Lakshan Perera

Love what you do

In "Maybe you can't make money doing what you love", Seth Godin challenges the conventional wisdom about careers. He argues sometimes converting your passion in to a profession may not work. Though most of us may not willing to accept, this is the harsh reality of life. Rather than doing what you love, you have to begin loving what you do.

No matter whether you are employed in a large organization or running your own startup you cannot expect to work only on what you love. If you are in a larger organization you may have to bow to your boss and do whatever he orders, if you need to secure your paycheck. Though you have creative and innovate ideas, going over the organizational restrictions and policies may not be easy. You may think if you were running a startup you would have freedom to go for your heart desires. However in reality it's also not that sweet as it sounds. If you want your startup to make profits and have a steady cash flow, you always have to operate with scarce resources. So you will need to go beyond what you love to do.

Imagine bunch of kickass coders working for towards creating the next killer web app. If the app's interfaces are confusing, servers are clunky, support is poor and the business model is vague, it will be in deadpool in 2 weeks time. In reality the code is only 10% of the whole mission. In a startup, you need to match highly differentiating set of tasks by yourself. You cannot avoid anything saying that's not my cup of tea.

You cannot expect the world to spin the way you want. You have to embrace whatever comes to you and turn them into your own good. If you wait till your perfect time comes it will be too late. Secret mantra of many successful people is their multifaceted characters. Are they born with these skills gifted? In my belief they have developed these skills by loving what they had to do.

No matter how much passions you have, if you don't know how to market, how to face to the challenges and how to create opportunities there's very little chance you could be really benefit from them.