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Comment by auggierose

5 days ago

It is not the opposite. If you do what you love, you love what you do. So its more of, "love what you do" is what to aim for, and "do what you love" is one way to achieve this.

15 comments

auggierose

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lazide  5 days ago

It’s a flip on the framing, and a non trivial one.

One is love what you do - which assumes regardless of what you’re doing, love it.

The other, do what you love - means choose things that make you love them.

They’re completely opposite in what choice they’re telling people to make.

  • mettamage  5 days ago

    My ex-girlfriend [1] did this with us and household tasks, especially cooking. I've gone from hating household tasks to being slightly positive about it. I've gone from hating cooking to loving it.

    I've tried this with programming. After 15 years, I'm only mildly positive about programming. That has more to do with the culture though, not the activity. I wish there was a business analyst/entrepreneurial programmer hybrid role. Spot opportunities from data, then build out a solution. Or if a solution doesn't need to be built out but it's more of a human/political thing, then do that.

    I'm currently a data analyst and get some room (informally) to do just that. It's a really fun role, and I'm programming way cooler things than I ever did as a software engineer.

    [1] Mentioning this detail because I don't think I could've learned this any other way. Well, parents maybe, but they didn't have this attitude.

    • maccard  5 days ago

      Those roles exist but they’re really senior staff+ into director level roles (at a smaller org). The problem is that they’re really two roles bundled into one - discovery and development . You need to be aware of business impact, pain points, upcoming tech, your competitors, and you need to be able to execute to just the right level of finish.

      The bad ones identify solutions that work for huge orgs and try to apply them to everyone and don’t implement them. This is your typical architecture astronaut. Or, they get bogged down in perfection and are massively hands on when they should have stopped long ago. Also your typical micromanaging vp of engineering.

      But one or two good ones can be utterly enormous force multipliers.

      1 reply →

  • auggierose  5 days ago

    No, it doesn't tell you "regardless". It tells you, if you do something, you better love it. So if you start doing something, and it turns out you don't love it, you better stop doing it, and do something else instead. As an extreme example, take Nazis managing a concentration camp. If it turns out you are not a bad enough person to love it, you better stop doing it.

    • lazide  5 days ago

      That is not at all what ‘love what you do’ means. You’re talking about ‘do what you love’. That means what you are talking about.

      Both of these sayings can of course be applied to evil as well as good, and be either positive or pathological in impact depending on the situation.

      3 replies →

mettamage  5 days ago

If you do what you love, then you love what you do.

If you love what you do, you didn't necessarily get there by doing what you love.

Reminds me of: a duck is a bird but a bird isn't necessarily a duck.

I agree it's not the opposite.

detourdog  5 days ago

I think the subtle difference is "Do what you love" is passive one is not actively doing anything. They have ideal in their head that may not match reality. "Love what you do" in my eyes is being present and actively loving the moment while doing the work.

muzani  5 days ago

A very common example is art. Most people love to draw things like characters or landscapes. But the real world application of art is usually ads, logos, and posters.

There's significant skill overlap, but little passion overlap.