Should You Always Love Your Job?

I can remember hearing when I was in college that it is important that I find a profession that I loved. If I found this, I was told that I wouldn’t work a day in my life. The thought being, if I found something that I loved, it would not seem like a job at all. The truth is, I found a career I loved, and yet I still felt like it was a job many days. It was not as if I hated my job, but I did not lose sleep each night looking forward to going in.

Most of the individuals who end up in the emergency management field do so because they are excited about the work, but this passion can chew you up and spit you out. The emergency management field is one of those jobs that can monopolize your entire life. I have watched many driven emergency management professionals bounce from job to job without ever settling in to one of them, always imagining that there was something better, just around the corner.

I absolutely love the emergency management field, and I am passionate about everything in it. This does not mean that I draw all of my happiness from it though. Steve Jobs is famous for his view of work stating, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”[1] Steve Jobs may be wrong. I think that he might not be the best person to discuss passion at work. His experience with work is skewed. I can’t help but think it’s little easier to love your job when you are raking in millions of dollars a week.

Despite what Steve Jobs said, it is not necessary for us to love our work 24 hours a day. If this is your litmus test, you are always going to be unhappy and searching for the next opportunity. I think we can sometimes be unhappy at work, and still be great at it. If you wrestle with discontentment at work, I would challenge you to wait a while. Better things are down the road. Until then, find what you love and allow your job to support that.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/903982-you-ve-got-to-find-what-you-love-and-that-is