How to Do What You Love for the Rest of Your Life – Without Falling for Stupid Self-Help Guru Advice
Don’t just show up every day like a monkey
“Do what you love” is some of the worst advice in history.
It’s thrown around like dirty underwear at a strip club. The self-help gurus make it sound like you go on some Wizard of Oz journey and magically stumble across a sparkly yellow brick road full of magicians and potions.
Hands up who believes this? Not me.
The path to doing what you love for the rest of your life isn’t obvious. But when you understand the basics, it’s almost impossible not to make it happen.
Start Here: Do what you love
WTF!!!
Yep. Start by doing something you love doing. I know, complicated stuff, right? We all have at least one thing we love doing, even if it’s collecting Pokemon cards.
Just do it. Don’t overthink it. Don’t ask mentors. Don’t worry what your boss thinks. Don’t start in a year when you’re ready. Don’t worry if anyone cares. Again, just do it.
Complicated = Bullsh*t
Doing what you love is the easy part. You learned to do it as a child. Now you have to remember to do it again as an adult.
Build it in public
Most people ignore step one or never go beyond it.
That’s why we have millions of tired and burned out adults who feel like crap and don’t know where their life is leading them. They’re found in office cubicles all over the world, building someone else’s dream while theirs dies a slow & painful death.
“A lot of 'burnout' is just the result of prolonged exposure to environments you were never truly aligned with to start." – Anu AtluruThey focus on “what’s my niche” or “where will I be in 5 years” and never find the answer. So they just get frustrated and give up.
They can’t see the future (side note: none of us can see the goddamn future).
What worked for me was to skip all these complicated questions and just start. The difference is I did it in public. That means I took what I love doing (writing) and shared it with the world on social media.
I didn’t act like I was an expert.
I didn’t pretend to be smart.
I didn’t fall in love with myself.
I didn’t build some big ego personal brand.
What I did was:
Shared what I was learning
Met people where I was at (not where I wanted to be)
Started conversations in communities
Made it a daily habit
Shined the light on others in my space
Documented the rise of my writing career
Curated lessons and insights from influential people
This unconventional approach allowed me to think through what I love in a different way. It also helped with the next step …
Attract human beings with sexy eyeballs
Without attention all you have is something you love and no one to share it with.
This will lead you to become a starving artist because you’ll earn $0 and get frustrated by anyone (like me) who does earn money from doing what they love.
Building an audience is another topic that’s drowning in sludge-filled guru advice that acts as a form of quicksand if you dare step into the arena.
Most audience building is needy (even desperate).
Natural audience building isn’t just doing what you love. It’s daring to ask people to follow/subscribe to you and to share your work. There’s a delicate balance.
If you’re too assertive with your asks or you make too many asks, the average person will ignore or even block/mute you.
If you’re not assertive enough or use stupid limiting phrases such as “selling out” or “being salesy,” you will starve to death. But if you nail building an audience, well, you can build anything in the world and live an uncommon life.
Make some big cash
Romantics hate when you mention money.
They act like we pay bills with love hearts and compliments. As soon as I add money to the doing what you love formula, the crazies lose their mind.
But without money there is no love.
Money helps you pay the bills so you can keep doing what you love. Otherwise, you have to sandwich a 9-5 job in the middle and that distracts you from the real work.
Someone asked me the other day what my goal is with my writing. Answer: “To earn enough money to keep doing it and never work a job again.”
Money is a resource. Money amplifies what you love and makes it 10x better.
Without money all you have is a hobby that’ll eventually take a backseat and get replaced by a corporation’s mission statement.
There is no end to the amount of work a job can give you. And you can’t say no if you want to stay employed. We don’t push back on 9-5 work because they keep us on the treadmill, believing we will get a promotion or bonus if we do.
However, the incentives you get from doing what you love and getting paid to do it are far greater than any dream a prestigious employer like Google can ever offer.
Life is full of promises. Most of them are lies.
Choose yourself. Choose what you love. Dare to get paid so you can do it for the rest of your life and support your family. It’s the ultimate form of happiness.
From love to full-time income
The transition from doing what you love to a full-time income often blows up in people’s faces.
Why?
If you don’t solve a problem for people, you can never collect money. Even playing music solves a problem for people (it helps entertain and provide us an escape). Too many wannabe creatives forget about other people’s problems and only focus on theirs.
“I need money, dontcha know.”
“The internet is too crowded.”
“No one’s listening!”
“Elon is evil.”
“Social media is exhausting.”
If all you do is create more problems in the world, you’ll never make the jump from love to full-time pursuit. Problem solving is the missing skill. You figure out what problem to solve by interacting with people online.
The best path I’ve found for doing this is writing.
Talk to us. Understand us. Find out what the problems are in your topic of interest. The final step is to pick a problem you discover and attempt to solve it.
The first attempt will be sloppy. You’ll probably piss your pants and go red in the face. Good. You’re now on the path of enormous growth.
Don’t just show up every day like a monkey
The self-help gurus preach consistency. I sometimes do too.
But only f*cking monkeys show up every day and drown in their own awesomeness. I’ve watched a lot of people in the last 10 years try to do what they love online.
Many of them fail because they won’t pull their head out of their own ass. They think they know everything but they actually don’t know much.
They refuse to:
Get feedback from peers
Join paid masterminds
Pay for coaching
Do courses
Consider the opposite worldview
Instead, they just keep doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Or worse, expecting to be goddamn discovered….lol.
Listen carefully: no one is coming to discover you.
Penguin Random House isn’t sending you a book deal because you wrote a Medium article with 5000 claps. Hollywood isn’t turning your story into a movie starring Matt Damon as your father.
The path to success is paved with thousands of iterations.
You actually have to do what you love and make many rapid changes on a consistent basis while maintaining the daily habit. You have to be humble enough to get out of your own way and have your assumptions challenged, and ideally, freaking demolished with a nuclear bomb.
The people who do what they love aren’t the smartest people in the room.
They’re the ones who experiment like mad scientists and force their way into rooms full of successful people they don’t belong in.
Doing what you love requires you to kick down doors, instead of wait for them to be opened for you by a Keanu Reeves Jesus in a tuxedo.
What you love will slap you in the face
Wait, what, what, what, what, what???!!!!
People think they can predict what they’ll love. And you can at the start. But as you go on this wild journey above, your mind starts to shift.
You realize you love things you weren’t previously aware of. You come across new ideas on social media and unlikely people to worship. I was never looking for a buff gym god who talks about spirituality and business. Yet I found Dan Koe by accident.
I also wasn’t looking for a wild guy from Tennessee with a cowboy hat and one too many cats. Yet I found my business partner Todd. I’ve learned the things we end up loving are the things we struggle for.
If it’s easy, it’s bullsh*t. If it’s hard, it’s life-changing.
Building anything online has many obstacles and roadblocks. But if you can figure it out through experimentation, you find a holy grail most don’t know exists.
Life is too short *not* to do what you love full-time.
Stop waiting.
Tell me in the comments section below what’s holding you back from doing what you love full-time.
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"I’ve learned the things we end up loving are the things we struggle for."
I was reading 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck' over the Easter weekend. Mark Manson makes this point - true joy comes when you solve problems. Life must suck a bit for you to make a difference in it.
To be happy, you need to know what being unhappy is.
"“Do what you love” is some of the worst advice in history. It’s thrown around like dirty underwear at a strip club..."
Man, Tim, I want to write like this too.