What You Love: Is it What You Do?

I have a Rumi quote that hangs above my desk, it says: let the beauty of what you love be what you do.

Sure, sometimes we have to engage in things we don’t actually love. I don’t love going to the dentist. But I really enjoy my teeth. So it’s kind of a trade-off. We don't love everything we do all the time.

I think Rumi would agree that we should spend a significant amount of time doing what we love. Your life’s work should be something you love. When you love something, you are more connected to it. You put your best energy into it. And you get more out of it. The essence of what you love is that “beauty” and that essence should be in your daily work. It will naturally spill into what you do, and if you’re lucky other people will benefit from what you are doing.

To do something truly well, you have to enjoy it on some level. Paul Graham wrote an interesting essay on How To Do What You Love.

He poses the question:

How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia.-

I remember when I asked myself this question when I was trying to decide on graduate school. Do most people actually enjoy their jobs? During this point in my life, I was really driven by what I thought was “rational”. What am I good at? What do I like to do or what can I tolerate doing? What will pay me enough to enable me to do things that I love? (notice I never considered work to be something that I could “love”. It was something I had to do in order to support myself so I could do all the things that I love).


This 22 year old rational Amy was having a much harder time deciding what to “do” than any other form of impulsive Amy. Take 6 year old Amy for example: In the first grade, our class was asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. That profession was printed next to our names in the yearbook. It didn’t take me more than 3 seconds to decide on my future profession. I was going to be a triple threat: model/actress/writer. I loved writing plays for my Barbie dolls, I loved acting, and I loved modeling in church fashion shows. So the only thing that made sense to me was to be a model/actress/writer. There. Settled. As I flip through that yearbook, I notice it is full of aspiring astronauts, ballerinas, nurses, and teachers. (Surprisingly not a single venture capitalist or lawyer in the bunch.)

Now I’m not saying that my class of 6 year olds had some kind of deep insight that they somehow regrettably abandoned along the way. (We were a group of kids who used to put lemonade in sandwich bags and tell people that it was pee. Most of us were still afraid of the dark and a few of us liked the taste of our own boogers.) In short, I wouldn’t want 6 year old Amy making any major life decisions for 26 year old Amy. Through the years, we discovered more about our likes, dislikes, abilities, and what we are actually capable of doing. A lot of that simple I-know-it-in-my-gut passion got lost or discarded as childish/idealistic.

I think of my friends, and myself, as we enter the workforce. Maybe we like the money, or the prestige, or the benefits. Maybe we even like the people we work with or we like feeling “productive.” But I wonder how many of us actually love what we do.

How much do you love what you do? Do you work to live? Love to work? Or live to work?

Random Acts of Kindness (for jerks).

This week is Random Acts of Kindness Week. The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation hopes to “inspire people to practice kindness and to pass it on to others.” Good ol’ wiki describes a random act of kindness as a “selfless act performed by a person or persons wishing to either assist or cheer up an individual…. There will generally be no reason other than to make people smile, or be happier.”

This is insinuating that we perform these random acts of kindness because it makes the recipient “feel good.” And hey— when we make others feel good, we feel good, right? Well the truth is there are many other emotions that the recipient of a random act of kindness may feel other than “good”: suspicious, weirded out, and embarrassed come to mind. For example: One of the most common suggestions for a random act of kindness is to write a letter of gratitude to someone. I personally love handwritten letters. There’s nothing more romantic or exciting than a handwritten letter. But if I received a letter of gratitude from a friend out of the blue, my first thought would be Why are they thanking me and telling me that I’m a good friend? I should perform a suicide assessment just to be safe… Call me a cynic. Or a Jerk.

I’m generally kind to people. I say please and thank you. I smile at strangers. Sometimes during the holidays, I pay for the person behind me in the Dunkin Donuts drive thru. But I’m not kind enough to bake cookies for all of my neighbors or visit the elderly in a nursing home. Not yet anyway.

So in honor of Random Acts of Kindness week, I’ve compiled a list of “acts” for those people who aren’t used to going out of their way to be kind. If you’re a jerk the other 51 weeks out of the year, it might be hard for you to dive head-first into the random acts of kindness schtick. I understand. Here are some ideas to help you ease into the kindness.


