Life is way too long to give up early and way too short to be derailed from what weâre passionate about and made to do.
Related Quotes
But instead, I got a lecture on fun. âWell, Jim, if you donât love doing it, you wonât stay with it long enough to ever really get good at it.â Then he added, âLife is just too short not to enjoy what youâre doing. If we canât make this fun, we should stop doing it!
What makes all of life complicated, and not just hard, is this unwillingness to do the work thatâs ours to do; our unwillingness to live the examined life.
Itâs not about finding what you can do better than others, but about finding what you can do exceptionally well relative to other ways you could expend yourself.
The point here is not about superhuman endurance, endless self-inflicted suffering, awe-inspiring work ethic, or even self-discipline. Iâve come to see that for individual lives it is more about feeling intrinsically compelled than about being fanatically disciplined. I used to think of myself as a disciplined person, but the more I studied these lives, the more I came to see that I never really needed discipline to keep going. If you so love what youâre doing, and you feel so well encoded for it that you simply cannot stop yourself from doing it, then how is that discipline? I love the time of bliss in the hours of transition from night to dawn, and there is nothing in the world I would rather be doing than creative work as the light changes. I still hit nearly every single day excited by the work at hand, checking my watch in the middle of the night hoping that it is far enough into the morning to justify getting up, thinking to myself, âPlease, oh please, let it be at least 4 a.m., so I can get going!â Thatâs not discipline; thatâs love.
Of all the sources of fire, Iâve concluded that perhaps the biggest is sheer unadulterated love of the doing. Itâs like a personal flywheel within: If you discover something youâre encoded for and you love doing it, then you can't help but want to do more of it, which means you can't help but get better at it, which means you can't help but move toward the intrinsic satisfaction of excellence in what you do, which further reinforces doing what you are encoded for and love to do.