Ask anybody who’s actually productive—especially those who make a lot of money by being productive, and nearly all of them will tell you that they love their work.
I have noticed this pattern but have always been a little skeptical because there seem to be obvious signalling reasons to make this claim irrespective of its truth. I’ve also considered the possibility that there are personality types who are telling the truth when they basically claim to be happy and motivated all the time. The third possibility I’ve considered is that people mean something different by ‘love my work’ than I understand by it—not that they are literally full of enjoyment and motivation all the time while working.
I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone who I’ve had what felt like an honest conversation with about work who literally ‘loved their work’. They may enjoy some parts of it but much of it is still effortful and not the most enjoyable thing they could think of doing at any given moment.
Could you clarify exactly what you think productive people mean when they say they ‘love their work’ and explain what leads you to believe that it is literally true?
As someone who loves his work, here is how I see it.
No one is happy and motivated at all times when working. For any substantial work, that work is divided into many different things. Some of those things are inevitably going to be things that you do not love, and some will be things that you actively dislike. Loving your work means loving the composite of the things you love and the things you don’t love, and it means that the parts you love give you the motivation to do the things you don’t.
In my job, there’s a core task. I spend the bulk of my time actively engaged work time either on that task or trying to find ways to do that task better. I love both of these tasks, but I also spend a large amount of time waiting for these tasks to reach a point where they become engaging, and I have to deal with people many of whom I’d prefer not to deal with, and I have to do things like maintain all the computers and connections and programs necessary for this work.
But that’s true of anything! I love eating, but there are subsets of this task I don’t enjoy, and that’s even more true of baking or cooking. It’s true when I play a game, or write an article, or watch a television show (gotta skip those ads!), or anything else I can think of. There’s nothing special about work.
But that’s true of anything! I love eating, but there are subsets of this task I don’t enjoy, and that’s even more true of baking or cooking. It’s true when I play a game, or write an article, or watch a television show (gotta skip those ads!), or anything else I can think of. There’s nothing special about work.
Ok, this makes more sense to me. There are certainly things which I would say I ‘love’ doing which I do not enjoy every aspect of. In that sense I have never loved work but I can imagine that some people are fortunate enough to do so. I still don’t really understand pjeby’s comment in this context though. I love snowboarding in this sense for example but I still have to make a conscious effort to motivate myself with the sub-tasks required to get to the enjoyable parts.
Working is merely a particularly large and complex sub-task I perform in order to obtain the financial resources to do the things I actually ‘love’ and many (work and non-work) sub-tasks are boring and unpleasant and require motivational hacks to get done, which seems to be the whole point of the kind of self-improvement being discussed.
I have noticed this pattern but have always been a little skeptical because there seem to be obvious signalling reasons to make this claim irrespective of its truth.
But there are also equally obvious signaling reasons to make the opposite claim—i.e., I Am Doing This Work That Is Really Hard Because It Is (And Therefore I Am) Important And Prestigious.
And some people do make that claim. They just usually don’t have much to show for their efforts, by comparison to the people making the other claim.
They may enjoy some parts of it but much of it is still effortful and not the most enjoyable thing they could think of doing at any given moment.
The sensation of “effort” is the sensation of your mind trying to escape whatever you’re actually experiencing in the present moment, whether it’s because you dislike what’s happening or you wish it were something else.
In the absence of that escape attempt, there is no “effort” felt, vs. what you might simply call “exertion” instead. Things just are, and doing happens.
Could you clarify exactly what you think productive people mean when they say they ‘love their work’ and explain what leads you to believe that it is literally true?
I think perhaps you are reading “love” as something like “receive pleasure by”, whereas the intended meaning is more like “create pleasure through”.
When I do something nice for my wife, I “love” what I do in the sense that I am doing it with love—investing myself in it for the sake of the result. This is pleasurable, but not because the activity itself is necessarily pleasurable. It is what I bring to the activity that makes the difference.
To put it another way, “love” in this case is an active verb, where one is the do-er of love-ing. Not a passive verb, in the sense that we might say, “I love this weather we’re having”, but more like the love in “I love you”.
And some people do make that claim. They just usually don’t have much to show for their efforts, by comparison to the people making the other claim.
