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Comment by 0xEF | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, and I've always hated that phrase since it seems like it has two different meanings, depending on who is uttering it;

1. People who use "do what you love" to mean "love what you do," as though you can force yourself to enjoy anything. This is only true for people who lie to themselves and compromise regularly against their own interests.

2. The Lucky Ones™ who happened to accidentally align an enjoyable hobby with a career and think because they "did it," anyone can, without acknowledging that they were simply in the right place at the right time with the right skills, or that the stars don't exactly align the same way for the rest of us.

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> 2. The Lucky Ones™ who happened to accidentally align an enjoyable hobby with a career and think because they "did it," anyone can, without acknowledging that they were simply in the right place at the right time with the right skills, or that the stars don't exactly align the same way for the rest of us.

To be fair, advice doesn't have to be applicable to everyone in order to be useful to someone.

Extremely few people get to become astronauts, but that doesn't go to say there isn't relevant career advice for those who do aspire to become one.

Chalking outcomes up to luck is also not a very useful attitude. Life undeniably has a huge random element, but it's more akin to the randomness of the stock market than a pure dice roll. You don't have control of every outcome, but your choices and decisions can massively tilt the scales in favor of getting "lucky".

3. You are in a career because you mistakenly thought you’d like it, or because your parents told you to do it, or because it’s the only thing that you’ve ever known, but it turns out that you absolutely hate it. You’ve reached a local maximum and you need someone to tell you to try something else before you reach 50 and have major regrets.

To add to that: people like some messed up things, or truly inaccessible things. And while you can try to focus on "some good stuff" that you like, you can't really pick the things you like the most! If you could, wouldn't the world be a much easier place (just like the things that make the most money, or are the most accessible, in other words, the things offering the best cost-benefit... but of course no one can really do that... no one would ever suffer heartbreak - just like the person who likes you, and if they change their mind, just stop liking them and like someone else! Such genius!)?!

I get what you're saying. It's difficult to convey this to some people. I've been through a lot of jobs in quite a few different fields over the decades and have the appearance of being restless if I am not careful about how I craft my resume.

I've been asked "okay, but what do you _like_ to do?" which just puts me in a position to have to explain that I have a passion for learning new things and experimentation, but nobody is going to pay me to read books and play around in a workshop all day, since those jobs are few and definitely already filled.

So, it's a hobby, instead.

> since those jobs are few and definitely already filled.

Doesn't that go for most things though?

Designer, across all fields exists; game designer, creative technologist, research scientist. Just because you can't land that job right out of the gate is no reason not to try, and to become an insurance adjuster instead (unless you do want to be an insurance adjuster). In team sports everyone wants to be the star, but even if you're not, if you just love the game, you can always find some way to be involved, even if it's selling t-shirt outside the stadium.

I've learned to love things I used to hate.

For me it took understanding how things are connected and that doing the superficially unfun things are a necessary precondition for the superfun things to happen.

Learning to appreciate what you have instead of hate what you're missing is also a very fundamental mental health principle.

This is of course much easier said than done.

And to expand on #2, we not only get our hobby coinciding with our career, but that work can pay exceptionally well.

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