your Passion Chapter One The “Passion” of Steve Jobs In which I question the validity of the passion hypothesis, which says that the key to occupational happiness is to match your job to a pre-existing passion.

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About a third of the way into the address, Jobs offered the following advice: You’ve got to find what you love…. [T]he only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. When he finished, he received a standing ovation. Though Jobs’s address contained several different lessons, his emphasis on doing what you love was the clear standout. In the official press release describing the event, for example, Stanford’s news service reported that Jobs “urged graduates to pursue their dreams.” Soon after, an unofficial video of the address was posted on YouTube, where it went viral, gathering over 3.5 million views.

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This is where you find titles like Escape from Cubicle Nation, which, as one review described it, “teaches the tricks behind finding what makes you purr.” These books, as well as the thousands of full-time bloggers, professional counselors, and self-proclaimed gurus who orbit these same core issues of workplace happiness, all peddle the same lesson: to be happy, you must follow your passion. As one prominent career counselor told me, “do what you love, and the money will follow” has become the de facto motto of the career-advice field. There is, however, a problem lurking here: When you look past the feel-good slogans and go deeper into the details of how passionate people like Steve Jobs really got started, or ask scientists about what actually predicts workplace happiness, the issue becomes much more complicated.

Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away by Julien Saunders, Kiersten Saunders

barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, digital divide, diversification, do what you love, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, index fund, job automation, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lifestyle creep, Lyft, microaggression, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, passive income, passive investing, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, side hustle, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, work culture , young professional

We had to get really honest with ourselves: the direction we were headed in would never help us get out of a cycle of working for others and giving up our financial futures to a career. To make the kind of progress we were truly envisioning, we had to be willing to think and act differently. Cashing out wasn’t about giving up. It was about letting go. Our self-reflection ultimately led us to five compelling reasons to cash out. 1 | More Time to Do What You Love If we asked you to make a list of what was most important in your life, we’re willing to bet family and community would be near the top of the list. We’re no different, and like you we struggled to make the connection between how we managed our time amid a growing list of competing priorities.

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., 198 O opportunities, evaluating, 129–30, 129 oppression, exposure to, 210 optimism blind, 62–63, 158 as motivator for difficult tasks, 194 options trading, 114 Orman, Suze, 155 ourrichjourney.com, 215 P parenthood and childcare costs, 30 uncertainty experienced in, 115 and work-life balance, 30 parents, supporting aging, 10, 70 passive income, 22, 65 paycheck to paycheck, living, 47, 77–78 paying yourself first, 118 PDFs, selling, 136 personality types, financial, 46–52 Fast Spenders type, 48–50, 51, 52, 61, 69 Financially Insecure type, 46–48, 50, 51, 52, 69, 233 the Middle type, 50–52 Pew Research Center, 36, 172–73 phones, faux connectedness from, 25 Playing with FIRE (documentary), 47 The Plug (Dorsey), 133 podcasts and Jannese’s success story, 124 learning about FI through, 217–18 and preferences of audiences, 145 thepointsguy.com, 131 Popcorn Finance (Browning), 218 poshmark.com, 135 positivity, pressure to sustain, 43 poverty and automation threat to employment, 126 cycle of, 47, 234 principles of cashing out, 36–41 embracing stealth wealth, 37–39 prioritizing purpose and community, 40–41 recognizing the Black tax, 39–40 “progress trap,” 64 public.com, 131 public health, negative impacts of work on, 31–32 purchasing power, impact of inflation on, 173 Purple, 91–94, 95 purpose(s) of income, 44–73 asking better questions about, 120 and Black buying power, 52–55 and breaking the consumerism cycle, 45 and financial personality types, 46–52 flexibility, 56, 60–65 freedom, 56, 56, 68–71 independence, 56, 65–68 lack of, 51–52 and retirement, 54–55 rules and richuals for, 72–73 security, 56–60, 56 and sinking funds, 119 Q quality of life, financial components of, 9 questions, asking better, 119–20 R racism, 39–40 “Raising a Family Index” (RAFI), 30 Ramsey, Dave, 155 Ray, Ola, 101–2 real estate agents, 61 real estate investing of authors, 6, 11, 87–88, 142, 143 income from, 22, 86 Kendra’s success story, 85, 86–87 1 percent rule in, 87 “Reality Check: Paycheck-to-Paycheck,” 77 reasons for cashing out freedom from burnout, 31–33 prioritizing family life, 29–30 safety from corporate change, 27–28 success on your terms, 28–29 time to do what you love, 25–26 regret/sacrifice, moments of, 100, 200–201 religious faith, 36–37 restaurants, dining in, 57 retirement difficulty saving for, 59 income’s role in preparing for, 55 lack of successful examples of, 22 and Middle personality type, 51 and pending crisis, 210 See also retirement accounts retirement accounts IRAs (individual retirement accounts), 94, 114 and matching by employers, 156, 176 maxing out, 94, 168 procrastinating on, 154–55 of self-employed, 176 See also 401(k)s; index funds rewarding yourself, 81–82 Rice, Bradley, 212 “richuals” (term), 17 ride-sharing companies, 131 risk managing feelings of, 116 and the myth of full confidence, 113–14 and uncertainty, 116 Rock, Chris, 33 role models, lack of relatable, 68 rounding-up programs at banks, 118–19 S S&P 500 index fund, 161, 163, 173, 230 sacrifice/regret, moments of, 100, 200–201 saving money/savings authors’ rate of, 11 conventional approach to, 226–27 conversations about, 193–94 and labeling people as “savers,” 191 lessons passed to children on, 226–27 low levels of, 4, 45 and Middle personality type, 50 reframing practice of, 193–94 sacrifices made for, 200–201 security as first purpose of income, 56–60, 56 self-care, 32 self-defeatist language, 15 self-doubt, overcoming, 18, 111 self-employment and retirement accounts, 176 self-reliance, 64–65 selling, 137–40 shame/shaming for buying preferences, 61 and defensiveness, 195 overcoming, 18 sharing, 213–14 Shopify, 137 short-term wants/needs, 63 sinking funds, 119 skills, cultivating marketable, 83, 87, 94, 99, 147 Skillshare, 137 slavery, legacy of, 3 snowball method to paying off debt, 80–81, 81 social issues, ability to engage with, 35 social media platforms and content creators, 141–45 FI community on, 216–17, 220–21 gurus/celebrity advisers on, 223 sharing strengths/wins on, 90 Souffrant, Jamila, 217 spending.

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See consumerism and spending standards of living, pressure to uphold, 107 Statista, 63 stealth wealth, 37–39 stock market calculated risks in, 174 downturns in, 98–99, 173–74 and health of economy, 230 historical average returns in, 162–63, 168 index funds’ relationship to, 158–59 and investment clubs, 170 lack of certainty in, 111, 114–16 as wealth-building machine, 16 storage industry, 63–64 strengths, getting feedback on, 89–90 stress, 31–32, 97 struggle, financial, 46–48 student loan debt of authors, 6 average balance of, 76–77 challenge of paying down, 4, 59 as crisis, 210 and Jannese’s success story, 123, 124 success maintaining appearance of, 4 as six-figure salary, 147 on your own terms, 28–29 swagbucks.com, 131 T taboo of talking about money, 12, 38 talentstacker.com, 212 taskrabbit.com, 131 taxes, 165 Teachable, 137 technology advances in, 127 and digital divide, 128 entrepreneurship in, 128–29 and future of wealth, 127–29 and gig economy, 131–34 impact on entrepreneurship, 128–29 income options unlocked by, 139 technological literacy, 128 as threat to employment, 125–26 television, gurus/celebrity advisers on, 155–56, 223 terrorism, domestic, 3 “Thriller” video (Jackson), 101–2 time to do what you love, 25–26 exchanged for wages/salary, 124–27, 138 token integration, 41 Torres-Rodriguez, Jannese, 123–24 Total Stock Market Index Fund (Vanguard), 167, 168 transportation as Big 3 expense, 57, 59 trucking industry, automation in, 126 Twitter, 145 2008 economic downturn, 76, 131–34, 155, 173 U Uber, 131, 135 Umi Feeds (nonprofit), 221–22 universal basic income, 125–26 upside/urgency in entrepreneurial opportunities, 129–37, 129 U.S.

Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good by Kevin Smith

do what you love, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, McJob, Saturday Night Live, short selling, zero-sum game

Made for five million (a nearly five-million-dollar increase from the budget of Clerks), Clerks II was more than just a reunion flick or a trip back to the well, as I called it: It was the last good time. After that, filmmaking would change for me. After that, I’d realize my time as a cinematic storyteller was coming to a close. Because the tough shit is, sometimes you can start out doing what you love, and then doing what you love starts to become work. Twenty years is a long time to do anything, let alone make movies. I’ve gone further than I ever dreamed. The plan back in 1991 had been to make Clerks on credit cards, hoping someone with money would see that we knew how to make a film and in turn reward us with a budget to do a next one.