There seem to me to be successful people who claim that they have had to work hard and overcome obstacles to achieve their success. Thomas Edison’s famous “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” springs to mind but successful people who claim that ‘damn hard work’ was what brought them success don’t seem as rare as you imply here.
I think perhaps you are reading “love” as something like “receive pleasure by”, whereas the intended meaning is more like “create pleasure through”.
You seem to be saying that people who ‘love their work’ then do not literally enjoy the process of doing their work but take pleasure in the results. This sounds quite plausible but then I wonder why this is in conflict with the idea that ‘Work is hard and problematic and we must be forced to do it.’?
It all seems to come back to the question of how you motivate yourself to do things (or just to start things) that are not intrinsically pleasurable in the moment or intrinsically rewarding.
For example, I do not find it easy to drag myself out of bed at 5am to head out into the wet and cold and take a 2 hour bus ride to go snowboarding but I find it easier to perform this somewhat unpleasant task when motivated by the relatively short term reward of an enjoyable day on the mountain. I find it harder to motivate myself to overcome obstacles at work and avoid procrastination because the reward is distant, abstract and only loosely correlated with my direct actions (and the sub-tasks often feel intrinsically more effortful).
I’m curious if you have insight into how one could go about making distant, abstract and loosely correlated outcomes have the same motivational force as shorter term, more direct actions leading to actually-enjoyed outcomes.
You seem to be saying that people who ‘love their work’ then do not literally enjoy the process of doing their work but take pleasure in the results
You are still not getting what “love” means. I am talking about being loving—the emotional state of giving love to something. This is during the work, not after the work.
If I make breakfast in bed for my wife, I am feeling love as I work. Not love for the process of cooking, but love for my wife.
This is not the same thing as anticipating the result of my wife’s smile.
You’re operating under a false dichotomy between “pleasure now” vs. “pleasure later”, as though these pleasures can only come from things that happen outside you. This is not the case.
I’m curious if you have insight into how one could go about making distant, abstract and loosely correlated outcomes have the same motivational force as shorter term, more direct actions leading to actually-enjoyed outcomes.
The kind of thinking that produced this question is not the kind of thinking that can apply the answer. (Because the assumption behind the question is that motivation is something that happens to you to make you do things, and that is not the same kind of motivation that I’m talking about.)
I’m afraid your examples and explanations aren’t really hitting home for me. I don’t find cooking a motivational challenge in general for example because the rewards are so immediate and so correlated with the process (not to mention that the process does not feel inherently effortful in the way that the kinds of work tasks I struggle with motivationally do).
The particular characteristics of ‘work’ tasks that are not fun and pose motivational challenges seem to be their inherent effortfulness (high degree of conscious attention) but low novelty/interest, the relative distance to achieving any actually pleasurable reward (like eating a tasty meal) and the relatively low (or loosely felt) correlation with high level goals that you actually care about. I just can’t wrap my brain around how ‘being loving’ applies to these kinds of tasks.
I just can’t wrap my brain around how ‘being loving’ applies to these kinds of tasks.
Ok, try this one: Imagine a monk copying a manuscript, who fervently believes he’s doing the Lord’s work, and therefore treats every moment of it as a prayer and meditation.
Note that this is not at all the same state of mind as the monk trying to force himself to work because he’s anticipating a reward in heaven. Rather, the monk feels good now, because the work is important. (e.g. brings glory to god, is the expression of god’s love, or whatever meaningless phrase is used to stand for the perceived inherent goodness of the immediate action.)
IOW, the dimensions you’re using to measure by (novelty, required attention, distance to reward) are not the solution, they’re the problem.
IOW, the dimensions you’re using to measure by (novelty, required attention, distance to reward) are not the solution, they’re the problem.
I wouldn’t really say I’m using them to measure by as a deliberate choice. These are the dimensions which seem to me to be relevant differences between tasks that pose motivational problems and those that don’t. This is partly observational but also based on material and research I’ve encountered over the years on these issues. The lack of motivation comes first however and the dimensions are attempts to identify a pattern.
Convincing myself that my work is important seems a more daunting challenge than finding motivational hacks and also more dangerous—what if I end up like the monk, squandering my efforts on some sub-optimal activity?
