Many of us have heard the mantra “Do What You Love and Never Work A Day in Your Life.” This affirmation may be misguided and misleading. It is likely to produce more hardship and struggle. For high-achieving ambitious professionals who desire an aspirational life and whole-life balance, here are my 9 Things Wrong With This Mantra.
Do What You Love and Never Work A Day in Your Life
9 Things Wrong With This Mantra
Many of us have heard the mantra “Do What You Love and Never Work A Day in Your Life.” I suspect the original intention of this mantra is either to say, “It’s not work if you love doing it” or perhaps “Do what you love, and the rest will follow.”
Regardless, this affirmation is misguided and misleading. It is likely to produce more hardship and struggle (btw, I mostly hear this uttered by people who struggle with their money, job, or results). For high-achieving ambitious professionals who desire an aspirational life and whole-life balance, here are my 9 Things Wrong With This Mantra.
HINT: “Work” is a subset of one of 15 unavoidable Conditions of Life™ 1 that, if not satisfied, will produce hardship for any human being. Read on, and we’ll explain.
1. It’s an Affirmation
That it is an affirmation is my first problem. Affirmations generally smell like bullshit to me and are often taken out of context.
An affirmation in New Thought and New Age terminology refers primarily to the practice of positive thinking and self-empowerment—fostering a belief that “a positive mental attitude supported by affirmations will achieve success in anything.” 2
While I recommend a positive attitude, I consider these moods a result of (rather than the cause of) the profound satisfaction gained from well-constructed transactions whose aim is to satisfy all 15 Conditions of Life™.
Where you can, find advice from those who don’t rely on magical thinking to produce satisfaction. We won’t have you walking across coals or listening to affirmations while you sleep. You don’t need a cheerleader. You need new clarity, practical tools, and skills around how to achieve what you REALLY WANT across all the dimensions of your life.
2. It’s From The Current
It’s from The Current 3, so it is likely repeated out of context, misquoted, or attributed to a Life Coach.
For those of us who seek to think accurately, beware of current-driven mantras, affirmations, articles, and news.
The Current is “The all-pervasive, popular, and predominant narratives of the social/marketplace environment.” The Current is an amalgamation of the river of narratives primarily designed by influence peddlers who seek our compliance. These are the narratives that drive the invitations and offers extended to us by these practitioners. The Current often offers a seductive fantasy that reinforces the pervasive state of mind we describe as naiveté. It perpetuates weak, irresponsible, and often false notions such as we can have anything we want if we just work hard enough for it – or – we deserve and are entitled to a good life. 4*
Accurate thinking in an era of fake news is not easy. Carefully research any information on which you base your claims or aims. Where you can, seek out those with highly specialized knowledge to help.
Life Coach? Bitch, please! Ask about the accomplishments of those with whom you take advice. If they haven’t been where you want to go, move away quickly. I’m sure there are exceptions, but planning on exceptions makes for a bad strategy.
3. Knowing is Doing
We only come to know something through doing. For example, consider swimming; you can read a book, watch a video, or peruse tutorials to understand it. Still, you only KNOW it once you validate and modify your assumptions through action – in the water while avoiding drowning.
Learning by doing is hard work at first. In some cases, like swimming, even life-threatening. If you avoid the work you consider hard, you will not KNOW the highly sought-after skills and knowledge that come only by doing. The knowing-doing gap is enormous in an information-as-knowledge society. Yes, we recommend and encourage that you acquire highly specialized knowledge to raise your station, but be forewarned that the highest prizes go to those who work to know.
Look for what you seek to know and confront the hard work to acquire that skill, ability, and knowledge.
4. What You Love Changes
With the arc of time, what you love doing changes. When I was a child, I loved making wood crafts in the garage. As a teenager, I was president of the high-school film club. I enjoyed public speaking as a young adult. In early adulthood, I found the need to make a living and build a valued identity. As ambitious adults understand, we utilize these loves in valued exchanges with others. I don’t naively disregard 14 other Conditions of Life™ to satisfy my love for one.
Additionally, some Conditions of Life™ emerge as more fundamental conditions are satisfied. For example, we have many students who have satisfied their financial and career concerns and are now seeking to build a powerful legacy or participate in global affairs.
5. Never Say Never
Never statements violate the law of hype. In the book The 22 Immutable Law’s of Marketing, law #20 is The Law of Hype, and it says, “The situation is often the opposite of the way it appears in the press.” The gist is that you don’t have to hype something great. Words like awesome, never, and always ought to ring warning alarms.
You don’t need to hype something that is genuinely excellent. Our approach; under-promise and over-deliver. As such, we let our students be surprised by the exceptional value of our proprietary curriculum and elite membership.
6. The Human Condition
Labor, work, and action is part of the human condition. These are subsets of the Condition of Life™, named Activity.
Activity is a biological (basic) Condition of Life™. Activity is what we do with our mind/body to satisfy all 15 Conditions of Life™.