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Not sure what their endgame’s gonna be, but writing about movies and hosting trailers is a start, right? For some, the endgame will be to make a film. For others, just having people read what they have to say about a subject they love is good enough. Regardless, the smart ones will always find a way to earn off it. Because once you’ve got a taste for working for yourself, doing what you love doing? You’ll work ten times harder than any bricklayer or paralegal, but you’ll never feel it and never recognize it. Controlling your own little universe is key. Before I made Clerks, I was in my early twenties, and the universe I lived in was run by my parents. Since I lived rent-free under their roof, I had to abide by their rules—which included mandatory trips to relatives’ houses every weekend.

The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms by Beth Buelow

do what you love, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Skype, solopreneur, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh

Content Is King: How Working on and in Your Business Can Be the Same Thing If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. —Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland Business development is not something set apart from your passion that keeps you from doing what you love. Rather, it enables you to do what you love. For me, being able to reframe sales to “education” makes a big difference in how I approach sharing my message. My sales calls are really prospect or discovery calls. I don’t like thinking of the process in terms of “getting clients.” Instead, my mission is broader and more prospect focused.

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One of your objectives is to reap a financial return for the work you do (remember, one of the defining characteristics of entrepreneurship is to make a profit). You can love that work to the point where you can’t believe that you get paid to do it. That’s the great benefit of entrepreneurship. You get paid to do what you love to do. If you didn’t, it would be an avocation: something outside your profession, done purely for the love of it. Because of the L-word—love—the lines between vocation and avocation can become very blurry. This is especially true if you have any level of fear or doubt about the value of your products or services or talking about the value of your services with others.

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Trust your heart and success will come to you.24 Millennials have internalized this message: A recent study found that young people believe that adulthood “should be a journey toward happiness and fulfillment, meaning and purpose, [and] self-actualization,” one “marked by continuous development, discovery and growth.”25 Identity and work are inseparable in this equation, not because people identify themselves by their occupation, but because more and more of our lives are spent working, networking, and building up our personal brand. We spend years acquiring social capital (connections, access to networks) and cultural capital (skills and education) so we can find a job we love and hopefully keep a roof over our heads. The “do what you love” message is at the heart of the work-identity fusion. It advises you to follow your passion. If you’re unhappy, it’s because you’re not following your passion. If your job sucks, you’re at the wrong job. Video blogger and social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk’s famous TED Talk is a “shot in the arm” for those pining for a more fulfilling life: There are way too many people in this room right now that are doing stuff they hate.

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In 2011, Fox Searchlight Pictures was charged with violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, and since then similar lawsuits have been filed against other companies, including Warner Music Group, Atlantic Music, and publishing houses Condé Nast and Hearst Corporation. In October 2014, NBC Universal settled a class-action lawsuit brought by a group of its interns for $4.6 million. Following your passion and doing what you love may also require you to forgo job stability and long-term employment on the always changing, always moving road to self-actualization. But job stability is rare these days: The average Millennial spends only 2.6 years at a company today. Some 30 percent of the US workforce is contingent labor, and by some estimates, 40 to 50 percent of jobs that produce an income will be organized as short-term, contract work by 2020.

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required by Kristy Shen, Bryce Leung

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy low sell high, call centre, car-free, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, digital nomad, do what you love, Elon Musk, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk/return, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, the rule of 72, working poor, Y2K, Zipcar

I’m not here to tell you things you want to hear; I’m here to tell you the truth. But remember that the rule is “Don’t follow your passion (yet).” I’m not saying you can’t ever make money doing what you love. After all, you’re only reading this because I eventually was able to become an author. But you have to follow the rest of my advice first. Doing what you love and hoping for money to follow is risky. Follow the money first, and you can do what you love later. Not all degrees are created equal. Don’t follow your passion (yet). Follow the POT. And, yes, I wrote this entire chapter just to be able to close with that line.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

She devoted part of the WeWork space at 175 Varick Street to companies and people in the film industry, and she tried to launch an arm of the company dedicated to producing films, but despite her shuttling to L.A. for many pitch meetings, it fizzled before getting off the ground. As stardom seemed less and less likely, though, she turned her focus to growing her husband’s main business. She dived further into branding, coming up with a number of the defining taglines for the company. She was credited with coining “Do What You Love,” which WeWork put everywhere, emblazoning the slogan in white cursive font on black T-shirts and black flags that would hang outside WeWork locations. Another, “Make a Life, Not Just a Living,” was often repeated internally to sum up the ethos of what WeWork was trying to build. At the same time, she was spending a great deal of time at home.

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Neumann showed off a video of his commute to a cheering crowd. The company’s culture played well on social media. WeWork staff would post pictures on Instagram of the inspirational slogans scrawled on T-shirts, printed on mugs, and spelled out in neon signs at WeWork offices. “Hustle Harder.” “Embrace the Hustle.” “Do What You Love.” “Thank God It’s Monday.” “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.” Staffers posted endless pictures of well-designed new offices, along with photos of tequila shots and prosecco flutes. Friends would comment, “So jealous!!” and “Are they hiring?” Carl Pierre was just twenty-five years old when he was hired by WeWork to run its nascent Washington, D.C., operation.

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In midtown Manhattan, it had become like Starbucks during its expansion blitz of the 2000s, with its black flags with “WeWork” written in white popping up outside brick buildings on seemingly every other block. Its swag was also omnipresent. WeWork T-shirts dotted the subways. When it rained, WeWork-issued “Do What You Love” umbrellas sprang up on sidewalks. This scale should have meant enormous savings. A company adding a Kansas City’s worth of office space should be able to negotiate great prices; it should need far fewer people working in administration at headquarters for every office. WeWork’s CFO, Artie Minson, had long touted the financial benefits of this expansion.

Choose Yourself! by James Altucher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, cashless society, cognitive bias, dark matter, digital rights, do what you love, Elon Musk, estate planning, John Bogle, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, PageRank, passive income, pattern recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, superconnector, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, Y2K, Zipcar

I’ve seen it happen for myself and for others. Don’t plagiarize the lives of your parents, your peers, your teachers, your colleagues, and your bosses. Be the criminal of their rules. Create your own life. I wish I were you because if you follow the above, then you will most likely end up doing what you love and getting massively rich while helping many others. I didn’t do that when I was twenty. But now, at forty-six, I’m really grateful I have the chance every day to wake up and improve one percent. OK—let’s choose ourselves for wealth. Why All The Personal Finance Gurus Are Out of Date Perhaps you found this book in the personal finance section of a store or website.

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So I really had no choice but to share it with you. Don’t plagiarize the lives of your parents, your peers, your teachers, your colleagues, and your bosses. Be the criminal of their rules. Create your own life. I wish I were you because if you follow my advice, then you will most likely end up doing what you love and getting massively rich while helping many others. I didn’t do that when I was twenty. But now, at forty-six, I’m really grateful I have the chance every day to wake up and improve one percent. And I hope you do the same. How to Run a “Choose Yourself” Meetup A lot of what you’ve read in this book will come to life when you discuss it with other people.

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions by Elizabeth Ghaffari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Bear Stearns, business cycle, business process, cloud computing, Columbine, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark matter, deal flow, do what you love, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, follow your passion, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, high net worth, John Elkington, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Oklahoma City bombing, performance metric, pink-collar, profit maximization, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

The other side is the women and men that I have trained in my laboratory—my scientific children. That’s the flip side. Ghaffari: Is there anything you would say to advise young women about their interest in science or math? Barton: Do what you love. Follow your passion. And, if you love doing science, you can do it. There’s no reason why you can’t. So, do what you love, because whatever you love doing, you’ll be good at it. Amy Millman President, Springboard Enterprises Born June 1954 in Brooklyn, New York. For more than a decade, Amy Millman has been president and principal advocate of Springboard Enterprises—the premier venture-catalyst platform for building women-led businesses.

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Ford: Engineering typically is not considered by women as a fun career option or thought of as a fun career. You don’t see any TV shows about “The Young Engineers.” There is a fun side to engineering—you just have to be diligent in finding a good fit with your skills and interests. Find out for yourself. Ghaffari: Would you give any different advice to men? Ford: Do what you love. Find your dream job. Do the important work. Persistence. One step at a time. That’s the same advice you’d give anyone. Not just women. Ghaffari: What do you see as the area of greatest opportunity for young women professionals? Ford: Today, opportunities for women are better than they were when I started out and certainly better than my mom’s generation.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Since 1967, notes one 2010 study, the percentage of underemployed college graduates—those working well below their level of qualifications—has soared from roughly 10 percent to over 35 percent.25 The glut of college graduates reflects the difficulties facing a generation that, growing up in an era of relative prosperity, now finds the realities of life far more challenging than they were led to believe.26 The millennials have frequently been told that they could pursue the fields that they “loved” and somehow make a living at it. Yet for many this has turned out to be a fairy tale, a life that can be afforded only by the rich. “‘Do what you love’ disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is a privilege, a sign of socioeconomic class,” notes one observer.27 The disjunction between career choice and reality, then, is particularly intense for those who receive degrees from second- or third-tier institutions.