Convincing myself that my work is important seems a more daunting challenge than finding motivational hacks and also more dangerous—what if I end up like the monk, squandering my efforts on some sub-optimal activity?
Two things:
You did ask how people could love their work, and
If you aren’t convinced what you’re doing is important, maybe that’s a bigger problem than falsely convincing yourself it’s important!
Note, for example, that lots of people have ended up accidentally doing important things as a direct result of trying to do something stupid that they thought was important. (Like, say, Columbus.)
True, I think a couple of things are getting conflated here (largely my fault because I’m still confused about the distinctions).
A couple of people have said they ‘love their work’ but still have motivational issues with particular sub-tasks of their work. If that is what people generally mean by ‘love their work’ I think I have a better grasp on the idea. If this is what people generally mean then all kinds of motivational hacks for dealing with low-level sub-tasks that are not inherently lovable are useful. They might even be useful for someone like me who does not ‘love their work’ but values the resources it provides to do things they actually want to do.
You originally seemed to be claiming that people who really ‘love their work’ do not suffer from motivational issues on not-inherently-pleasurable sub-tasks or need ways of avoiding being distracted by ‘shiny things’. I find this slightly implausible but it sounds like nice work if you can get it.
If you aren’t convinced what you’re doing is important, maybe that’s a bigger problem than falsely convincing yourself it’s important!
Either sense of ‘loving your work’ above sounds like a great place to be and I’m very interested in attaining such a situation if possible. That seems a bigger / higher level problem than simple motivational hacks can help with however.
For me and the vast majority of people I know however work is merely a particularly large and burdensome sub-task required to attain the resources to pursue things we actually value / consider important. Figuring out if there’s an alternative is a major personal project for me however so I’m open to any and all advice in that area.
Thomas Edison’s famous “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” springs to mind but successful people who claim that ‘damn hard work’ was what brought them success don’t seem as rare as you imply here.
A quote that would be at least as credible in Edison’s case (and in general): “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent taking credit for other people’s work.”
To put it another way, “love” in this case is an active verb, where one is the do-er of love-ing. Not a passive verb, in the sense that we might say, “I love this weather we’re having”, but more like the love in “I love you”.
There’s enough confusion about what the term “passive verb” means out there already, please don’t add more.
I enjoy my job, I get to do fun stuff, and generally look forward to going to work. Then I come home and program too, for personal projects.
This gets back to my original question of what people mean when they say they ‘love their job’. I’m reasonably well paid and work on reasonably interesting problems and there are certainly worse jobs. I sometimes enjoy aspects of my work and / or get a sense of satisfaction from them. But ‘love’ seems like a completely inappropriate word for something I would walk away from and never look back if I won the lottery tomorrow.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, I’d start a small game company, keep programming on the interesting bits and hire people to do the boring stuff or the stuff I’m not as good at.
Considering I never even played the lottery, that seems pretty unlikely, but still—I wouldn’t want to stop working on cool nifty stuff, unless it was to work on something cooler and niftier.
I love my job so much that if I won the lottery, I would keep doing it too, and I would hire people to do the boring stuff which doesn’t uniquely require me.
Yet, not having won the lottery, it remains the case that, at this job I love SO MUCH that I would keep doing it if I won the lottery, there are many subgoals and tasks which are boring, which aren’t shiny and interesting enough to draw my attention naturally, and which I must force myself to do. And if I don’t do them, my organization will proceed more slowly or not at all.
So to be more effective at this job I love, I either need to win the lottery, or I need to strength my attention-directing muscle.
But ‘love’ seems like a completely inappropriate word for something I would walk away from and never look back if I won the lottery tomorrow.
I think that’s apt, and I think that the people who love their jobs (like Emile) do not fit that description. I haven’t yet held a job that I love. I am, though, studying to enter a field of work that, if I won the lottery, I would still want to work in, because I’m passionate about it. There exist jobs that I would love.
If you still don’t think it’s possible to love your work, what would you do if you won the lottery? Sit on the couch playing video games all day? I doubt it—at least after the first year. Doing nothing, as it turns out, gets really boring after a while, especially for people with curious minds. (This is one of the premises of unschooling; I don’t remember which specific book I read it in, or I’d link it.) You’d find something to do that interested or excited you. Odds are, there’s work to be had which relates to that something. It has the potential to be work that you love.
