Love What You Do

If you don't love it, you'll never be able to keep up with the same volume of effective practice as someone who does have that love. You'll never outwork them.

Cross-posted from here.

If you want to succeed wildly and consider it a life well lived, you have to love what you do. There’s no way around it. If you want wild success, and not just on a lottery ticket, then you have to put in such a high volume of work that it is life-consuming. And if your life is consumed by something you don’t love, then it’s a life thrown away.

Now, I’m not saying you have to love an activity to get better at it. Effective practice will make you better at anything even if you don’t love the thing. But if you don’t love it, you’ll never be able to keep up with the same volume of effective practice as someone who does have that love. You’ll never outwork them.

Love is perpetual hardcore effort. Not as a descriptor, but as a definition. A throwback to Tyler Bruno’s “Be Consistently Hardcore” – love is being consistently hardcore. To say that a parent loves their kid is to say that the parent is consistently hardcore about raising their kid. That their kid is always on their mind and they are always putting max effort into raising their kid. You don’t love something if you’re not consistently hardcore about it, and you won’t be consistently hardcore about it if you don’t love it. It’s a biconditional, a definition.

Also in “Be Consistently Hardcore”: consistently hardcore people achieve extraordinary outcomes through extraordinary actions; these actions go beyond the ordinary and are often seen as crazy. Framed as love, this is familiar: everyone knows that love makes people do crazy things.