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Richard Vedder, “The College-Graduate Glut: Evidence From Labor Markets,” Innovations (blog), Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 2012, http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-college-graduate-glut-evidence-from-labor-markets/32997. 27. Miya Tokumitsu, “In the Name of Love,” Slate, January 16, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html. 28. Samantha Stainburn, “Following the Money: Calculating the Net Worth of a College Degree,” New York Times, August 2, 2013. 29. The White House, “Remarks by the President on Opportunity for All and Skills for America’s Workers,” press release, January 30, 2014, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/01/30/remarks-president-opportunity-all-and-skills-americas-workers. 30.

Inspire Your Home by Farah Merhi

do what you love, follow your passion, young professional

Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. DEDICATION To my children, Celine, Julia, and Adam: If there is one thing I want you to take away from this, it is that when you do what you love from your heart, dreams do come true. You three are my reason, my why, my everything. To my husband, William: You have shown me the definition of true love. The way you believe in me, the way you’re there for me, has allowed me to spread my wings and do what I love without holding back. Thank you for being you.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bear Stearns, business cycle, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, Internet of things, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, obamacare, post-work, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, warehouse automation, working poor

But look, I’d rather suck your dick than wait on you in Applebee’s, get paid shit for bein’ polite to you, you see what I’m sayin’?” Or Ephraim, the window installer, once upon a time an athlete, a pitcher drafted by the Chicago Cubs who never made it to the big leagues: “I tell my daughter, you gotta do what you love to do; the money don’t matter when you get to be my age. I played ball, now I do this. I’m not proud of it. But I’m alive.” Or Mel the super, who’s got six buildings on my block, one of them the halfway house next door, where morons and murderers go to pretend they’re not. He’s a man who’s always at work: “I’m blessed because I don’t ride that raggedy-ass subway to the Bronx anymore”—he used to be a mechanic for the MTA—“I walk out the door every morning and there I am, I’m at work on my own street, you see what I mean?

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

Mushrooms might grow when they are kept in the dark and fed a diet of dung but it doesn’t work with people. Remember Steve Jobs and the Pixar piazza: build open work environments that invite your people to intermingle and share their visions. 10. DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND HAVE A COUCH IN THE KITCHEN As long as you are surrounded by the people you love and doing what you love, it really doesn’t matter where you are. When we are on Necker we tend to spend most of our time in the kitchen. Add in a bedroom and a partner that you love, and you really don’t need too much more. Now I really must get back to my hammock and do some business – around here that’s known as the Virgin Island Way!

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

“Virtual Webs, Physical Technologies, and Hidden Workers.” Technology and Culture 42, no. 2 (April 2001): 209–35. Dube, Arindrajit, Jeff Jacobs, Suresh Naidu, and Siddharth Suri. “Monopsony in Online Labor Markets.” American Economic Review: Insights, forthcoming. Duffy, Brooke Erin. (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Ekbia, H. R., and Bonnie A. Nardi. Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Erickson, Kristofer, and Inge Sørensen. “Regulating the Sharing Economy.”

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Households in 2016 (Washington, DC: Federal Reserve Board, May 2017); Neal Gabler, “The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans,” The Atlantic, May 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/. [back] 2. Brooke Erin Duffy calls this mix of passion projects and portfolio-building forms of “aspirational labor.” See Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). [back] 3. Weil, The Fissured Workplace; Dean Baker, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2016); Herzenberg, Alic, and Wial, New Rules.

The Self-Care Cookbook: Easy Healing Plant-Based Recipes by Gemma Ogston

do what you love

I hope by being kind to yourself, taking time to fully recover and by eating nutritious wholesome food you’ll be back to feeling strong and happy again soon. GIVE YOURSELF SOME TLC … Say no. You need time to recover properly, so ease up on the commitments for a while. Ask for help. Don’t suffer in silence, feeling like you don’t want to bother anyone. Asking for help will take the pressure off, and people will be so happy to give you a hand. Do what you love and what makes you happy. We are so used to being under constant pressure, we can forget to do what we really enjoy and what gives us pleasure. Get lost in a good book or cook a nourishing meal for yourself (e.g. the Super Green Nourish Soup on page 176). Make this a priority when you need some extra TLC.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

But it also means something even more radical: erasing the distinction between what counts as a business and what counts as a collective leisure activity. Only in that situation might we find that “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.” In that case, work wouldn’t be work at all any more, it would be what we actually choose to do with our free time. Then we could all obey the injunction to “do what you love”—not as a disingenuous apology for accepting exploitation, but as a real description of the state of existence. This is Marx as stoner philosopher: just do what you feel, man (from each according to his ability), and it’ll all be cool (to each according to his needs). Marx’s critics have often turned this passage against him, portraying it as a hopelessly improbable utopia.

Habitat by Lauren Liess

big-box store, do what you love

Original works of art, handcrafted items, and one-of-a-kind antiques all tell a story and are more interesting than mass-produced pieces. There’s luxury in free time. Many people say that the greatest luxury is time with their loved ones. Think about how you can design a home so precious time isn’t wasted on mundane tasks, so that more time can be spent doing what you love. Being organized saves time. Being able to pack for a trip quickly and efficiently because the closet is organized reduces stress. Cleaning up the kitchen is a breeze when there’s a place for everything. There is luxury in convenience and in having things close at hand. It all makes life easier.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

We’re supposed to work for the love of it, and how dare we ask questions about the way our work is making other people rich while we struggle to pay rent and barely see our friends. Like so many things about late capitalism, the admonishment of a thousand inspirational social media posts to “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” has become folk wisdom, its truthiness presumably everlasting—stretching back to our caveperson ancestors, who I suppose really enjoyed all that mammoth hunting or whatever. Instead of “never working,” the reality is that we work longer hours than ever, and we’re expected to be available even when technically off the clock.

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“We trust you to get your work done,” the toys and perks imply. “You can decide how and when you do it and how and when you have fun.” With the feeling of autonomy comes the feeling that long work hours are a choice; they become a status symbol rather than a sign of unfreedom. As Miya Tokumitsu wrote, in Do What You Love , “The promise of worker autonomy is embedded in the ‘you’ of DWYL.” 35 But surveillance is as rampant in the tech industry as it is elsewhere. As early as the 1990s, Andrew Ross found that tech companies routinely monitored their workers. It shouldn’t be a surprise that companies like Facebook, who make their profits off extracting data, might want to keep an eye on their employees, or that the fallen WeWork, a real estate company that leased coworking spaces yet sold itself to investors as the techiest of tech companies, harvested a wellspring of data from the people who worked—and might have lived—in its buildings.

Design Is a Job by Mike Monteiro

4chan, crowdsourcing, do what you love, index card, iterative process, John Gruber, Kickstarter, late fees, Steve Jobs

Remember those print designers we used to laugh at? Well, the web finally caught up to where everything they knew about layout, color theory, and typography was essential. We weren’t doing anything new with design. Our technology just hadn’t caught up to what design was capable of yet. Getting good at doing what you love means having the confidence to recognize what you know, the humility to recognize what you don’t, and the courage to extend our respect to those who make our faults more visible. Clear roles To work together without tripping over each other and duplicating each others’ efforts you need to establish clear roles.

Letters From an Astrophysicist by Neil Degrasse Tyson

dark matter, do what you love, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, microaggression, Pluto: dwarf planet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unbiased observer

And I love the cosmos. Please help me, Neil, in any way you can. I will appreciate it. Jarrett Burgess Dear Jarrett, Thanks for that all-out appeal to connect with the cosmos. You express a dilemma that afflicts many in society: Should you do what you’re best at? Do what others expect of you? Or do what you love most? I love baseball (a few dozen of my Tweets are on the subject), so I’d be hard-pressed to tell you to take your 100 mph arm and study the universe. But I also happen to love what I do. And because I love what I do, I am self-driven and incentivized to make myself better at it every day—without limit.

Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in the World by Jesse Krieger

Airbnb, always be closing, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, do what you love, drop ship, financial independence, follow your passion, income inequality, independent contractor, iterative process, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, search engine result page, Skype, software as a service, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, warehouse automation

It can be difficult to see beyond the list of to-do items sitting on your desk and plan for a future that may seem out of reach or unrealistic. But don’t spend all your time putting out fires and managing your current situation at the expense of planning for a future that excites and empowers you! Take this time to imagine what your life would be like for 3-6 months, anywhere in the world, doing what you love. Think back to the Identity exercises Once you’ve defined a Creative Construct that suits you, costing it out and planning logistics becomes possible. Simply going through the planning process brings your dreams into focus and often times they are a lot more affordable and accessible than we initially believe.

