“Turning What You Love into Work” Falls Short from a Missing Route, Not Missing Passion

There is something you love. It would be good to live on it. You also know that the moment this is said aloud, the responses divide roughly in two. Just try it and it is not that easy.

The two look opposite, and they are measuring the same place. Both are looking at whether that love is genuine, or whether there is enough of it. Since the object measured is the same, whichever answer you receive, what you do the next day is unchanged. On the day you were encouraged and on the day you were warned off, what is to hand is the same thing you love.

The split also tells on where time goes. Take just try it and you go deeper into the love you already hold. Take it is not that easy and you first shore up the living. Both are instructions to move time towards one side or the other — the love or the living. And while that happens, nothing at all is allotted to what sits between them.

What you want to know may not be there. Not whether to do it, but what is interposed between what you love and income. The object of the love is already settled, has continued for years, and still does not turn into income. For someone in that state, whether to do it or not is a fork long since passed.

Only the location of the answer, placed first. There are four things interposed, and every one of them exists independently of the degree of love. The four are not filled in by practice. They are of the kind that get decided. The second half of this article is given over to a procedure for counting which of the four is blank from the numbers to hand. However much better your hands become on the skill side, the four do not fill themselves in.

That the place of the blockage is hard to see has a reason. The love side and the route side differ by orders of magnitude in the time poured into them. One holds years of accumulation; the other holds barely a memory of having been considered. When the materials to hand are all on one side, the account of the cause leans to that side too.

Articles answering should you turn what you love into work exist in quantity, and many are careful. What they treat finely, though, is what to do, not how to deliver it. For not a few people the former is already settled. Redoing a stage already completed does not move the blockage.

What follows first examines the word love itself, then places the four one at a time. After that it counts which side you are blocked on — the love side or the route side — from the number of things made and the number of things placed. Whether you love it is not judged at any point.

The Answers on “Turning What You Love into Work” Are Left Split in Two

Articles on this theme are often built the same way. First the advantages, then the disadvantages, and finally the signs of who is and is not suited to it.

The advantages listed are: it is rewarding, it is easier to sustain, skill grows more readily. The disadvantages listed are: the gap between the ideal and the real, the possibility of coming to dislike it, unstable income. The signs of being suited are: initiative, drive, having done your self-analysis.

This construction carries one shared premise: that what has to be judged is the choice of whether to turn what you love into work. So the article sets the good and bad sides of that choice side by side and lets the reader’s aptitude decide at the end.

The prescription is uniform too: make love specific. Rather than saying vaguely that you love something, take apart what inside it you love. If music, is it performing, making, listening, or being in the room. Take it apart and the right occupation comes into view — that is the storyline.

The prescription is genuinely useful. Taking it apart can bring out elements that surprise even you. Someone who thought they loved drawing takes it apart and notices they loved the state of concentrating alone for long stretches. Discoveries of this kind widen the range of options.

It is necessary, though, to see precisely which question the prescription answers. What taking apart answers is the question of what to do. Which occupation to choose, which field to enter.

Where people actually jam, however, may not be there. What is loved is known. What is wanted is settled. And still it does not become income. For someone in this state, the prescription make your love specific amounts to being told to redo a step already completed.

So the two-way split of the answers — just try it and it is not that easy — and the prescription make it specific are all looking only at the side of love. The income side is treated as something that follows as a result, or set aside as a matter of luck.

The bias has a source. Articles on this theme are often written by publications dealing with employment and job changes. Within the framework of employment support, the income side is already settled. The figure is written on the job listing. So all the reader has to decide is which post to choose, and the article is built to handle the love side with precision.

For the context of employment, this construction is accurate. In changing jobs, the figure is decided by the employer and not by the applicant. Where the choice has only one variable, digging deep into that one is the right design.

For someone trying to make income on their own from what they love, however, there are two variables. What to do, and how to deliver it. The second has nothing corresponding to a job listing, so it has to be built. Reading articles that dig only into the first will not bring out the second.

This is the fork. Income does not follow automatically as the purity of love rises. There is another variable.

Is Passion Found, or Grown?

Before that, let me put a little pressure on the word love itself.

The sentence turn what you love into work implies that what you love already exists and only has to be found. The search for a calling, aptitude tests, self-analysis. Each takes the shape of discovering a correct answer that is somewhere out there.

This implication has been tested directly. O’Keefe, Dweck and Walton divided how people conceive of interest into two (O’Keefe, Dweck & Walton, 2018, Psychological Science, 29(10), 1653–1664). The position that interest is found, and the position that interest is grown.

The result was this. The more someone holds that interest is found, the more readily they lose it at the stage where the field becomes difficult. The more someone holds that it is grown, the more readily the interest persists in the face of difficulty.