But I suspect that at least one of us is generalizing from a single example. Either you have not had a job that you loved and are thus assuming that such a thing is impossible, or I am naive and optimistic and don’t understand what appears to me to be cynicism.
If you still don’t think it’s possible to love your work, what would you do if you won the lottery? Sit on the couch playing video games all day? I doubt it—at least after the first year.
Nope, not at all. I’ve got plenty of things I’d do with sufficient free time and resources. None of them that I’ve yet figured out how to get anyone to pay me enough to cover my living expenses though. The reason I work is primarily to fund the things I actually want to do.
I was under the impression that the video game industry was a horrible pit of despair, crunch time, and routine 80-hour weeks that chews up innocent hopefuls who initially think “Cool, I’m making Video Games!” and spits them out when the idealism wears off in a couple of years...
The phenomenon you describe certainly does exist in the games industry but it’s not something I’ve had to deal with a lot (just saying no works wonders) and isn’t the primary reason I don’t love my job.
I have noticed this pattern but have always been a little skeptical because there seem to be obvious signalling reasons to make this claim irrespective of its truth. I’ve also considered the possibility that there are personality types who are telling the truth when they basically claim to be happy and motivated all the time. The third possibility I’ve considered is that people mean something different by ‘love my work’ than I understand by it—not that they are literally full of enjoyment and motivation all the time while working.
I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone who I’ve had what felt like an honest conversation with about work who literally ‘loved their work’. They may enjoy some parts of it but much of it is still effortful and not the most enjoyable thing they could think of doing at any given moment.
Could you clarify exactly what you think productive people mean when they say they ‘love their work’ and explain what leads you to believe that it is literally true?
As someone who loves his work, here is how I see it.
No one is happy and motivated at all times when working. For any substantial work, that work is divided into many different things. Some of those things are inevitably going to be things that you do not love, and some will be things that you actively dislike. Loving your work means loving the composite of the things you love and the things you don’t love, and it means that the parts you love give you the motivation to do the things you don’t.
In my job, there’s a core task. I spend the bulk of my time actively engaged work time either on that task or trying to find ways to do that task better. I love both of these tasks, but I also spend a large amount of time waiting for these tasks to reach a point where they become engaging, and I have to deal with people many of whom I’d prefer not to deal with, and I have to do things like maintain all the computers and connections and programs necessary for this work.
But that’s true of anything! I love eating, but there are subsets of this task I don’t enjoy, and that’s even more true of baking or cooking. It’s true when I play a game, or write an article, or watch a television show (gotta skip those ads!), or anything else I can think of. There’s nothing special about work.
Ok, this makes more sense to me. There are certainly things which I would say I ‘love’ doing which I do not enjoy every aspect of. In that sense I have never loved work but I can imagine that some people are fortunate enough to do so. I still don’t really understand pjeby’s comment in this context though. I love snowboarding in this sense for example but I still have to make a conscious effort to motivate myself with the sub-tasks required to get to the enjoyable parts.
Working is merely a particularly large and complex sub-task I perform in order to obtain the financial resources to do the things I actually ‘love’ and many (work and non-work) sub-tasks are boring and unpleasant and require motivational hacks to get done, which seems to be the whole point of the kind of self-improvement being discussed.
But there are also equally obvious signaling reasons to make the opposite claim—i.e., I Am Doing This Work That Is Really Hard Because It Is (And Therefore I Am) Important And Prestigious.
And some people do make that claim. They just usually don’t have much to show for their efforts, by comparison to the people making the other claim.
The sensation of “effort” is the sensation of your mind trying to escape whatever you’re actually experiencing in the present moment, whether it’s because you dislike what’s happening or you wish it were something else.
In the absence of that escape attempt, there is no “effort” felt, vs. what you might simply call “exertion” instead. Things just are, and doing happens.
I think perhaps you are reading “love” as something like “receive pleasure by”, whereas the intended meaning is more like “create pleasure through”.
When I do something nice for my wife, I “love” what I do in the sense that I am doing it with love—investing myself in it for the sake of the result. This is pleasurable, but not because the activity itself is necessarily pleasurable. It is what I bring to the activity that makes the difference.
