Falling out of Love With Work We Want To Do

We don’t fall out of love with work because it gets hard.
We fall out of love because we started for the wrong reason.

February talks a lot about love. But it could also whisper about falling out of love, not with people of course, but with the work we once cared about and want to do, yet somehow keep avoiding it.

Some people make work look effortless. Watching them, we either feel envious or briefly inspired. But inspiration fades.

A quick peek at what inspiration really means.

You see what it says? Inspiration is the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something.

Well firstly, stimulation isn’t action. Feeling isn’t doing. Which means inspiration will leave the building the minute we start doing the thing, because that’s not what it signed up for.

And in doing the work, we understand that what seems effortless on the surface requires heavy paddling on the inside.

Here, we paddle mostly with our emotions. The ones that negotiate, stall, and trick us into believing we’ll feel more ready tomorrow. And for some reason, we never put our foot down in front of these puppy emotions.

Most of us think motivation fades because the work gets hard. But maybe that's not it.

It usually fades when we confuse "should" with "want."

We start because we "should."
We keep going because we "should."
We measure progress against "should."

"I should gain 250k followers by the end of this year. Otherwise, what am I even doing? I should get at least 150 likes for the work I have put in."

When "should" sets the terms, we’re always going to be worried because those terms are almost always out of our control.

"Should" is someone else's story about what matters. Even when we layer "want" on top, "should" is still the one driving the van.

What if, instead of chasing what you should do, you practiced what you can't not do? In other words, what you must do.

Maybe we fall out of love because we thought it was supposed to feel easier.

Frustration sneaks in when the reality doesn’t match what we imagined.

But that doesn't mean the work is broken; our expectations are.