Loving what you do

I haven’t read the feeds in my reader since last Wednesday; that’s unusual for me. It’s almost as if my work is now distracting me from my distractions, if that makes any sense. Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s a good thing. Infact, I think it’s a great thing. It’s nice to enjoy work again. The time goes by much faster, but that’s probably because I’m no longer staring at the clock.

It’s so important to love what you do. In life, that is probably most important, really. From the moment college is over you’re out in the work force where you’ll be for the next 40 years. That is a tremendous amount of time, so hopefully your time is spent wisely. The whole point of college is to learn about something you’re interested in so you can get a good job and have more opportunities to do what you love. My high school didn’t offer much programming, so I was never introduced to it until college. Needless to say, I liked it. Mixing that with the art of design, and I now know what I love to do. But (this is a huge but), I think creative control and small teams are a must if I’m going to continue to like web development. Right now, I’m young and I know I could afford to gain a little experience. That’s why I don’t really mind going to Lockheed Martin—who I’m sure is totally against creative control and small teams. They might not necessarily be against it, but they are far more formal in their process. And for that type of work, I’m sure they have to be. But, overall I’m a young programmer; I might benefit from learning the Java language. Plus, from a web development standpoint, I believe Jakarta Struts is an MVC framework? It might be good for me to work with another framework to experience something else.

Anyway, I never realized how important it is to love your work until I didn’t. My days quickly turned into “required tasks” rather than a place I go for 8-10 hours and do some cool stuff. I dreaded waking up more and more because I knew it was going to be many hours before I could come home. For the next 40 years I hope to get paid doing what I love. After seeing the other side, I don’t know that I could handle anything else.