Follow Your Bliss & Loving the Work You Have

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"Follow Your Bliss" - mythologist Joseph Campbell - "If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living."


"The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive. ." Robert A. Heinlein


http://positivesharing.com/2007/01/how-to-find-a-job-youll-love/
Focus on what you like at work, not on what you don't
when you’re picking a new job, it’s not enough to look at all the things you want to avoid. Partly because there are an infinite number of things to avoid. ... To be happy at work, you also need good things, not just the absence of bad. The best way to find out what you want at work, is to look at what has previously made you love your job.

Ask for what you want
It’s a lot easier to get what you want if you actually ask for it. In your job interviews, let them know that being happy at work matters to you, and tell them what it takes to get you to love work.
It’s true that asking for these things may mean not getting the job, and that’s precisely the point! If that job won’t make you happy, you don’t want it!



Ask yourself: What would I work on for free???
Do it on your free time and see where it leads


http://positivesharing.com/2006/03/my-lazy-life/
Start a lot of small projects and see which ones grab me. Rather than try to analyze my way to an answer to which opportunity is the best/will make me the most money/will be the most fun, I float a lot of ideas in a lot of places. Some happen, most don’t. The ones that happen are by definition the right ones, and they are always fun to work on. Always.




http://ask.metafilter.com/197798/How-do-you-find-what-you-love-doing
Another Perspective:
I think it is more important to "love what you find." I am not living where I thought I would live, I am not working in the field I thought I would, and I am not with the person I thought I would be... but, I love every aspect of my life because I have discovered how to love my job, how to love my city and ultimately how to love my partner (who is WAY better for me than the person I thought I should be with). It's all about perspective... in my opinion.

Another
I began opening my heart to friends, family, and even work supervisors, asking them what kind of work they thought I was suited for. In quick succession, I received the same response from three different people. It was something that for some reason hadn't occurred to me, but as soon as it was brought to my attention, my inner response was, "Of course! I organised to do some work experience in the field .... I gained education and (unpaid and then paid) experience.

I've found that trying to do something I love for money is a surefire way to make me quit loving it


The top 10 advantages of low-rent living
truly excellent reasons - Freedom


http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
nearly all lured onto the rocks(hating the work) by prestige or money.

Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate.



The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
The classic model of dicovery is as follows: you serach for what you know (say a new way to reach India) and find something you didn't know was there (America). ... almost everything of the moment is the product of serendipity ... Alexander Fleming was cleaning his laboratory when he found that penicillin mold.... Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools... some of these tools bring us more knowledge. .. it is only the engineer's gusto and love for building of toys and machines that contribute to the augmentation of our knowledge. ... The Economist askes Charles Townes, the alleged inventor of the laser, if he had had retinas on his mind. He had not. He was satisfying this desire to split light beams.. Nor was the computer invented to let you talk to your friends in Siberia..



selection bias

What if everyone that existed was a Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, Einstein, Voltaire, Renoir, Shakespeare, Galileo, etc... For instance, if all the most famous painters existed at the same time, many of them would have to be considered mediocre and even bad -depending on the tastes of the day. Which one of them would make the garbage cans, or be the meter maid, the government auditor, the farmer, or the grocer ???? I think someone would really enjoy each of these jobs.. Maybe we really have just settled... I can't think of anything more mind numbing than doing accounting, and I know people who absolutely love accounting.