“Activity is what we do with our minds and bodies to take care of and cause our lives. Activity is a constitutive aspect of all Conditions of Life; that is, activity is required to produce or bring into existence the objects, conditions, and situations that constitute our living “in the world.” Many people tend to confuse the Work they do with the creation and production of money. In other words, they only know Work as labor and use their mind and body in exchange for money. Without the proper orientation and understanding of the difference between Work and Money, this unfortunate coupling can only produce limited prosperity.” 5
That is to say, while we have a say in the Activity that will or will not satisfy us, there is no getting around Activity for human beings. For example, any confusion about work and money can threaten your ability to be wholly satisfied in these and other conditions.
7. Work is Fabrication
Work is Fabrication. We love making stuff and might perish without it. Never work a day in your life? Not likely.
“Work is the form of production or fabrication, is represented by the term “working” or through the use of the term “worker” when characterizing an individual ‘at work.’ The effort of the worker is the effort of the hands to design, craft, and build things; objects and, more specifically, use objects offering people permanence and physical or objective worldliness. “[The worker] and his product, the human artifact, bestows a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time.” [Arendt p.8] Workers require tools and other use objects in order to bring into existence other things. We live in a world of things, and it is through things that we orient ourselves in society.
A worker is a producer, craftsman, or fabricator and almost exclusively a user of tools. A worker is a producer of things – the maker of that human artifice that gives meaning and a sense of reality, purpose, and protection.
It is the worker who, through the skill of hand, tool, and knowledge, brings into existence the things that make up our ability to function – and most often, the use objects that help up construct and maintain functional environment(s). It is the worker who brings into existence the “…variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice.” [Arendt p.136] and to be clear – we mean the objective world of things and objects so critical to its identity that “…the ego would crumple up if it were not surrounded by external objects in which might find expression its tendencies, its energy, and its peculiarities.” [Simmel in Poggi p. 85].”6, 7, 8
Rather than find ways to avoid labor or work, discover (or rediscover) those activities which satisfy you personally, but also those activities that fulfill you wholly. Your “ego will crumple up” if not working on something, so let’s stop trying to find so many ways to avoid what is foundational to the human condition.
8. No One Escapes Maintenance
Maintenance is unavoidable for those who seek any surplus (wealth). When you produce any resource (money, a home, a good name), that resource must be maintained. All resources come with the labor, work, and action to maintain them. Poorly maintained resources can cause instability, threats, and breakdowns. Regular maintenance costs are minimal compared to the price of a significant breakdown; however, all maintenance has a cost.
We rarely consider this cost (especially when building abundant resources) and hence, threaten these resources. To produce surplus (and free your resources for other concerns), you must consider where you can maintain through others.
Whether you realize it or not, there’s labor that goes into maintaining every area of your life. While this may or may not sound obvious, those of us who have things figured out (the wealthy/successful) know that there isn’t enough time or energy to maintain everything by ourselves. If you look closely at how the highest achievers get their results and maintain their various areas of life, you’ll see that they rarely do it alone.
The key is to maintain through others, and by going this route, you not only get the luxury of not having to do the work yourself but also the success rate and top results that only a specialist in their field can achieve.
9. Aims Beget Activity
Finally, your aims determine your activity, not the converse. DO what satisfies your ambitions (and profound satisfaction will follow), DON’T “do what you love and the rest will follow”.
As for “Do What You Love and Never Work A Day in Your Life,” again, I suspect the original intention of this statement has been taken out of context by many who copy it. Don’t buy it. You know better than that.
Our recommendation a) You must think accurately about our aims in each Condition of Life™, b) build transactions to satisfy those aims, and c) develop and maintain the surplus to survive any threat. For more, read Work-Life Balance: A How-To in 13 Steps.
- Conditions of Life™, The Fundamentals of Transaction Program, Influence Ecology
- Health
- Activity
- Career
- Money
- Relationship
- Education
- Sociality
- Ethics
- Knowing
- Fitness
- Aesthetics
- Environment
- Politics
- Legacy
- Spirituality/Self-Actualization
- Supercharged Affirmations, The Salem New Age Center, Salem Massachusetts USA . Accessed August 2007.
- The Current, Kirkland Tibbels, Fundamentals of Transaction Program, Influence Ecology, 2009
- The Current, Kirkland Tibbels, Distinctionary, Influence Ecology 2009
- Activity, Kirkland Tibbels, Distinctionary, Influence Ecology 2009
- Work, Kirkland Tibbels, Distinctionary, Influence Ecology 2009
- Money and the Modern Mind – Gorge Simmel’s Philosophy of Money by Gianfranco Poggi
- The Human Condition by Hanna Arendt
An Education in Being Influential
Our curriculum begins with the Fundamentals of Transaction Program, a six-month course of study specifically designed to influence others, work less, and make more.
AUTHOR
John Patterson
Co-founder and CEO
INFLUENTIAL U
John Patterson co-founded and manages the faculty and consultants of Influential U global. Since 1987, he has led workshops, programs, and conferences for over 100k people in diverse professions, industries, and cultures. His history includes corporate curriculum design focusing on business ecosystems, influence, leadership, and high-performance training and development.