To put it another way, “love” in this case is an active verb, where one is the do-er of love-ing. Not a passive verb, in the sense that we might say, “I love this weather we’re having”, but more like the love in “I love you”.
There seem to me to be successful people who claim that they have had to work hard and overcome obstacles to achieve their success. Thomas Edison’s famous “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” springs to mind but successful people who claim that ‘damn hard work’ was what brought them success don’t seem as rare as you imply here.
You seem to be saying that people who ‘love their work’ then do not literally enjoy the process of doing their work but take pleasure in the results. This sounds quite plausible but then I wonder why this is in conflict with the idea that ‘Work is hard and problematic and we must be forced to do it.’?
It all seems to come back to the question of how you motivate yourself to do things (or just to start things) that are not intrinsically pleasurable in the moment or intrinsically rewarding.
For example, I do not find it easy to drag myself out of bed at 5am to head out into the wet and cold and take a 2 hour bus ride to go snowboarding but I find it easier to perform this somewhat unpleasant task when motivated by the relatively short term reward of an enjoyable day on the mountain. I find it harder to motivate myself to overcome obstacles at work and avoid procrastination because the reward is distant, abstract and only loosely correlated with my direct actions (and the sub-tasks often feel intrinsically more effortful).
I’m curious if you have insight into how one could go about making distant, abstract and loosely correlated outcomes have the same motivational force as shorter term, more direct actions leading to actually-enjoyed outcomes.
You are still not getting what “love” means. I am talking about being loving—the emotional state of giving love to something. This is during the work, not after the work.
If I make breakfast in bed for my wife, I am feeling love as I work. Not love for the process of cooking, but love for my wife.
This is not the same thing as anticipating the result of my wife’s smile.
You’re operating under a false dichotomy between “pleasure now” vs. “pleasure later”, as though these pleasures can only come from things that happen outside you. This is not the case.
The kind of thinking that produced this question is not the kind of thinking that can apply the answer. (Because the assumption behind the question is that motivation is something that happens to you to make you do things, and that is not the same kind of motivation that I’m talking about.)
I’m afraid your examples and explanations aren’t really hitting home for me. I don’t find cooking a motivational challenge in general for example because the rewards are so immediate and so correlated with the process (not to mention that the process does not feel inherently effortful in the way that the kinds of work tasks I struggle with motivationally do).
The particular characteristics of ‘work’ tasks that are not fun and pose motivational challenges seem to be their inherent effortfulness (high degree of conscious attention) but low novelty/interest, the relative distance to achieving any actually pleasurable reward (like eating a tasty meal) and the relatively low (or loosely felt) correlation with high level goals that you actually care about. I just can’t wrap my brain around how ‘being loving’ applies to these kinds of tasks.
Ok, try this one: Imagine a monk copying a manuscript, who fervently believes he’s doing the Lord’s work, and therefore treats every moment of it as a prayer and meditation.
Note that this is not at all the same state of mind as the monk trying to force himself to work because he’s anticipating a reward in heaven. Rather, the monk feels good now, because the work is important. (e.g. brings glory to god, is the expression of god’s love, or whatever meaningless phrase is used to stand for the perceived inherent goodness of the immediate action.)
IOW, the dimensions you’re using to measure by (novelty, required attention, distance to reward) are not the solution, they’re the problem.
I wouldn’t really say I’m using them to measure by as a deliberate choice. These are the dimensions which seem to me to be relevant differences between tasks that pose motivational problems and those that don’t. This is partly observational but also based on material and research I’ve encountered over the years on these issues. The lack of motivation comes first however and the dimensions are attempts to identify a pattern.
Convincing myself that my work is important seems a more daunting challenge than finding motivational hacks and also more dangerous—what if I end up like the monk, squandering my efforts on some sub-optimal activity?
Two things:
You did ask how people could love their work, and
If you aren’t convinced what you’re doing is important, maybe that’s a bigger problem than falsely convincing yourself it’s important!
Note, for example, that lots of people have ended up accidentally doing important things as a direct result of trying to do something stupid that they thought was important. (Like, say, Columbus.)
True, I think a couple of things are getting conflated here (largely my fault because I’m still confused about the distinctions).