The reason is that difficulty is interpreted differently. Holding that it is found, the experience of difficulty is read as evidence that this was not truly loved, because the premise is that something truly loved should be absorbing. Holding that it is grown, the same experience is read as not yet grown.

In the context of turning love into work this bears directly, because the moment it becomes work the field tends to become difficult. Deadlines attach, other people’s requirements enter, days of not managing run on. At this point someone holding love as a fixed object receives the difficulty as a betrayal.

The warning that turning what you love into work makes you come to dislike it points at this mechanism. The wording of the warning is not accurate, though. What came to be disliked did so not because the love broke but because the definition of love had been tied to a state of not being difficult.

The same way of thinking works at the stage before starting, too. Someone holding that it is found experiences the state of not yet having found it as a deficiency. There must be a true love somewhere and it is not yet mine. This reading keeps lowering the evaluation of what is to hand. Even where something is genuinely being done, a reservation is always attached: this may not be the real thing.

And while that reservation is attached, no hand reaches towards the route. The steps of delivering take effort, so the judgement to spend that effort on an object of uncertain authenticity is unlikely to come down. The posture of settling the purity of love first becomes, as it stands, a way of delaying the start.

What this study showed is a relation between conception and persistence, not a guarantee that taking the growing position always produces persistence. Fields that do not suit however much growing is attempted do exist. What can be said here goes only as far as this: concluding from a single point of difficulty that it was not truly loved is premature.

Three Ways of Facing Work Coexist Inside the Same Occupation

The division between occupations that become a calling and occupations that do not has not been observed. Inside the same occupation, three ways of facing work sit side by side.

A survey reported by Wrzesniewski and colleagues divided how people position their own work into three (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997, Journal of Research in Personality, 31(1), 21–33). Those who see it as a means of living, those who see it as a process of climbing, and those who feel it is an end in itself.

The distribution was the striking part. These three were not determined by occupation alone. Even inside the surveyed group of administrative staff in the same workplace and the same rank, the three were mixed in roughly equal proportion.

What the distribution means is that the same work becomes a different thing depending on the person. Someone treating it as a means of living and someone feeling it as an end in itself are sitting at adjacent desks. What makes the difference is not the content of the work.

This result unsettles the premise of the phrase turn what you love into work. On the premise, choosing an object you love makes it a calling, and choosing wrongly makes it drudgery. The result is decided at the moment of choosing. The observation, however, says it is not decided at the moment of choosing.

What, then, divides them? Out of the lineage of this survey came the perspective of reshaping the work side yourself. Even within the same duties, the scope you engage with, who you engage with, and what meaning you give it are movable by the person to a certain degree. Those who moved them experience the same work more readily as an end in itself — that is the view put forward (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001, Academy of Management Review).

Here too the point is whether it can be moved. The more room someone has to move the scope, move the counterparty and move the meaning, the more the same work becomes something different.

And the size of that room is decided not by the content of the work but by its form. In the form of delivering against someone’s commission, the scope and the counterparty are settled in advance. In the form of making something yourself and leaving it in place, both are settled by you.

A restatement has occurred here. Turn what you love into work was a sentence of the form choose an object. What has now appeared is of the form reshape a relation. The former is a single choice; the latter is a continuous operation.

The meaning of failure moves with this difference. Held as the choice of an object, the conclusion when it does not work is I chose wrongly. Starting over means choosing a different object. Held as the operation of a relation, the conclusion is this arrangement did not reach. The arrangement can be changed without changing the object.

And the number of times an object can be rechosen is limited. Building an accumulation in one field takes years, so it is not something that can be rechosen often. The arrangement can be changed any number of times.

Not the purity of love but the size of the room to move. This is the second variable.

A Route Is Interposed Between Love and Income

The sentence that joins what you love directly to income is what has made this difficult all along. Do what you love, therefore income. There is no indication in that sentence that anything sits between.

In fact four components sit between.

First, who it is directed at. When what you love is put out as it is, who needs it is not settled automatically. With the same skill, changing who it is directed at makes it a different product.

Second, how it comes to be known. What is not known to exist will not be chosen however good it is. This is a point in the route that tends to be overlooked. The expectation that making something good will get it found is a way of omitting the design of the route.

Third, how it is handed over. One to one, or made once and handed to many. This is the question of the form of handing over, and it decides the ceiling on income.

Fourth, who sets the figure. Fitting the other side’s budget, or presenting your own. How the figure is settled has nothing whatever to do with the degree of love.

These four exist independently of what you love. However much it is loved and however skilled you are, if the four are blank there is no income. Conversely, if the four are filled in, income arises even where the degree of love is not especially high.

