Love What You Do or Leave

The quest of a regular employee to find meaning in his life.

I had been working for nine years in the finance department of a big FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods — like snacks, soft drinks, or shampoos) when, at the end of the annual performance review, my new boss told me to love what I do or leave.

She felt like I had been complaining too much about the toxic work environment (incredible pressure to reach performance targets), the lack of budget for training (the last one I attended was four years prior), and the fact colleagues in the marketing department didn’t seem to do much more than partying with distributors for much better pay than mine.

I wish I could have joined them, but I was an introvert, and there was no way I could fake the smiles and the constant praises they had to deliver when dealing with the distributors.

But when she told me to love what I do or leave, I thought she was joking.

I could understand why Marketing people would love what they did, but how could anyone enjoy spending their time in SAP (accounting software), Excel, and Access databases? And I didn’t mention the boring meetings where we discussed the numbers for hours. Sure, there must have been some people who loved numbers and coding in SQL, but they weren’t the majority of the employees in the finance department — far from it.

Back then, I was just an average guy working in a finance department after business studies, and there was no way I could find enough fulfillment in my daily job to say I loved it.

What I loved to do was to play music, write songs, and go running with my dog. I loved these but wasn’t talented enough to live from them. Unfortunately.

So, I told my boss she was right because that’s one business rule I had learned from my colleagues in marketing; I stopped complaining and returned to work.

Except I changed my approach.

I hired a coach for a few sessions and gave some serious thoughts about my working life and what it meant to me.

Together, we established a work-related strategy to maximize my praise-worthy output and minimize my mental load.

Another thing I learned from the marketing folks is that not all work is valuable in the eyes of your boss or even the company. Prioritizing what is important for the people above you is, from my experience, a winning strategy. Many tasks are crucial to the good functioning of a finance department, but your boss notices only part of them. Usually, these are tasks that enable your boss to look good with their boss.

Focusing on these tasks helped me optimize the return on investment of my time spent at work, and I had more time to focus on the good things outside work.

Outside, I follow Richard Feynman’s advice.

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”

Conclusion

Saying “love what to do or leave” is a luxury. Few people can afford to do that, and I envy their privilege. Many of us have people we need to look for and other constraints preventing us from leaving.

And many of us don’t have the skills to make a living doing what we love. It’s as simple as that. There’s no shame in admitting we need to work to live.

And there’s no shame in saying that my boss should have kept her “advice” for herself.

I’m just an average guy with average skills working in the financial department of a big FMCG. I don’t see how I could love my job, and leaving it for another similar position won’t change that.

But I can (try to) allocate as much time as possible to the things I love. And that includes writing nowadays.

For more career advice, I recommend you follow this publication and read the articles I published there. They’re good. You can also join me on Substack at the Top Hat Seminar.