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

There are few financial variables more correlated to performance than commitment to a strategy during its lean years—both the amount of performance and the odds of capturing it over a given period of time. The historical odds of making money in U.S. markets are 50/50 over one-day periods, 68% in one-year periods, 88% in 10-year periods, and (so far) 100% in 20-year periods. Anything that keeps you in the game has a quantifiable advantage. If you view “do what you love” as a guide to a happier life, it sounds like empty fortune cookie advice. If you view it as the thing providing the endurance necessary to put the quantifiable odds of success in your favor, you realize it should be the most important part of any financial strategy. Invest in a promising company you don’t care about, and you might enjoy it when everything’s going well.

Team Geek by Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman

anti-pattern, barriers to entry, cognitive dissonance, Dean Kamen, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fear of failure, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, publish or perish, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, value engineering, web application

And finally, these principles apply directly to the way you interact with the most important group of all—the users of your software. If you keep HRT at the forefront of the way you work, you’ll have greater impact with considerably less effort. We think it’s the best way to end up spending the most amount of time doing what you love (shipping great software) and the least amount of time dealing with social conflicts, bureaucracy, and other human drama. A Final Thought It’s time to let the cat out of the bag. If you haven’t figured it out already, most of the advice in our book isn’t necessarily specific to software development.

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms by Danielle Laporte

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, David Heinemeier Hansson, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak

You can get psychoanalytical about why you’ve been molded into a certain character, but what’s most important for our liberation mission is that you’re aware that you can change your time persona. You can refuse to rush and still arrive on time; you can have all the energy you need to accomplish what you want and not be fried when you’re finished; you can find some grace in the less pleasurable must-dos, and you can fill your days doing what you love with people you cherish. WE KNOW YOU’RE BUSY. NOW SHUT UP ABOUT IT. So sorry, I’ve been busy. I’m just so busy with…I’ve been too busy to… Busy? Get in line. That’s life. That’s my life. That’s most people’s lives. Grown-up humans tend to be…busy. Add kids, jobs, or curveballs to the mix and you have all that much more of life to be busy about.

Playing With FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early): How Far Would You Go for Financial Freedom? by Scott Rieckens, Mr. Money Mustache

Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, cryptocurrency, do what you love, effective altruism, financial independence, index fund, job satisfaction, lifestyle creep, low interest rates, McMansion, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, remote working, sunk-cost fallacy, The 4% rule, Vanguard fund

I started by explaining why we’d left Coronado: how we were pursuing the idea of living more frugally as a way of maximizing our happiness, since people typically spend most of their money on expensive items and experiences but get most of their joy from simple, free things like spending time together. With FIRE, I explained, you create a high savings rate and invest your money so that you can spend your time doing what you love. At this point, I paused. Was I saying too much? I didn’t want to sound judgmental or possibly offend these guys, the way these conversations had gone in Seattle. FAMILY AND FRUGALITY One day in late October, Taylor and I invited my cousin Jared and 137 PLAYING WITH FIRE 138 Jared looked at me, confused.

Sustainable Minimalism: Embrace Zero Waste, Build Sustainability Habits That Last, and Become a Minimalist Without Sacrificing the Planet (Green Housecleaning, Zero Waste Living) by Stephanie Marie Seferian

8-hour work day, Airbnb, big-box store, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, do what you love, emotional labour, food desert, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lifestyle creep, Mason jar, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, ride hailing / ride sharing

A decluttered home is much easier to maintain than a cluttered one. Americans spend an average of ninety minutes per day—or sixty hours per month—on household upkeep, including cleaning, tidying, and organizing.26 But when you own less, you have fewer items to dust, wipe down, organize, and put away. As a result, you naturally have more time do what you love with the people you adore. I consider decluttering to be a transformative event in the evolution of a sustainable minimalist. The purging process can be jarring—I myself felt profound shame as I stood over the piles of cheap junk I had mindlessly purchased. But that shame awakened me to an uncomfortable reality: I had bought many items I didn’t need, and for no good reason.

The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday by Alexander McCall Smith

British Empire, do what you love, North Sea oil, Philippa Foot, trolley problem

He pointed to a clutter of toy vehicles on the floor: a fire engine, a tractor. “He’s going to be a mechanic, I think. Or an engineer.” Charlie started to crawl away, and Isabel intercepted him. “Not a musician?” “Who would be a musician?” Jamie said, beginning to pick up the toys. “Years of practising. Awful hours. No money…” Isabel was cuddling Charlie. “But you do what you love doing,” she said over her shoulder. “How many people can say that?” “Quite a few, I suspect,” said Jamie. “Most doctors like doctoring, don’t they? And most lawyers like arguing—or at least the ones I know do. And you hear about pilots saying that they get a real high from being up there above the clouds.

The Cheapskate Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americans Living Happily Below Their Means by Jeff Yeager

An Inconvenient Truth, asset allocation, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, delayed gratification, do what you love, dumpster diving, index card, job satisfaction, late fees, mortgage debt, new economy, payday loans, Skype, upwardly mobile, Zipcar

I love being a schoolteacher, but, better yet, I love having my wife be able to stay home with our daughters. We may not earn a large income, but we are very wealthy because we get to do what we want to in life.” Ironically, not only can living below your means be the key to being able to afford to do what you love for a living, but cheapskates often told me that—because they’re happy in their jobs—they tend to be less tempted to use shopping as “therapy” or to mistake money and stuff for true happiness. “Because I have a job that fulfills me, I do not need external or materialistic things to make me feel happy and content,” Danny Kofke said.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Try Freelancing on Fiverr,” advised a Yahoo news headline during the government shutdown of 2013.26 Fiverr was so named because, at launch, it asked workers to offer their services for a flat rate of $5 (workers now can set different rates). You could use Fiverr, the startup’s founder explained, to make money doing what you love in your spare time. Like 75% of people surveyed in a Fiverr-sponsored poll, the deal sounded pretty good to me.27 But that was before I realized that 4,786 other workers on Fiverr had, like me, offered to proofread papers for $5. My profile was nowhere to be found among the first several pages of the site’s search results for the service.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

do what you love, index card, Mason jar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, rolodex

It has happened to me, and if you get published, it is almost certainly going to happen to you. But the fact of publication is the acknowledgment from the community that you did your writing right. You acquire a rank that you never lose. Now you’re a published writer, and you are in that rare position of getting to make a living, such as it is, doing what you love best. That knowledge does bring you a quiet joy. But eventually you have to sit down like every other writer and face the blank page. The beginnings of a second or third book are full of spirit and confidence because you have been published, and false starts and terror because now you have to prove yourself again.

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B. J. Novak

Bernie Madoff, carbon-based life, citation needed, dark matter, do what you love, F. W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, Saturday Night Live

There’s so much going on!” Nana took a drag from the live half of a cigarette, which she had neatly hidden between her fingers by the doorknob. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” said Nana. “You have infinite time here, and there are infinite things to do, but you still don’t end up doing much of it. You do what you love most, over and over.” She took another breath of smoke, which couldn’t kill her now. “There’s something I think about sometimes, when I’m walking through the town, looking at the different concerts. So many of them were so big in their time, and people loved them, but maybe it’s just ’cause that was all they had, you know?

Stephen Hawking by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Michelson, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, do what you love, Ernest Rutherford, Eyjafjallajökull, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Nelson Mandela, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Stephen, then forty-three, was as much a genius as any of those genius grant recipients but not yet a celebrity—he’d just started to write A Brief History—and he really did need the money. In physics, you don’t get paid for what you discover. You publish your work, and in exchange you get a tenured position and the satisfaction of having figured something out. You are supposed to be content with a modest salary and a secure job that pays you to do what you love. In 1985 Stephen’s annual salary was about $25,000. Those earnings don’t go far if you have ALS. Fortunately, Stephen’s work on Hawking radiation had elevated him in the physics community by then, if not in the world at large. His name had already been on the map, but after Hawking radiation it was written in the largest of fonts, and so the MacArthur Foundation was happy to help and gave the money to Cambridge University to administer.

A Wealth of Common Sense: Why Simplicity Trumps Complexity in Any Investment Plan by Ben Carlson

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, loss aversion, market bubble, medical residency, Occam's razor, paper trading, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto

If you understand how the markets work, and more importantly how the human brain works, the results over time can be impressive. The process does not have to be based on degree of difficulty. The goal is to gain financial independence, pay for your child's college education, go on more vacations, have more time to do what you love, or whatever your needs and desires may be. Remember, the markets are not just about building wealth and making money. They're a tool for your desires about creating freedom, time, memories, and peace of mind. These things are all attainable, as long as you have a plan in place and are able to get out of your own way.