So when turning what you love into work does not work, there are two places to suspect. The love side or the route side. And what tends to be jammed is the route side.

The reason is that the love side has already been grown over years. There is an object time has been poured into, more knowledge than others have, hands that move better than others’. There is an accumulation there. On the route side there is no accumulation. Who to direct it at, how it comes to be known, how it is handed over, how the figure is set. The time ever spent thinking about these four is far below the time poured into what is loved.

This asymmetry works in the direction of distorting judgement, because people build explanations on the side where the accumulation is. Faced with the result that income is not arising, the material to hand is only material from the love side. The level of skill, the quality of the work, the amount of practice. So the explanation takes the shape of skill is still short. The route side has no material, so it does not come up as a candidate explanation at all.

This reading has one further convenience. The diagnosis of insufficient skill makes the next action clear. Practise. And practice is enjoyable work, so there is no resistance. Wrong as a diagnosis, it is easy to carry out as a prescription. That is how it becomes possible to stay in this cycle for years.

Look again at the four on the route side and a difference in character becomes noticeable. None of the four rises with practice. They are of the kind that gets decided. Who to direct it at is decided; how it is handed over is decided. They are not objects of improvement, so waiting advances nothing by a single day.

Loving It Also Makes the Route Harder to Design

Whether loving something is neutral towards the design of the route is another matter. It can in fact work as an obstruction.

There are two reasons.

One is that for an object you love, you become the standard recipient. In a field engaged with for a long time, the sense of what is interesting and what is good has become the internal standard of that field. When the first component of the route — who to direct it at — is being decided, however, what is needed is not the internal standard but where someone not yet inside catches.

Concretely, demand from outside concentrates on the parts that someone knowledgeable feels are obvious. And the more knowledgeable someone is, the less willing they are to put those parts out, because putting out the obvious feels low in value.

The other is that what you love carries its own reward. The time spent making is itself enjoyable. So the motive to divert time to the unenjoyable step of designing the route weakens. An allocation of ten hours to making and not one hour to the route arises naturally.

This allocation is not weakness of will. Time being allocated by which is more enjoyable is a normal function. What tends to follow from it, however, is this. What has been made increases and the amount that reaches does not.

And here is the awkward shape of this symptom. What has been made is increasing, so there is a sense of progress. Skill has genuinely risen. Better things can be made than a year ago. And income does not move.

At this point it tends to be read as ability is still short. As a reading it is natural, since it presumes the causal relation that getting better should bring sales. What is being raised, however, is none of the four on the route. The variable felt to be short and the variable not moving have become different things.

The first reason — that the knowledgeable do not put out the obvious — has a concrete way of being checked. Have you given the same explanation to someone three or more times in the past year? If so, that explanation is not obvious to people outside. Repeated three times means someone needing it appeared three times.

This material tends to sit outside the things you have made. Not a work or a product, but something handed over verbally in conversation or in response to a question. So it is not recognised as stock. Yet the answer to the first component of the route — who to direct it at — may well be in here. Content whose response has already been confirmed is to hand, without having been given a form.

An Answer to “Turn What You Love into Work and You Will Come to Hate It”

Let me answer head-on the warning that comes up often in this discussion: that turning what you love into work makes you come to hate it.

Part of the warning is grounded. Research on motivation has reported that introducing external reward into an activity continued because it was interesting in itself can weaken intrinsic motivation. The effect appears most readily where the reward enters accompanied by the sense of being made to do it (Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 2001, Review of Educational Research).

What the same lineage of research shows, however, goes further. With the same reward, the weakening is unlikely to occur where the sense of having chosen it yourself is kept. What tells is not the reward itself but whether autonomy has been impaired.

Seen this way, the substance of the phenomenon changes. Coming to hate it does not follow from having made what you love a source of income. It follows from having handed over, in the course of making it a source of income, the right to decide what to make and how.

Where what you love is turned into work through commissioned production, this transfer is present from the start. What to make is decided by the commission, good or bad is decided by the other party. You are doing what you love and it is not you deciding. This state is a combination that readily erodes intrinsic motivation.

Where you make something yourself and leave it in place, on the other hand, no transfer occurs. What to make is decided by you, and whether to put it out is decided by you. Responses come back, and they are not judgements.

So the warning reads accurately not as do not turn what you love into work but as do not turn what you love into work in a form that gives away the right to decide. And where the right to decide sits is settled by the four components of the route — the third and fourth in particular.

This rereading produces a practical difference. Read as do not turn what you love into work, the response becomes keep what you love as a pastime and build income elsewhere. Many people do choose this, and it is a workable choice.

