Loving Your Work: Motivation

Many people think that they will be happy in their job if they can just get paid a bit more.  In my experience, and from what clients and colleagues tell me, that’s rarely the case.  The whole point of my mission to help you to do what you love for a living is that it’s something that you’d do even if you weren’t getting paid at all!

Where people have most success in turning what they love into a living, is where they’re doing it for some higher purpose, something bigger than themselves.  That can range from all-encompassing goals like ending hunger or creating world peace to projects that just affect your local community or your spiritual group, your church synagogue, temple or mosque.  Or it may be as simple and powerful as wanting your family to have everything they need.  Quite why this greater purpose makes people better at sticking at it until they can make a living doing what they love is open to debate, but I have my own theories.

Most of us have been brought up to think of work as something to be endured, something you do under duress, something done out of some kind of duty.  So to spend your working life doing something you actually love seems kind of cheeky, something to be a bit guilty about.  After all, who do we think we are, having fun in our work for goodness sake!  And that slight feeling of guilt makes us just a little bit less certain of our decision to create a work we can love.  In turn, that uncertainty makes us less prepared to fight for our inalienable right to pursue happiness in our work.

But when you have a higher purpose, it’s no longer just about having fun, it’s all about your family, your spiritual group, it’s all about saving the world!  And now you’re proud to stand up and stand out and say, “I love my work”.  Just don’t forget, you have to love the work itself.  A chore being done for a grand purpose is still a chore, and will not be done with joy if the task itself isn’t something you can love.  So by all means have a higher purpose that makes your work even more fulfilling – and serve that purpose doing work you love.

As an aside, as I was re-reading this post, I thought of this …

To Build Your Inspired Business – Start With 'Why?'

You might want to listen to this recording of one of Nick William’s talks recently – To Build Your Inspired Business – Start With ‘Why?’  (click on the image to buy it).  Nick runs the Inspired Entrepreneurs community based in London and with members across the world.  The recording costs £14.99 to get, but here’s a tip – it’s available free to members, and Nick offers a 30-day trial membership for just £1!  That not only includes access to all the talk recordings (there’s dozens of them!), it also gives entry to the London meetings each month – they cost £20, and there’s usually a book that Nick’s bought as a gift for us (I used to think Nick blagged them from the speakers, until an author friend of mine told me Nick had actually shelled out for 80-odd copies of her book when she spoke!)  That’s the sort of chap he is.