ECOVILLAGE: 1001 ways to heal the planet by Ecovillage 1001 Ways to Heal the Planet-Triarchy Press Ltd (2015)

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, do what you love, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, intentional community, land tenure, low interest rates, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, young professional

In essence this means that if we tune in to what the universe wants to happen and focus our inner work to align with that intention, then the resources to realise these projects are more likely to be manifested. From the construction of the art studios, Community Centre and Universal Hall in the 1970s, through the purchase of the Caravan Park in 1983, to the more recent manifestation of the widely acclaimed Moray Art Centre, stories of these laws in action are legion. ‘Do what you love and the money will come’, or ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway’ are everyday descriptions of these same laws in action. It is impossible to think of the Findhorn Foundation’s unfolding history in the absence of the application of this core principle. It is important to note that this is not the same as simply saying you will get whatever you wish for.

Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate by Cynthia Kim

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, do what you love, fear of failure, neurotypical, pattern recognition

I’ve read and heard about a lot of Aspies who’ve done the same with their lifelong special interests. It’s certainly not possible for everyone with Asperger’s to turn a special interest into a job or career, but when it does work out that way, you get to be one of those lucky people who earns a living doing what you love. 7 Sensory Seeking and Sensitivities I have difficulty resting when I’m at rest. My body was born to be in motion. I slouch. I splay. I pin one foot under the other. I pull one knee up, then two, hugging my shins with a hand or arm. I sit on my foot, ankle, or calf. I sit cross-legged, even on chairs.

The Minimalist Home: A Room-By-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life by Joshua Becker

Albert Einstein, car-free, collaborative consumption, do what you love, endowment effect, estate planning, Lao Tzu, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, new economy, Paradox of Choice, side hustle, Steve Jobs

Focus more on who you are becoming. #minimalisthome Where do you keep your hobby or craft materials? Maybe you have a room dedicated to this purpose, or at least a part of a room. You’ve probably also got a cabinet or closet where you store your supplies so that you can pull them out when you’ve got some free time to do what you love. How do you minimize these things? First, make a distinction between (1) hobbies or arts and crafts that you actually do; and (2) those that you used to do, or thought that you would do, but don’t really do these days. Let’s take a look at the second case first. If you’ve got supplies for a hobby or craft that you don’t pursue, then I can understand why it might be emotionally hard for you to get rid of the stuff.

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

airport security, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, defund the police, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, index card, McMansion, Minecraft, pre–internet, QAnon, Skype, social distancing, Transnistria

Our commencement speaker was a conceptual artist named Vito Acconci. He’d done a lot but was best known for constructing a wooden ramp in a New York gallery. Then he hid beneath it and masturbated for several weeks without stopping. “Well, you could do that!” my mother said when I explained to her who he was. “I mean, isn’t that the goal? Doing what you love and getting paid for it!” I don’t think she understood a word of the man’s commencement address. I’m not sure I did either. In preparing for today, I asked myself what he might have said that would have had an effect on my future. I figured my post-college life would be pretty much like the one I’d been leading for the past decade: work some little job I didn’t have to put much thought into, then come home and do my own stuff.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become more pleasant—even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same. As Gallagher summarizes: “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.” In Rapt, Gallagher surveys the research supporting this understanding of the mind. She cites, for example, the University of North Carolina psychologist Barbara Fredrickson: a researcher who specializes in the cognitive appraisal of emotions. After a bad or disrupting occurrence in your life, Fredrickson’s research shows, what you choose to focus on exerts significant leverage on your attitude going forward.

Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet by Ian Hanington

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Day of the Dead, disinformation, do what you love, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, Exxon Valdez, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl

We can continue to burn things until there is nothing left to burn, and we can continue to allow fossil-fuel interests to spew pollution into the air without cost, but where will that leave us? Maybe scrounging for roots and berries and huddling in caves for shelter. How to become an environmentalist YOUNG PEOPLE OFTEN ask me what they have to do to be environmentalists. They want to make a difference. My answer is, “Follow your heart. Do what you love most and pursue it with passion.” You see, environmentalism isn’t a profession or discipline; it’s a way of seeing our place in the world. It’s recognizing that we live on a planet where everything, including us, is exquisitely interconnected with and interdependent on everything else. Life-giving water moves from ocean to air to land, across the globe, linking all life through the hydrologic cycle.

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life by Bernard Roth

Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, classic study, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, do what you love, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, school choice, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, zero-sum game

This also means that we have the power to alter our perceptions, revising perceptions that bring us down and enhancing those that help us. Your outlook on life is deeply entwined in your propensity for success. Miserable blowhards can achieve, however they still wind up miserable. That’s not success. Success is doing what you love and being happy about it. To learn how to get a better handle on your perceptions, emotions, and behavior, it is useful to look at how you think. YOU GIVE EVERYTHING ITS MEANING Mike, a graduate student in my class at Stanford University, planned to design a musical instrument for that summer’s Burning Man festival as his project.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Five years ago, a common-enough crisis plunged me into a study of the nature of experience. More important, this experiment led me to cutting-edge scientific research and a psychological version of what physicists trying to explain the universe call a “grand unified theory” or “theory of everything”: your life—who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on. That your experience largely depends on the material objects and mental subjects that you choose to pay attention to or ignore is not an imaginative notion, but a physiological fact. When you focus on a STOP sign or a sonnet, a waft of perfume or a stock-market tip, your brain registers that “target,” which enables it to affect your behavior.

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

“Ultimately,” he says, “it’s not about a dip in corporate profits, but a change in corporate attitude—a change that means no one’s job is safe, and never will be, ever again.” It’s one of the reasons he decided to start his own company, NaviDate, a data-driven twist on online dating sites: “It’s no longer a trade-off between doing what you love and having stability. Stability is long gone, so you better do something you love!” Achieving middle-class stability has always been a big part of the American Dream, but, as Blackburn notes, mobility now is increasingly one way: “The plateaus of each step, which can be a great place to stop a bit and catch your breath, are gone.

The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Any Top Tech Company by Gayle Laakmann Mcdowell

barriers to entry, cloud computing, do what you love, game design, information retrieval, job-hopping, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, why are manhole covers round?

You were hired in to be a tester, and now you’re helping look for office space. Well, tough. Someone’s got to do it. Start-ups don’t have the time and money to hire a specialist for each and every task, so employees are expected to chip in on projects that are outside of their roles. That may mean you spend less time doing what you love and more time doing what the company wants you to do. Low pay. With very few exceptions, start-ups tend to pay below-industry salary and compensate for the difference with stock options. If the company fails (which it usually does), your stock options are worth nothing. Limited credibility.

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

airport security, Albert Einstein, blood diamond, carbon footprint, David Sedaris, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Pepto Bismol, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, the medium is the message

My dad drove Kara’s jeep across the country loaded with our stuff and I settled quickly into a life of waitressing and taking classes. It was an awesome time. I was extremely poor and had little to do. I painted my tiny bedroom Van Gogh Starry Night Purple, and I smoked a lot of pot. I would ride my bike to shows while listening to the Beastie Boys. I was twenty-two and I had found what I loved. Watching great people do what you love is a good way to start learning how to do it yourself. Chicago was swollen with talent at the time. The first Second City show I ever saw was Amy Sedaris’s last. The entire cast was saying good-bye to her and she was doing all of her best sketches. Amy Sedaris is the Cindy Sherman of comedy.

Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass by Darren McGarvey

basic income, British Empire, carbon footprint, deindustrialization, do what you love, Donald Trump, gentrification, imposter syndrome, impulse control, means of production, side project, Social Justice Warrior, universal basic income, urban decay, wage slave

In communities like this it has created a fertile bed of resentment from which anger and apathy have grown. But you wouldn’t know from talking to these kids. The interior of The Barn is brightly lit and colourfully decorated. Life affirming slogans adorn the walls. One reads: ‘Don’t aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally.’ Situated in the middle on the main hall are funkily coloured couches where teenagers – who recently constituted their own youth committee – chat, while the younger kids dart around between air hockey, table tennis, pool, snooker, baking, football and even a sectioned off computer room for Xbox enthusiasts.

Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure by Alex Honnold, David Roberts

carbon footprint, do what you love, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, income inequality, risk tolerance, short squeeze, side project, trade route

• • • • From the little-known climber who once hoped that, as he put it, the attention of a sponsor might someday win him a free pair of rock shoes, Alex has by now developed into a thoroughgoing professional. One of his favorite quotes comes from the mouth of basketball legend Julius Erving: “Being a pro means doing what you love even on the days you don’t love it.” Still, on any given Sunday, Alex would rather be climbing than signing autographs. In the spring of 2014, he agreed to serve on the film jury of the Trento (Italy) Film Festival. Only when he saw the schedule of presentations did he realize what he’d gotten himself into.

