Doing What You Love
You can love pet rocks all you want. Still, nobody's gonna pay you to hold one.
I've spent years reading about the elderly. Books, blue zones, long conversations with people who've actually finished the race. All trying to figure out what they wish they'd gotten right.
And it keeps coming back to three things: your person, your health, your work. Get those three right and everything else ... the money, the travel, the legacy you're so sure you're building ... falls into place behind them. Get them wrong and the rest is just decoration on a house with no foundation.
I've written about the person. I write plenty about health. Today, let's dig in on work.
The Intersection
The sweet spot is simple to describe and brutal to find. The place where what you're good at meets what the world actually needs.
Not what you enjoyed in a seminar. Not what sounded good at a dinner party. What the world needs and will pay you for.
For a decade or more, we've sold kids on the "university experience" instead of a plan. They graduate with debt and an Art History degree, then wonder why the world isn't lining up to reward their four years of self-discovery. Nobody told them self-discovery isn't a career.
Finding the intersection takes actual work. The unglamorous kind.
Showing up early. Staying late. Doing the job above your title before anyone's paying you for it. There's no hack for this part. Trust the work.
The New Currency
Old goal: money and a title on the door.
New goal: control of your time and your location.
That's the real prize now, and COVID didn't invent it ... it just let a HUGE swath of people finally taste it.
I know a guy who rode the wave from data into the AI boom and landed a Principal Engineer title along the way. He and his wife left California for Boise. Better cost of living, better pace, better place to raise a family. None of that works without remote flexibility, and he's not an outlier.
Remote work quietly redrew the map of where a good life is allowed to happen.
I lean hybrid myself. Office for the deadlines and the cross-pollination, home for the deep work nobody interrupts. There are arguments for both.
What there isn't an argument for anymore is pretending location has to be fixed to have a career.
Gratitude, or the Lack of It
Here's the trap: get the flexible, well-paid role, and some people immediately start wanting more, more, more.
I've worked with plenty. They log in late, take credit that isn't theirs, complain about everyone around them, and treat self-promotion like it's their primary job.
Notice something, though ... they can never sustain output. They're streaky, because they're chasing the wrong thing. And the folks around them eventually grow wise. Disloyalty breeds distrust.
Do the opposite. Heap praise on your team. Make the people around you look good. Don't campaign for the promotion. Do the work and let the campaign happen without you.
It's slower. It also actually works, and you get to like yourself in the mirror while it does.
It's a Journey, Not a Route
Almost nobody starts in the right lane. You might not find it for five years, or thirty. The job is to keep improvising. Learning, connecting, moving when you go stale. Trusting that the path only looks straight when you're standing at the end of it looking back.
Every job I've ever gotten came from a conversation, not an application. A volunteer meetup. A phone call about my Master's program. A late night of drinks off a remote island in Estonia.
The open doors often sit at the periphery, not where we're staring.
So don't get too attached to a title or a pay grade. The better opportunity is usually one step sideways (and mildly uncomfortable).
A startup, a culture shift, a season where you trade prestige for actually seeing your kids. Different seasons want different things from you. Keep adjusting.
Don't Let Work Be the Whole Meal
Work can't feed every part of you, and expecting it to is how people quietly become insufferable.
Get your physical vitality, your connection, your sense of adventure somewhere ... a gym, a church, a beach volleyball league, a jiu jitsu school, learning guitar or language you're bad at, reading a book, writing ...
Feed them before you need them, not after work has already hollowed you out.
We all need an outlet.
Life has no meaning, and all the meaning, depending entirely on what you choose to emphasize.
You could cash the check and ride the couch to the finish line. Or you could build a life with enough going on that when the job drains you (and it will, sometimes), you've got people and pursuits ready to remind you who you actually are.
The blueprint is not one thing done perfectly, but rather a few things done intentionally.
You won't get the order right the first time. Almost no one does. You'll chase the wrong intersection for a while, mistake a title for a life, maybe even hold your own version of a pet rock a little too long before you set it down. That's not failure, that's the process working exactly as it's supposed to.
Trust it the way you'd trust a river to find the sea: not in a straight line, not on your schedule, but eventually, and always further than you thought you could carry yourself alone.
We're meant to build this life in pieces. Feed the parts work can't reach. Say yes to the coffee, the phone call, the drinks on the strange island ... because that's where the doors actually open.
And when you're doing it right, you won't feel like you've arrived somewhere. You'll just feel more like yourself, growing a little louder and truer with each passing year.