Read as do not put it in a form that gives away the right to decide, the response changes. The option appears of handling what you love as it is while moving only where the right to decide sits. With the same skill, move from commissioned work to making and placing on your own judgement. It is a shape in which the object is not given up and only the form changes.

Which is better depends on the situation. Concluding that what you love is better not made into work, while only the former is in view, undercounts the options by one.

A form that keeps the right to decide has its own price. Deciding yourself what to make means that when it misses, nobody else can be blamed. The form of taking commissions does not carry this burden. Which is lighter differs by person.

Build the Route First and the Order Changes

The four components can be restated as a problem of order.

The general order for turning what you love into work runs like this. Find what you love. Raise the skill. Make it work. In this order the route appears only at the final stage. And it is compressed into the single word work, undivided into the four components.

There is another order. Build one route first, and pass what you love through it.

Concretely it looks like this. First, hold a place where you can put something. It does not matter if it reaches only a few. Next, watch who responds to what has been put there. Those who responded are the answer to the first component — who it is directed at.

The advantage of this order is that guessing decreases. Trying to settle who to direct it at in your head in advance settles nothing, because there is no material for settling. Put something out, watch the response, and material appears.

There is another advantage. Build the route first and the route remains even when the love side changes. What is made is a changeable thing. Interest moving in three years is entirely possible. If the route has been built tied to what you love, everything vanishes at the moment of the move. If the route exists independently, what passes through it is simply swapped.

This lowers the pressure on the choice of what you love, because it removes the need to settle in advance whether this will carry you for life. Interest is grown rather than found. If it is grown, placing change in the premises fits the reality better.

Let me make the effect of the reversal a little more concrete. In the conventional order the route appears at the stage of selling a finished thing. So designing the route begins after making is done. Two of the four components, however — who to direct it at and how it comes to be known — must be settled before making, or what to make is not settled. In sequence, what comes last is needed first.

This inversion is what produces the state of it is finished and it does not sell. It does not sell not because of quality but because, having begun making before the destination was settled, it landed in a position that hits nobody. It is a problem of placement.

In the order of building one route first, this inversion does not occur. The response is seen, even from a few, before making, so the destination is settled first. What is made is settled to fit it. The volume made decreases and the probability of hitting rises.

What this order yields is not worth overestimating in one respect. In the month you build a route, income does not move. What moves is the name of what is missing. Where something put out drew no response, that fact no longer lands on the vague conclusion ability is still short; it turns into the specific question of which of the four is blank.

The Love Side or the Route Side — A Procedure for Judging

Which side you are jammed on shows in numbers rather than in memory. All three are answered by counting what is actually to hand.

How many things have you made in the past year, and of those, how many did you put in a place where someone’s eyes would fall on them?

Set the two figures side by side and the allocation shows directly. Where the number made is far the larger, what is jammed is the route side. The making is moving and the reaching part is not.

Next is the side that came back. How concretely can you speak about the people who responded to what you put out?

Not their age or occupation, but whether you can say what they were having trouble with. If you cannot, the first component is blank. With it blank, there is no material for judging what to make next.

The remaining one is the figure. What proportion of your income is from work where you presented the figure?

If most of it was matched to their presentation, the fourth component sits on their side. Independently of the degree of love, this is deciding the level of the income.

None of the three asks whether you love it. What they ask is which of the four components of the route are filled and which are blank.

And at the point of answering them, the shape of the difficulty changes. Can I live on what I love cannot be answered now. The material the verdict needs sits on the side of events that have not yet happened. The second component of my route is blank, by contrast, can be checked from the numbers to hand.

The fact that there is something you love is not a variable in this discussion. It is material already to hand. What can be moved is the four that come after it.

Just try it and it is not that easy. That neither changed what you did the next day is because both carried only the scale of the love side. Where there is one scale, agreement and disagreement measure the same quantity.

The two answers were accurate about the love side. The love side is the premise of this discussion. Fill the four and, with nothing to pass through them, nothing arrives. What the two did not carry is the second of the scales. With it in place, agreement and disagreement come to point at different places.

That said, whether to fill the four is a choice. Keeping what you love separate from income is not a defeat within this account. The four are needed only by someone who has decided to deliver. Where that has not been decided, leaving them blank breaks nothing.

The third and fourth components of the route — how it is handed over and who sets the figure — directly decide the ceiling on income; that structure is handled as a whole in Getting out of the labour-intensive form. To move from a state where the other party sets the figure, start at Before you negotiate a higher rate, look at who is setting the figure; to check the two forms of handing over first, start at What to know before earning on your own: the ceiling on selling time. Where this territory is being thought about not as turning what you love into work but as earning by your own strength, Taking apart “earning by your own strength” takes apart the word strength in the same way.