Buy a beer/shot for someone at the bar
When was the last time you bought a beer for a stranger who you weren’t trying to pick up (and make-out with)? Go ahead. Buy a beer for the lonely old man at the end of the bar. Don’t worry about promoting alcoholism. You don’t even have to acknowledge that it was you. You’ll either make his day, or make him extremely suspicious. Either way, you win.

Let someone merge in front of you in traffic. During rush hour
If you experience moderate to severe road rage like me, this is going to be a tough one. But in reality, letting one car merge in front of you takes little to no effort. Just take a deep breath. You’ll be home soon. And if you’re lucky, you’ll get a thank you wave.


Be a parking meter fairy
Put a quarter in an almost expired meter. This is for you rebellious types. I think it’s illegal to do this in most cities. Australia seems to have the right idea though.


Leave some reading material in the public bathroom
Admit it--You’d be so pumped if someone left you a little dose of entertainment in the office bathroom. Leave a newspaper or magazine draped over the stall. Heck, if you’re the creative type you can even write a poem and tape it to the door. Nobody will have to know it was you and you can sleep easy knowing you made someone’s public bathroom excursion a little more enjoyable.


Share your awesome taste in music
Remember all of those mixed CDs you made back when illegally downloading music was all the rage? If you’re like me, all of that music is now on an iPod. No use for those old discs? Leave one in a favorite spot: coffee shop, library, etc. Label it with a sharpie or attach a post-it stating: For someone interested in really good music, or For someone who’s heart just got stomped on or For someone who just can’t get enough of 90s boy bands. Ya know- depending what’s on the CD.


Being kind is easy. And who cares if the recipient is suspicious or freaked out by your random act. More than likely, he’ll forget about it in a couple of days.

Happy Random Acts of Kindness Week. Let’s spread the love and attempted un-jerkiness

More Ramblings on Authenticity

I need to get this out in the open: I’m a worrier. I worry about the world around me. I worry about other people’s problems. I worry about my problems. I worry about what other people think of me. Because I worry so much, I can’t turn my mind off. It’s constantly racing: Will-I-find-a-job-do-i-even-like-what-I’m-doing-am-i-making-a-difference-does-he-like-me-ohmygoddiditurnoffthestove?!

So in an attempt to organize my thoughts, I’m writing it all down. Streamlining. Trying to simplify: Authenticity. Creativity. Mindfulness/Deliberate Living. Gratitude. Joy. That’s what I’m striving for.

Let’s start with this idea of authenticity. I throw around the term a hell of a lot lately, so I feel like I need to explain myself. To me, authenticity means, living as truly and as honestly as you can in relation to your desires, hopes, likes, interests, and character. In other words, it’s a kind of congruence between what you hold within you (your values, talents, passions) and your outer world (your relationships, jobs, interactions, community).

Side note: Authenticity as a philosophy stems from an existential term (shout out to Duquesne’s existential phenomenology program woot woot you crazy people). Wiki does a nice job in explaining it if you’re more interested in authenticity in relation to existentialism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity_(philosophy)

Even bigger side-note: I like Heidegger. He would be one of the 3 people I invite to dinner if I could invite 3 people to dinner either alive or dead. Heidegger challenges that existential authenticity is experience-oriented. The “self” is ephemeral and changes from moment to moment. Therefore, there is no authentic self only momentary authenticity within a certain situation. I wish could go on, but my head might explode.


So what’s the problem here? Shouldn’t you just do what you love when you love it and be done with it?

I’ve been struggling a bit with it. First of all, for many, it’s kind of damn hard to find what you love and then have that love supported in the “outside world”. We have therapists, we have self-help books, we have society, family, church, non-churchy things, organizations, media, friends. We have all of these options for “support systems”. Although some have better intentions than others, they can make it hard for us to distinguish our own “truth” from what people are telling us should be true.


It’s all really a multi-step process: You have to first have a sense of identity and then live in accordance to your sense of self. In order to live that way you also have to be careful not to interpret the world through institutionalized concepts and abstractions.

Then there’s the issue of selfishness. Is living this way selfish? Disregarding what other people say you should do? Yes. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe working on authenticity is the most selfish thing we can do. I’m not saying we owe the world anything, but… if we did… wouldn’t putting our best selves out into it be the greatest act we could hope to accomplish?