I love this idea of doing our work for the love of the toiling itself.
Here is the heart of what I am talking about.
- If you find yourself writing, just for the fun and utility of it – you might be a writer.
- If you would paint everyday, no matter if people ever paid you for it or not – you might be a painter.
- And if you think you would write code for free – you might be a software developer.
I think the secret might be:
If your work does not feel like work most of the time, you might be on to something.
Being the obsessive compulsive that I am, this prompted me to take a look at this Hindu scripture Pressfield was so enamored with. I found this line: “You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.” Reading this line helped me recall Willard’s teaching on separating my effort from my earning. What are the chances that three very different philosophical approaches for dealing with how to behave in this very complex world—one thousands of years old, one from the early twentieth century and one from a contemporary Christian philosopher—relied upon similar fundamental approaches to work without there being something to it? Pretty slim, I suspect. So what if I started doing the work for the work’s sake instead of doing the work to get something? What if my job wasn’t to toil for reward but to toil for the love of the toiling? This forced me to start reconsidering what my work was.
-Tim Grahl, Running Down A Dream