Love What You Do
There goes a famous saying:
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
Variously attributed to just about anyone smart who is both old and dead. Word on the street is Confucius said it, though my money’s on a random high school teacher who wanted his students to believe it came from someone wiser than him.
Or, alternatively:
Convince someone to pay you for the thing you wanted to do anyway.
Which is attributed to me, because I just said it. Right now.
Here’s the thing. I literally cannot stop inventing new games. Walk around the park? Invent a game. Cooking soup? Invent a game. Playing a game? Oh you better believe I’m inventing a game.
Or, if not inventing. Refining. I haven’t played a game in the last ten years that I didn’t immediately start attempting to improve.
Someone much smarter than me probably would have noticed this and thought to themselves, “self… Uh… Have you considered maybe doing something with games?”
And I mean, yeah, if you’ve read my first blog post I had. My response would have been “yeah, and the company I worked for was so abusive that I spent the next 20 years trying to figure out how to not do that again.”
But here’s the thing. It’s turned the eight hours of my day that I’m stuck at work into dead time. I spend every other waking hour trying to take on various creative projects to fill the gap.
Which means things that I would like to be purely leisurely pursuits get pushed into the cracks around the edge. I live in terror of looking back in three or four years and feeling like I wasted my nights and evenings by having fun or relaxing.
Here’s my hunch: if I had a so-called “day job” that I found creatively fulfilling, I wouldn’t feel the same pressure to be productive the rest of the time, and I would be able to let myself rest and relax on evenings and weekends. Or at least have hobbies other than starting another company.
My guiding light in this, and many things, are the fine folks at Penny Arcade who have managed to build a career out of doing what they wanted to do anyway. I’m sure it’s not all rainbows and unicorn farts, but I get the sense that they’re as close as anyone gets to having a job that doesn’t feel like work.
Which, in turn, tells me that it’s possible. With hard work and a bit of luck, there’s no reason to think I couldn’t swing for the fence and get there too.