Work takes a third of your life, and most jobs have something worth loving

In Why I Love, the practice for loving your work comes down to craftsmanship: I do my job my own way when I can, instead of blindly copying how it has always been done, and I finish what I promised to finish. When work gets heavy, I look for what is still genuinely interesting in the problem rather than merely counting down the hours until five o'clock. And when work feels forced, I don't try to reclaim my freedom by numbing out on my phone.

When I was five years old, my mother was on the phone for what felt like hours. I noticed the coiled wire running from the receiver into the wall, picked up a pair of scissors, and snipped it cleanly in half. The call died instantly, and when my mother turned around in shock, I was beaming with joy because I had just discovered that invisible signals travel through cables. That was the first time I did engineering, and whether building with Lego as a boy or designing enterprise systems today, real craftsmanship has always been play.

The difference between work and play is not the physical effort involved; it is where you place your curious attention. For years, I woke up with knotting stomach pain about project deadlines, unpaid overtime, and the dread of making mistakes. When I worked in customer service, my ego tried to tell me the job was beneath me. Yet every time the phone rang, I was fascinated by the complex insurance cases and the living human being on the other end of the line.

Work takes up roughly one third of your adult life, and trying to get through that third by counting minutes or scrolling social media in secret is a miserable way to live. Every time you hide from a difficult task by opening your phone, you think you are reclaiming your freedom, but you are actually teaching yourself that you cannot be trusted with responsibility. Real freedom at work comes from taking ownership of what is directly in front of you.

I spent three months dragging myself through cold rain to an office I disliked, feeling trapped and complaining every evening. Finally, I stopped and looked at reality: I wasn't going to quit that week, which meant I had chosen to be there. Once you realize you have chosen to stay, you have only one sensible option left: why not actually care? The moment I focused on solving real problems for the people using my software, the work transformed without the job changing at all.

If your job feels heavy this week, find one aspect of the problem that you don't fully understand yet, and treat it with curious craftsmanship instead of resentment. When you call something boring, it is usually just something you haven't taken the time to understand. Pre-orders for Why I Love close in a few days through the link below; what is one small thing about your work that is still genuinely interesting to you?