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. by Mitch Joel

3D printing, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, behavioural economics, call centre, clockwatching, cloud computing, content marketing, digital nomad, do what you love, Firefox, future of work, gamification, ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, place-making, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, vertical integration, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In this new world, the squiggle is about not being afraid of the big stuff within whatever industry you serve. If you’re not thinking about the bigger problems that face your industry, someone else is. Squiggle… uncover and go after the big ideas. Lesson #3—Get squiggly. It’s not about doing what you love or being passionate about the work that you do, but about recognizing that you may be stuck or afraid to change simply because of the decisions that you made and followed back in high school and university (or because your predecessor did things a certain way). They say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, cloud computing, content marketing, data is the new oil, diversified portfolio, do what you love, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, future of work, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, solopreneur, Startup school, stem cell, TED Talk, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

—Shane Snow, author of Smartcuts and cofounder of Contently “Wondering what your next move is? Read this book! Jenny Blake is one of the wisest and freshest voices on the subject of career development, and this is her best work yet. In Pivot, you will hear the good news: that you can get paid to do what you love. It may not look like what you thought, and it may require some personal growth, but you can find the work you were meant to do. You just have to pivot.” —Jeff Goins, author of The Art of Work “Are the tectonic plates below your sturdy career suddenly splitting into a deep abyss of unknown?

Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life by Ken Robinson, Lou Aronica

do what you love, fear of failure, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

Every day she gets to be among books and to inspire children to read and love them, too. She’s delighted with herself and her life. As you look for your Element, you may encounter something you’ve never done before and have an epiphany. Equally, you may discover that you’ve already been doing what you love for a long time without realizing it, like falling in love with an old friend. Of course, discovering that you love something that you’ve been taking for granted is an epiphany all of its own. My wife, Thérèse, had that experience. She has recently published her first novel, India’s Summer.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

This billboard advertised NetApp, which was a company that offered remote data storage to other companies. Back in the 1990s, NetApp had raised funding from the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. (7) #1 for a Reason This billboard advertised Trend Micro Inc, a Japanese company that sold consumer and enterprise level security software and services. (8) IMAGINE 30 YEARS OR MORE OF DOING WHAT YOU LOVE. Let’s get ready for a longer retirement. This billboard advertised retirement and money management services with Prudential Insurance Company of America. (9) iPad This billboard advertised the iPad. The iPad had changed everything. (10) New Homes at Candlestick Cove With 2-Car Garages This billboard advertised condos for sale in the low $700,000s

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

But as much as she loved teaching her kindergarten kids, she found the economics of doing so in the modern US economy to be more challenging than she had ever imagined growing up, especially now that she was a single mother. Sarah is not alone. Amy, a thirty-two-year-old yoga instructor working in Shreveport, Louisiana, had the same sense of frustration: “I grew up understanding the American Dream as: you get your education and do what you love, and you can make a living out of it. I just don’t think it’s realistic.” My colleagues and I met Sarah and Amy in the fall of 2015, a third of the way through the Martin Prosperity Institute’s six-year project on the future of democratic capitalism in America. As part of the institute’s overall work, we conducted in-depth interviews with Americans like them around the country, across a wide variety of occupations, to better understand what they thought about their country and its political economy.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Dobson, “Inside the Verdura Resort in Sicily, Home to Google’s Top Secret Summer Camp.” 55. Rushe, “Scholar Says Google Criticism Cost Him Job.” 56. Foroohar, “Big Tech’s Grip.” 57. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 298. Chapter 3: New Frontier 1. Bennett, “Kim Kardashian Just Wants to Be Seen.” 2. Kardashian, Selfish. 3. Gary Vaynerchuk, “Do What You Love (No Excuses!),” Ted Talk, Web 2.0 Expo, September 2008. 4. Burgess, Marwick, and Poell, SAGE Handbook of Social Media, introduction. 5. Rojek, Presumed Intimacy, 135. 6. Ling, New Tech, New Ties, 43. 7. Lewis and Jacobs, “How Business Is Capitalising on the Millennial Instagram Obsession.” 8.

The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs

air freight, Albert Einstein, car-free, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, compound rate of return, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Golden Gate Park, intentional community, job satisfaction, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, telemarketer, the rule of 72, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

Another way to turn your passion into a job is by volunteering first. Cecile began another career as director of Women’s Studies at a community college after working first as an unpaid intern. She created the job as part of her internship. “When you follow your passion, you don’t know where it’s going to lead,” Cecile says. “I always tell people to do what you love to do, then figure out how to earn a living from it.” Get Paid for Your Passion There are two ways to get paid for your passion: make it your full-time career or a part-time sideline. Beth Steinkoning loves to sail and has done two things that enable her to sail frequently. The first is that she and her four-year-old son live on a sailboat that Beth owns.

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I’m doing what I believe in—helping people to master change in a positive way, without the adversarial process. I’m dealing with positive human issues of people making choices to express who they are instead of trying to conform to other people’s wishes.” Deborah’s ideas of a fulfilled life have changed since she made her transition. “I had always thought that if you were doing what you love, you can’t do too much of it. Now I realize that even if you love what you do, it can take over your life and whack you way out of balance. “I noticed that when I wasn’t getting paid well it was easier to control than when I started to earn good fees. Then it seemed like a shame to turn down all that money when I was enjoying what I was doing.

The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work by Vishen Lakhiani

Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, performance metric, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social bookmarking, social contagion, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, web application, white picket fence, work culture

To me, it’s a ‘portal of love.’ I’m doing what I love right now. Communicating with the people I love. Writing about what I love. Sharing on social media with more people around the world who I love. Sending cheesy videos to friends and family I love. I’m not disconnected—I’m deeply connected. “When you do what you love, you never have to work a day in your life. So thank you, and I get your concern, and you’re wonderful to check in on me, but I choose to experience this moment here on this cliff doing exactly what I’m doing now. It’s what I love.” “Wow,” she said. “I think I just learned something there.”

The Lost Art of Running: A Journey to Rediscover the Forgotten Essence of Human Movement by Shane Benzie, Tim Major

Buckminster Fuller, do what you love, Kickstarter

About getting even more in touch with what makes you human so that you can do what humans are designed to do in the way that we are designed to do it. This is about rediscovering the techniques that we, as a species, are physically built and mentally wired to undertake. It’s about freeing you to do what you love, so that you can feel an even deeper connection with yourself and the world. So that you can do it more often. Be injured less. Go further. Go faster. Feel that flow. Enhance, rather than detract from, your love of running. Running is an art. Yes, there are ways to do it that will still be like running.

Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power by Rose Hackman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, cognitive load, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Graeber, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, game design, glass ceiling, immigration reform, invisible hand, job automation, lockdown, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, performance metric, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

,” The Washington Post, June 20, 2019, accessed April 6, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/opinions/pride-for-sale/; Natasha Dailey, “Coca-Cola, Delta, United, and 7 Other Companies Blast Georgia’s New Voting Law in a Wave of Corporate Backlash,” April 5, 2021, accessed April 6, 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-united-delta-coke-companies-against-georgia-voting-law-elections-2021-4. 11.  Jillian D’Onfro and Lucy England, “An Inside Look at Google’s Best Employee Perks,” Inc.com, September 21, 2015, https://www.inc.com/business-insider/best-google-benefits.html. 12.  Marsha Sinetar, Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood (New York: Dell, 1989). 13.  Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2007). 14.  Shankar Vedantam et al., “Emotional Currency: How Money Shapes Human Relationships,” NPR, January 13, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/01/10/795246685/emotional-currency-how-money-shapes-human-relationships. 15.  

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

She fell in love with something at age 6 and she didn’t stop tap dancing until the day before she died at age 92. She died on a Monday morning, and the first thing we had to do was call her 100 students to say she wasn’t going to make class that day. “What is the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate. And this woman spent all day, every day doing what she loved.” Spirit animal: Rhino * * * Morgan Spurlock Morgan Spurlock (TW: @MorganSpurlock, morganspurlock.com) is an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker based in New York.

…

In The 4-Hour Body, there was one line that drove copyeditors crazy: “Because I’m a man, meng.” It’s a long story. ✸ Out of more than 4,600 articles on Brain Pickings, what are Maria’s starting recommendations? “The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and the Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long” “How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love” “9 Learnings from 9 Years of Brain Pickings” Anything about Alan Watts: “Alan Watts has changed my life. I’ve written about him quite a bit.” ✸ What is the worst advice you see or hear given in your trade or area of expertise? “‘Follow your dreams.’ It’s impossible to do without self-knowledge, which takes years.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

Divers didn’t recover his body for twenty-eight days. Both Daisher and McConkey took his passing hard, but action and adventure athletes have a different relationship with death. “When Frank died,” recounts Daisher, “everybody told us it was time to stop BASE jumping. But that’s not what Frank would have wanted. He believed in doing what you love and we weren’t going back. After he died, I quit my job and moved to the Drop Zone (a Tahoe-area skydiving operation). I lived in a tent and packed chutes. Shane and I spent all our time trying to piece together Frank’s knowledge. I would tell him something Frank had taught me, and he would tell me something Frank had taught him, and pretty soon another two-dollar bet was born.”

Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook by Michael Lopp

do what you love, finite state, game design, job satisfaction, John Gruber, knowledge worker, reality distortion field, remote working, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sorting algorithm, systems thinking, web application

It wasn't the recursive simplicity; it was the discovery that with imagination there were approaches that were wildly more efficient—and simpler. Whether you're formally trained as a computer science nerd or not, you've learned the value of efficiency—to make each action that you take mean something. You know that when you're efficient, you have more time to do what you love. This is why I have a simple requirement that any tool I rely on has complete keyboard support. I will fall back on using the mouse for one-off activities, but for any action I take that I know I'm going to do again, my question is, "How do I make this action cost less?" Think of it like this.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Sethi, Ramit

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, geopolitical risk, index fund, John Bogle, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Paradox of Choice, prediction markets, random walk, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, survivorship bias, the rule of 72, Vanguard fund

If you’re even considering buying individual stocks because you think you can beat the market or it’s sexier, I want you to take all your money, put it in a big Ziploc bag along with this book, and light it on fire. Just save the middleman. If you don’t want to spend a billion years managing your money and you’re satisfied with the 85 Percent Solution of investing in a convenient fund that’s good enough and will free you up to live your life and do what you love, then go for a lifecycle fund. If you’re more of a personal-finance geek, are willing to spend some time on your finances, and want more control, then choose index funds. Whichever category you fall into, you’ll want to figure out exactly what to invest in. Let’s get started. The Investment Most Americans Have: Your 401(k) As we discussed in Chapter 3, if you get a 401(k) match from your employer, you need to pay into in your 401(k) before you do any other investing.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

Gabrielle Russon, “Disney World Workers Endure Tourists Who Scream, Punch and Even Grope Them,” Orlando Sentinel, September 23, 2019, https://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/os-bz-disney-employees-abuse-20190923-zy7o3lka3fhmhfeohjicftx74a-story.html. 19.  Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 20.  Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 21.  The solidarity was bicoastal. The California resort unions won a $15 agreement at Disneyland in late July 2018, which put pressure on Disney World management to concede over the next month. 22.  

The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine N. Aron

do what you love, mirror neurons, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, work culture

She will become an empty windbag no one listens to. But how can one make money and still follow a calling? One way is to seek the point where the path directed by our greatest bliss crosses that directed by the world’s greatest need—that is, what it is willing to pay for. At this intersection you will earn money for doing what you love. Actually, the relation of a person’s vocation to his or her paying job can be quite varied and will change over a lifetime. Sometimes your job is just the way to make money; the vocation is pursued in your spare time. A fine example is Einstein’s developing the theory of relativity while he was a clerk in a patent office, happy to have mindless work so he could be free to think about what mattered to him.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Broken windows theory, do what you love, Panamax, period drama

She’s never been to the United States, although she’s lived within two hundred miles of the border all her life. He can see that she’s straining to imagine his life there, her thoughts probably a collage of scenes from movies and magazine shoots. “You love acting, don’t you?” “Yes. Usually I do.” “What a wonderful thing, to get paid for doing what you love,” she says, and he agrees with this. At the end of the meal she thanks him for paying the check and they leave together. Outside the air is cold, sunlight on dirty snow. Later he’ll remember this as a golden period when they could walk out of restaurants together without anyone taking pictures of them on the sidewalk.

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late by Michael Ellsberg

affirmative action, Black Swan, Burning Man, corporate governance, creative destruction, do what you love, financial engineering, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, hiring and firing, independent contractor, job automation, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, mega-rich, meta-analysis, new economy, Norman Mailer, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social intelligence, solopreneur, Steve Ballmer, survivorship bias, telemarketer, Tony Hsieh

They want to work for themselves, creating value for other people on their terms—perhaps on a Wi-Fi-connected laptop from a mobile location. These people, young and old, read books like The Four-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss, Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur by Pamela Slim, and Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love by Jonathan Fields. Daniel Pink, in Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself, his 2001 book prophesying the current tidal wave of microentrepreneurialism, small business, and self-employment, calls them “self-employed knowledge workers, proprietors of home-based businesses . . . freelancers and e-lancers, independent contractors and independent professionals, micropreneurs and infopreneurs, part-time consultants . . . on-call troubleshooters, and full-time soloists.”9 These new kinds of opportunities, open to anyone who wants to pursue them, without any formal, traditional, or academic qualifications necessary to compete, have arisen largely because of technology.

A Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country by Helen Russell

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, death from overwork, do what you love, Downton Abbey, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, microdosing, obamacare, offshore financial centre, remote working, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, work culture

‘A lot of people say that out here, people don’t bitch about work like they do at home. They don’t choose a profession based on how much they’re going to earn. They choose it based on what interests them. Education is free so anyone can train in whatever they want. You know you’re going to get taxed a lot anyway, so you may as well just focus on doing what you love, rather than what’s going to land you a massive salary.’ ‘So there’s less incentive to sacrifice career fulfilment for the almighty dollar?’ I ask. ‘Precisely – because the more you earn, the more tax you pay.’ He tells me about a word he’s been taught that encapsulates the Danish attitude to work: ‘arbejdsglæde’ – from ‘arbejde’ the Danish for ‘work’ and ‘glæde’ from the word for ‘happiness’.

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor who studies “expert performance,” told the New York Times Magazine that “the most general claim” in his work “is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence. . . .” The conclusion that follows, the NYTM notes, is that “when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love—because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t ‘good’ at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better

European Founders at Work by Pedro Gairifo Santos

business intelligence, clean tech, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, deal flow, do what you love, fail fast, fear of failure, full text search, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, information retrieval, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, natural language processing, pattern recognition, pre–internet, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, technology bubble, TED Talk, web application, Y Combinator

I don’t want to grow too much. Santos: Okay. Makes sense. At that point, or even later, might you consider selling the company? Guilizzoni: I don’t know. Not any time soon. That’s never been the plan. I really dislike people who have exit strategies. I think that means you’re not committed to your idea or you’re not doing what you love, so you shouldn’t even start. But I also know that nothing is forever. I spent twelve years of my life doing a web site for the Ultimate Frisbee community, which was huge. It was maybe the biggest web site for Ultimate for many years, and I thought that was going to be something that I did forever.

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

It is as if the sites can’t fully embrace the policing role they must play without reminding the reader of what the platform has to offer, in a language more suited to promotional material. Some simply preface the rules with a fluffy reminder of the platform’s value: “At Pinterest, our mission is to help you discover and do what you love. To make sure everyone has a great experience, we have a few guidelines and rules.” Others litter their guidelines with exclamation marks like an eager tween: “Welcome to the new Tagged Community! We want this to be a great place for you to find answers to any question you have about Tagged!

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World: A Handbook for Personal Liberty by Harry Browne

do what you love, full employment, independent contractor, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, military-industrial complex, Ralph Waldo Emerson, source of truth, War on Poverty

The author also helps you anticipate the problems you'll face and suggests ways of dealing with them. Very easy to read. (Pocketbooks, ISBN 0-67173744-9, paperback, $4.95) WHAT DO YOU WANT? Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want by Barbara Sher, Annie Gottlieb. Getting what you really want will change your life. Your energy level will soar. Doing what you love will attract the people you want in your life. Barbara Sher lays out strategies for identifying what you want, and then finding and creating the life you want. An enjoyable and life-changing book. (Ballantine Books, ISBN 0-34534089-2, softcover, $12.00) Live Your Dream! by Joyce Chapman. The discussions and exercises in this book will help you uncover and pursue goals that bring you alive.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, Linda Tirado Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary, Louis Hyman Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), Elizabeth Anderson Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Harry Braverman The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age, Simon Head Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness, Miya Tokumitsu HyperNormalisation (film), Adam Curtis On workplaces in this book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Brad Stone Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life, Robin Leidner The Furniture Wars: How America Lost a Fifty Billion Dollar Industry, Michael K.

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

Passion is a necessary ingredient for long-term success in business or any profession. If you have ever asked the advice of successful businesspeople on how to become successful, the most common advice you probably received was that you needed to find something you love to do and then do it. By doing what you love and getting very good at it, you’ll be happier, society will likely reward you, and the money will eventually follow. They probably counseled you to not go after a job for the money, and in fact, most people who have made a lot of money didn’t make that their primary goal. For example, when entrepreneurs create a business, they are usually following some passion.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

A search of Google Books’ Ngram Viewer finds that the term follow your passion appeared nearly 450 times more frequently in 2008 than it did in 1980, when it was barely used at all. Think back to that scene in Girls where the heroine—a college graduate—gets turned down for a job frosting cupcakes because, well, she doesn’t express enough passion for frosting cupcakes. The skit is so funny because it rings so true. “Do what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a sentiment we’ve all heard countless times. See, for example, Steve Jobs’s iconic commencement address at Stanford University: You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

But the flipside of that logic seems to be: if you actually like doing X activity, if it is valuable, meaningful, and carries intrinsic rewards for you, it is wrong for you to expect to be paid (well) for it; you should give it freely, even (especially) if by doing so you are allowing others to profit. In other words, we’ll make a living from you doing what you love (for free), but we’ll keep you in check by making sure you have to make a living doing what you hate. Shullenberger gave the example of translation work. Translating a paragraph or document from one language to another—particularly from a dry business document—is not a task that many people would do for fun; still, one can imagine some reasons people might do it other than the money.

