Do What You Love — Love What You Do
Often I work with service professionals to focus their businesses. We identify their unique value proposition — what they bring that no one else can. In that way, we develop a service that they love offering and their clients love too.
Doing what we love can’t be infatuation. After the first congratulations about our new job, other folks might care, but they have their own work to do. They won’t be paying attention to whether we love what we’re doing. Many will take for granted that we’ll get over that that “love thing” in a week or two. Yeah, we need to keep the love alive on our own.
They say, “Do what you love and the money will follow.” I might suggest that it could work better to say
“If you want the money to follow, do what you love and love every bit of what you do.”
25 Ways to Love What You Do So That the Money Follows
It’s the love that gets us up in the morning. On some days, it takes gut-wrenching love to keep us going. Start each morning with these 25 ways to love what you do, and success with be always in view.
- Love your clients and everything they care about, even when they’re unreasonable.
- Love thinking things through so that they don’t have to worry at all.
- Love the clients who change their mind more often than they change their underwear.
- Love promoting your work so that folks can find you.
- Love the fact that you’re always learning, mostly by doing things wrong.
- Love the challenge of figuring out how to pay the rent.
- Love the hours you’re working, and working, and working.
- Love the accomplishment that makes your client look like a hero.
- Love the calls from people who think you have free time to talk to them.
- Love that you solve problems before clients even see them.
- Love the clients who offer you a chance to learn.
- Love that you can sneak in a nap or a movie break now and then.
- Love your successes and your failures.
- Love the 13-foot commute to your computer.
- Love the folks who love you, but don’t “get” what you’re doing.
- Love everyone who offers you a chance to show what you can do.
- Love the folks who get paid vacations while you wish for a free minute.
- Love the chance to be your own boss working for clients who hire you.
- Love the chance to do work for free to build your portfolio.
- Love the chance to get intimate with your credit card number.
- Love deciding for yourself which clients are not a good match for you.
- Love meetings when folks wish they could leave the building with you.
- Love the feeling of being slightly out of control.
- Love that you’re adding your unique value.
- Love going to sleep tired, knowing you’ve been doing what you love.
We all define love and success differently. Yet is seems that success comes more easily when we full-out do what we love and love every part of what we do.
What’s your experience with doing what you love? Has it really been easy for you?
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz to focus in on what doing you love to do!!
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Liz,
You put together some good lists.
I do love feeling slightly out of control. But I hate meetings. UGH!
Thinking things through? Not a strength of mine. I like the grab bag, but at times it gets me in trouble.
I do love blogging.
Hi Steve,
I love the slight out of control feeling too. I only like the meetings I get to run. 🙂
I think things through for you. 🙂
Hi Liz, this list is priceless! You’ve definitely been getting inside my head again 🙂
I like the idea of loving all of it, smiling at it, teasing it, because the bits that sometimes soooo hard are part and parcel of the bits that are soooo good.
Joanna
A list is always good, Liz: so much more constructive than my own vague inarticulate sense that ‘Life is not a dress rehearsal’… mingled with a profound gratitude that I do very much love my work. 🙂 Items 4, 7 and 9 could use a bit of polishing up, however… and that number 15 item can be downright dangerous!
Hey Liz,
Love it, funny timing!
I just finished presenting a 2-day bootcamp all about doing what you love and then finding ways to make whatever money you need follow. Now, I can add this post into my resource list for future trainings! Woohoo
How about #26…love this list!
Thanks so much!
Jonathan
It might seem pretty unattainable to love everything you do, but we can certainly make the effort to change our attitudes about the parts we consider negative. Fighting and resisting something only makes it stronger and makes us spiral downward with our “ain’t it awful?” moaning. Loving everything is easier in the end!
Hi Joanna!
It is fun, especially on a rainy day out your window! Sometimes we just have to love those, ahem, fun parts until they sweeten up.
ah, Jonathan,
Send some that abudance my way. 🙂
Wait! I think you just did!
Hi Kristi!
It’s funny how when I start to think about loving something I don’t like . . . it sure gets easier to take. 🙂
#4
Hey rj!
Your point that life is not a dress rehearsal brings this all together. Kids don’t get lost in the “show” of it . . . they’re too busy living instead.
Oh, Liz, Liz, Liz…you know exactly how to inspire me! I’ve always believed that love is the basis for all the abundance and prosperity that appears in our lives, yet somehow I forget now and then.
“Love the folks who love you, but don’t “get†what you’re doing.” This has been my challenge for the past couple years, but I’ve gotten over the fact that you can’t please everybody!
It really is all about making the conscious choice to love and send out good energy!
Hi Maria!
How wonderful to see you! Yeah, it’s easy to love the folks who get what we do, isn’t it? It’s loving the others that makes the work go faster and more fluently in the harder times. 🙂