Find a job doing what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.
It’s my experience that this is not only shallow and semantic, but the philosophy is actively bad for long term health.
There are a few aspects to this:
- Turning a love or hobby into a job is effectively ceding control of that interest to those who write the checks. Whether you’re working for The Man as a cog in a machine, or The Herd as an entrepreneurial wizard, you’re still tying your love to money. That always changes things. And, as the EASpouse storm made more aware, and this story of Free Radical underlines (hattip to Anjin), passion is easily exploited by unsavory management, canny to optimize assets and maximize revenue.
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Find a job you’d be happy doing, so you can pay for the things you really want to be doing.
Sorta dovetails with how, when I conducting interviews (when I've been in the position to) - passion is all very well, but what I want is *professionalism*. What I want (in terms of interviewees) is more along the lines of passion for doing a good job, rather than passion for the field itself.