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

That’s the hole that many people fall into when they’re put in charge of a team. And some never climb out of it. Because once you’re a manager, you’re no longer an accountant. Or a designer. Or a fisherman. Or an artist. Or whatever it is you really enjoyed doing. I constantly have to remind people: If you’re doing what you loved in your old job, then you’re probably doing the wrong thing. You now lead a team of people doing what you used to be good at. So at least 85 percent of your time should be spent managing. If it’s not, then you aren’t doing it right. Managing is the job. And managing is hard. When I was CTO at Philips, my team put up one of those red flashing lights in the office—the old ones that used to be on police cars.

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm) by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, do what you love, fear of failure, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Vision Fund, Walter Mischel

Had he honestly answered standard “What do you want to be when you grow up?” questions he might have said: “Everything I have time for.” When his high-school guidance counselor tried to help him with career choices, Jordan, like others with Multiple Intelligences, found little use in the usual recommendations, such as “Do what you love” (because he could dive into nearly any topic with real enthusiasm) or “Do what you’re good at” (because he was better than most kids at nearly everything he tried). Like most Everyday Geniuses, Jordan never thought of himself as exceptional. He knew he had special talents and learned things quickly, but he was used to that and so was everyone he knew.

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

1960s counterculture, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, British Empire, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, do what you love, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, obamacare, pill mill, TED Talk, zero-sum game

“All of a sudden, we can’t go to college without Adderall; you can’t do athletics without testosterone; you can’t have intimacy without Viagra. We’re all the time focused on the stuff and not on the people. I tell pain patients, ‘Forget all that; the treatment is you. Take charge of your life and be healthy and do what you love and love what you do.’” And he ignored that very advice. Cahana came to Seattle at 260 pounds, and gained forty-five more over the next five years as, stressed and overworked, he battled to rebuild the historic clinic. The clinic won numerous awards, was highlighted as a model. He was on CNN and in People magazine, gave a TED talk, and testified before the U.S.

CTOs at Work by Scott Donaldson, Stanley Siegel, Gary Donaldson

Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, distributed generation, do what you love, domain-specific language, functional programming, glass ceiling, Hacker News, hype cycle, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, Pluto: dwarf planet, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, systems thinking, thinkpad, web application, zero day, zero-sum game

But I thought even then that I would probably go to law school, because I didn't know what else to do. All I knew for sure, and I remember this clearly: I didn't want to go into computers as a career. I thought that making computers my job would ruin my love for them, would ruin my hobby. I tell you, I wasn't too smart about it! It took me a while to figure out, “Do what you love!” Fortunately, one day my father sent me a magazine advertisement of a computer by Seequa called the Chameleon. “Here's yet another new computer I've never heard of. Nothing interesting about that, but check out the address.” I was like, “Holy crap. I walk by this building every single day.

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm) by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, do what you love, fear of failure, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Vision Fund, Walter Mischel

Had he honestly answered standard “What do you want to be when you grow up?” questions he might have said: “Everything I have time for.” When his high-school guidance counselor tried to help him with career choices, Jordan, like others with Multiple Intelligences, found little use in the usual recommendations, such as “Do what you love” (because he could dive into nearly any topic with real enthusiasm) or “Do what you’re good at” (because he was better than most kids at nearly everything he tried). Like most Everyday Geniuses, Jordan never thought of himself as exceptional. He knew he had special talents and learned things quickly, but he was used to that and so was everyone he knew.

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, behavioural economics, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, deskilling, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, future of work, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, hive mind, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, profit maximization, publication bias, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, school choice, selection bias, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

Anyone who calls Japanese comic books and old movies “useless” should check their double standard. How are comic books and movies any more useless than poems and plays? All else equal, of course, exposing students to plausible careers is better than exposing them to mere hobbies. To live the adage “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life,” students must learn what lovable jobs are available. Give students numerous, diverse, yet realistic options. Start with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ figures on “employment by major occupational group” and “occupations with the most job growth.”67 Expose boys to nursing.

Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, Peter Molyneux

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, book value, collective bargaining, Colossal Cave Adventure, do what you love, financial engineering, game design, Golden age of television, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shock, pirate software, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, Steve Jobs, Von Neumann architecture

At Appy, the Wild West aspects of the digital retail business model and the inherent product unknowns in building successful game apps are challenges that often require the mind of a student. Sometimes experience can send you down the wrong path if you’re not careful. Ramsay: What advice do you have for the entrepreneurs out there? Ulm: Do what you love. Be patient with yourself and your team. Don’t make the same mistake twice. Most importantly, share whatever success you are able to achieve with the people that made it possible. Tobi Saulnier Founder, 1st Playable Productions When Activision acquired Vicarious Visions, where Tobi Saulnier was vice president of product development, she left the company.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It is great to be passionate in life, but it is wise to be so only for things that are under our control, or else we risk being dejected because of unfavorable outcomes. Value investors derive satisfaction from the mental process of investing and from the learnings embedded in the outcomes. Those who love the process end up with results naturally, unlike others who worship only outcomes. The only way to gain an edge is through long and hard work. Do what you love to do, so you just naturally do it or think about it all the time, even if you are relaxing…. Over time, you can accumulate a huge advantage if it comes naturally to you like this [emphasis added]. —Li Lu Buffett has always held the opinion that the people who discover their passion in life are lucky.

Hedge Fund Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager

asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Edward Thorp, family office, financial independence, fixed income, Flash crash, global macro, hindsight bias, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jones Act, legacy carrier, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, oil shock, pattern recognition, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, systematic trading, technology bubble, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

It has gotten harder for me, but that may only be because I am older and less interested, and have more money, which makes me less motivated. Do you have any advice for someone who wanted to pursue the markets as a challenge? The approach that worked for me was the title of a book written much later by my ex-sister-in-law, Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow. Anything else? Try to figure out what your skill set is and apply that to the markets. If you are really good at accounting, you might be good as a value investor. If you are strong in computers and math, you might do best with a quantitative approach. Gambling and investing may not sound like they have much in common, but to Thorp they were quite similar—they were both probability-based games for which the problem of finding an edge could be solved analytically, even though such a solution was widely assumed not to exist for either.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

I was always pretty good at making the technical correction, but I’ve improved two things quite a bit in recent years: finding the thematic or psychological lesson hidden in the technical error (which hugely amplifies the ensuing growth), and having a sense of the beauty and potency of how the loss is actively improving me while I’m still in the thick of the pain of the blow. What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? Do what you love, do it in a way that you love, and pour your heart and soul into every moment of it. Do not be subject to inertia. Challenge your assumptions and the assumptions of those around you as a way of life. Notice how you are unconsciously fighting to maintain your conceptual scheme even as it mires you in quicksand and immense pain.

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, collective bargaining, corporate governance, do what you love, Donald Trump, Easter island, family office, financial engineering, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, obamacare, out of africa, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, stem cell, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration

I’m a big believer in 90 percent of new business happens after office hours, so there’s an edict in our department that you should be out every night. That’s where you find new business and you meet new people. We are all trying to be in the right place at the right time, to create new opportunities for our clients. To be able to do what you love—I’m the luckiest man in New York City. ERIC WATTENBURG, Agent: When I came to CAA, one of the things they kept telling me about was how culturally this place was not like anywhere I’d ever worked. I’d only worked at two other places, William Morris and then a small agency called N. S. Bienstock.

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation by Jono Bacon

barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), collaborative editing, crowdsourcing, Debian, DevOps, digital divide, digital rights, do what you love, do-ocracy, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, Guido van Rossum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, openstreetmap, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, software as a service, Stephen Fry, telemarketer, the long tail, union organizing, VA Linux, web application

To me, the real excitement comes from a true artist-fan connection. A movement. A culture. That’s where the magic is. If you work hard to improve your craft, and care deeply about the integrity of your art, I think you have a good shot. I believe if you make something good, success will follow. “Success” doesn’t just mean money, by the way. Doing what you love to do—and being able to live a comfortable lifestyle while doing it—is a great gig. Mårten Mickos, MySQL and Eucalyptus Mårten Mickos was the CEO of MySQL AB, was senior vice president of the database group at Sun Microsystems, is a member of the board of Mozilla Messaging and RightScale, and Entrepreneur In Residence at Benchmark Capital.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

“People ask me where they should go to work, and I always tell them to go to work for whom they admire the most,” he said. He urged them not to waste their time and their life. “It’s crazy to take little in-between jobs just because they look good on your résumé. That’s like saving sex for your old age. Do what you love and work for whom you admire the most, and you’ve given yourself the best chance in life you can.” They asked him what mistakes he had made. Number one was Berkshire Hathaway, he said—spending twenty years trying to revive a failing textile mill. Second, US Air. Buffett spoke of his failure to call the Air-aholic hotline beforehand.