I have been able to spend some time catching up with friends who I have not seen in awhile, friends who I had grown up with through university.

It was really nice to meet up at a commonplace and to reconnect with one another in person. Technologies like teleconferencing are great and all, but there is no substitute for a real in-the-flesh conversation (yet).

On the whole, it seemed like everyone was doing well — financially stable, making personal progress and keeping busy on the weekends.

Though, one thing that struck me was the impression that nobody at the table could genuinely say that they loved the work they got to do.

All of these people were young, curious, conscientious and educated. They were more than capable of putting in the work, and sure enough they were progressing up the levels of the games they had chosen for themselves. In exchange for their efforts, they also received a whole lot of stress for solving problems that, it seemed, they did not really care about.

To be clear, these were interesting, complex and sophisticated problems (how could you expect any less from smart, high potential people?), but there was a sense of a lack of personal connection.

The why was missing.

Live to work

Through my own work experiences, one of the things I have come to realise is that there are always problems waiting to be found everywhere — no matter the line of work, no matter the organisation, no matter the department or the team. There is often no end in sight for the problems and things will get challenging and difficult.

This helped me to learn that, perhaps, it is not so much the where, when, how or even the who that are primary. Perhaps, it is more important to consider the what and the why.

What you get to do and why you are doing it.

What problems do you get to solve? Why you?

Thinking through these questions are important, but not easy. It is important because the everyday battles must constitute a process that you could fall in love with; it is within those trenches where you will spend most of your precious time fighting problems.

Doing the things you love does not necessarily mean that things will be easy all the time, in fact it probably looks like the opposite. To me, love means committing to doing great work regardless of whether you ‘enjoy’ it or not in the moment. Love means understanding that there will inevitably be hard times, and any short term displeasures are worth going through for the purpose of securing a longer term, more sustaining pleasure.

Neal Stephenson, legendary author of Cryptonomicon and Snowcrash, shared some wisdom in the form of advice for young people in his recent podcast with Lex Fridman, which was to “find the things that you can lose yourself in.”

When I heard this, it resonated and has stuck with me because I have always used boredom as a tool for determining whether something was worthwhile doing or not. To “lose yourself” in the process of doing something is to be able to grasp onto an enduring sense of curiosity or innate excitement for the work, and I believe this serves as a great marker for determining the alignment between yourself and the things that you get to do.

During the times when I have experienced this sense of alignment, I might get tired, distracted or stressed when doing the work, but never bored or apathetic.

‘Someone please save me.’

Another aspect that comes up from thinking about the what and the why, is a sense of discomfort and impatience. Unpleasant feelings that manifest into thoughts like ‘could someone just please hand me something worthy to work for?’ or ‘why do other people seem so certain in the work they do?’

But these are traps, surface level mirages, because the earlier initiating questions of what and why demand a depth of self examination that only the individual in question can answer to. To expect an answer from anything external is to be mislead.

What happens if answers do not come easily? What happens if there is no answer, yet? That is okay, the process takes time. What is more important is to never stop looking for an answer.

There is also a highly practical side to never stopping until you find the things that you could be great at, the kind of work that makes answering ‘why you?’ effortless.

"If you’re not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you. And they won’t just outperform you by a little bit — they’ll outperform you by a lot because now we’re operating the domain of ideas, compound interest really applies and leverage really applies." - Naval Ravikant in his writing about specific knowledge

If the misalignment persists, you will lose in an open market to the person who loves the work.