Does Your Business Need to be the Love of Your Life? | #207

“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

Lovely idea. Also an absolutely enormous amount of responsibility to give a job.

Work is now expected to provide money, meaning, identity, purpose, fulfilment, creativity, friendship, status, growth, excitement, and happiness. And entrepreneurship can take that even further because if you created the business yourself, surely you should love every bloody minute of it?

In this episode of Messy Business, I question when simply being good at useful work, enjoying it, being paid properly, and having a life outside it became such an apparently unambitious proposition.

I explore how work and identity have become increasingly tangled, particularly when the business owner is also the brand, the marketer, the face, and the product. I talk about my own periods of being so emotionally invested in my business that changing or ending something felt less like a commercial decision and more like losing part of myself.

There’s a commercial problem here too. Loving your business can make good judgement harder. You can cling to an unprofitable offer, undercharge because you’d “do it for free”, work ridiculous hours because it’s supposedly your passion, or turn every enjoyable hobby into another potential revenue stream.

And perhaps we’ve become so obsessed with passion that we’ve underrated something quieter and more sustainable: competence.

There’s enormous satisfaction in being trusted, knowing your craft, solving difficult problems, doing excellent work, and getting paid for it. It may not involve leaping out of bed every morning aflame with purpose, but perhaps mastery is a healthier long-term relationship with work than expecting permanent passion.

So rather than asking whether your business lights you up, there may be a better question:

What role do you actually want work to play in your life?

Maybe your business doesn’t need to be the love of your life. Maybe it needs to be a good business, doing worthwhile work, that pays you properly and leaves enough of you left to have a life you love.

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