Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow

I have a question for you: Do you love your job?

Marcus Buckingham, author of “One Thing You Need to Know” says:

“Some people will tell you that it doesn’t matter if you like your work; you just have to be good at it. Question this advice. You may well be good at some activities you don’t enjoy, but your enjoyment is the fuel you require to keep practicing the activity. Lacking this enjoyment, your performance will likely plateau.”

I know first hand about being in a job you don’t love. I was in the legal field Quit Your Job and Follow Your Dreams for over 15 years and it was draining on a physical, emotional and spiritual level. I was “good” at what I did, but I found no joy in it.

So although I was making what was “good money” at the time, they were really empty dollars because I did not feel fulfilled in that job. Going to work everyday and sitting in my little cubicle felt like a prison to me.

Barbara Sher, author of “I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What it Was” says: “If you’re not involved in something you truly care about, anyplace can seem like a prison.”

I guess that would be a clue…if you feel like your job is a prison. If you wake up dreading to go to work or you just don’t feel satisified. We are not meant to struggle through life. We are meant to express ourselves, use our natural talents and contribute to others.

Years ago, when I was in my unhappy job at the law firm and searching for my “dream”, I read a book by Richard Bolles called “How to find your Mission in Life” and there was one sentence that really helped me excavate my buried dream. The author asked the question, “What do you love to do where you lose all sense of time?” I immediately thought of writing. When I would write, 5 hours seemed like 5 minutes. The interesting part was that I wasn’t doing any writing at that time in my life.

But I knew I was on to something because of the “time flying by” when I wrote. So I started going to writing classes, writing seminars and reading every book about writing that I could get my hands on.

Years later I became a freelance writer for the Capital Gazette Newspapers, I put up a website that I wrote, then I self-published several ebooks and ecourses, as well as a book I co-authored called “The Path to Success”. And now I do a lot of writing for my website and for my clients. I love writing! It brings me great joy! Let me ask you a few more questions:

What brings you joy?
What are you passionate about?
If you had 10 million dollars in the bank, what would you be doing with your time?

Sometimes we know what feeds our soul, but it takes a lot of courage to leave the security of our jobs and go chasing after our dreams. A student at a recent class of mine told me that JOB stands for:

Jails

Operating as

Businesses

I like that!

We have been brought up to believe that a job is something we have to do to pay the bills, but we are not trained to see work as fun. When you do what you love and get paid for it, it’s a whole different experience.

The choice is yours though. Stay in a job you hate or choose to explore and follow your dreams and passions.

You don’t have to make it an overnight event. I’m not asking you to quit your job today or tomorrow. You stay at your job that pays the bills, but now you take steps every day that will move you into creating work that you love.

My journey took 10 years. First, I went from working 45 hours a week at law firms as a full-time employee, to working 18 hours a week in the evening at a law firm for 5 years and then I took the leap!

Actually, that’s not true. I was pushed. You see the Universe knows if your not living your dreams and it will give you a push if you don’t do it on your own.

I got “pushed” from my secure legal job when I was given the pink slip. I was told that the department I was working in was being “restructured” and my job no longer existed. They gave me a little sevrance pay and sent me on my way. At the time I had a lot of fear about the unknown, because you see I didn’t know what my dream was…all I knew was I was miserable.

So the Universe gave me the push I needed. And guess what…you can either “jump” or get “pushed“. It’s called divine intervention. The easiest thing to do is nothing, but that only lasts for so long.

Oprah says that in order to hear the voice of God directing your life, you need to listen to every whisper, every intuitive feeling, and every feeling. If you do not listen to the whisper, you will then get a louder message, and if you don’t pay attention to the louder message, you will get a crisis, and eventually if you ignore that, then you will get a disaster.

I have found in my life that taking time daily for meditation and contemplation is how I hear the whispers. There’s a great Cherokee saying: “Listen to the whispers and you won’t have to hear the screams.”

Unfortunately, given the choice between safety and growth (risk), human beings will almost always choose safety. But there’s a price you pay for “safety”. Years wasted in an unhappy environment, with a boss we hate, a commute we suffer through and most importantly doing things that don’t bring us joy.

So my message to you is, if you’re unhappy in your job start exploring other options. My top 5 books for you to read for this process are:

This Time I Dance! by Tama Kieves (my #1 pick)
Do What you Love and the Money Will Follow by Marsha Sinetar
Beachcombing at Miramar by Richard Bode
How to Find Your Mission in Life by Richard Bolles
The 4-hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris
Making a Living without a Job by Barbara Winters

I’ll end with this story by Harold Ikemoto:

“When my daughter was about 7 years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, ‘You mean they forget?’

Yes, we forget what are dreams are…