A couple of people have said they ‘love their work’ but still have motivational issues with particular sub-tasks of their work. If that is what people generally mean by ‘love their work’ I think I have a better grasp on the idea. If this is what people generally mean then all kinds of motivational hacks for dealing with low-level sub-tasks that are not inherently lovable are useful. They might even be useful for someone like me who does not ‘love their work’ but values the resources it provides to do things they actually want to do.
You originally seemed to be claiming that people who really ‘love their work’ do not suffer from motivational issues on not-inherently-pleasurable sub-tasks or need ways of avoiding being distracted by ‘shiny things’. I find this slightly implausible but it sounds like nice work if you can get it.
Either sense of ‘loving your work’ above sounds like a great place to be and I’m very interested in attaining such a situation if possible. That seems a bigger / higher level problem than simple motivational hacks can help with however.
For me and the vast majority of people I know however work is merely a particularly large and burdensome sub-task required to attain the resources to pursue things we actually value / consider important. Figuring out if there’s an alternative is a major personal project for me however so I’m open to any and all advice in that area.
A quote that would be at least as credible in Edison’s case (and in general): “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent taking credit for other people’s work.”
There’s enough confusion about what the term “passive verb” means out there already, please don’t add more.
You should come and work in the game industry! There are a few here.
I do work in the games industry.
Damn.
Errrm—you should come and work in France, where soul-crushing unpaid overtime is illegal!
I enjoy my job, I get to do fun stuff, and generally look forward to going to work. Then I come home and program too, for personal projects.
This gets back to my original question of what people mean when they say they ‘love their job’. I’m reasonably well paid and work on reasonably interesting problems and there are certainly worse jobs. I sometimes enjoy aspects of my work and / or get a sense of satisfaction from them. But ‘love’ seems like a completely inappropriate word for something I would walk away from and never look back if I won the lottery tomorrow.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, I’d start a small game company, keep programming on the interesting bits and hire people to do the boring stuff or the stuff I’m not as good at.
Considering I never even played the lottery, that seems pretty unlikely, but still—I wouldn’t want to stop working on cool nifty stuff, unless it was to work on something cooler and niftier.
I love my job so much that if I won the lottery, I would keep doing it too, and I would hire people to do the boring stuff which doesn’t uniquely require me.
Yet, not having won the lottery, it remains the case that, at this job I love SO MUCH that I would keep doing it if I won the lottery, there are many subgoals and tasks which are boring, which aren’t shiny and interesting enough to draw my attention naturally, and which I must force myself to do. And if I don’t do them, my organization will proceed more slowly or not at all.
So to be more effective at this job I love, I either need to win the lottery, or I need to strength my attention-directing muscle.
I think that’s apt, and I think that the people who love their jobs (like Emile) do not fit that description. I haven’t yet held a job that I love. I am, though, studying to enter a field of work that, if I won the lottery, I would still want to work in, because I’m passionate about it. There exist jobs that I would love.
If you still don’t think it’s possible to love your work, what would you do if you won the lottery? Sit on the couch playing video games all day? I doubt it—at least after the first year. Doing nothing, as it turns out, gets really boring after a while, especially for people with curious minds. (This is one of the premises of unschooling; I don’t remember which specific book I read it in, or I’d link it.) You’d find something to do that interested or excited you. Odds are, there’s work to be had which relates to that something. It has the potential to be work that you love.
But I suspect that at least one of us is generalizing from a single example. Either you have not had a job that you loved and are thus assuming that such a thing is impossible, or I am naive and optimistic and don’t understand what appears to me to be cynicism.
Nope, not at all. I’ve got plenty of things I’d do with sufficient free time and resources. None of them that I’ve yet figured out how to get anyone to pay me enough to cover my living expenses though. The reason I work is primarily to fund the things I actually want to do.
I was under the impression that the video game industry was a horrible pit of despair, crunch time, and routine 80-hour weeks that chews up innocent hopefuls who initially think “Cool, I’m making Video Games!” and spits them out when the idealism wears off in a couple of years...
The phenomenon you describe certainly does exist in the games industry but it’s not something I’ve had to deal with a lot (just saying no works wonders) and isn’t the primary reason I don’t love my job.
I think the distinction between a “remembering self” and an “experiencing self” might be relevant here: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html