Do what you love.”
That’s what the commencement speeches tell us, right?
“Do what you love.”
Could any phrase be more cliché?
I bet if you had a computer analyze the most common sentences from every commencement speech in the past thirty years, there’s a good chance that “Do what you love!” would be right near the top alongside “Oh, the places you’ll go!” and “Carpe diem!”
But here’s the line missing from commencement speeches: “Do you love it so much that you can take the pain and punishment, too?”
That line isn’t mentioned in commencement speeches, and it’s just as important.
Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, says something about this on The Marie Forleo Podcast:
The reason I became a successful writer is because I enjoyed the work of writing. Since I was a kid, I was always the guy sitting on forums writing pages explaining why everybody else was wrong and being that annoying guy on Facebook who starts political arguments just cause. I love just spilling words out… things that other people hate about writing, I enjoy.
Mark grew up wanting to be a rock musician, but the pain of getting there—lugging equipment around, playing in dive bars, strumming the same chord progression for six hours—was never appealing to him. He didn’t enjoy that pain. That failure. But he did enjoy the pain of writing and the little failures that inevitably come with becoming a better writer.
Do you love it so much you can take the pain and punishment, too?
The point is that you need to take the pain and punishment on the way toward the thing you want.
Do you want to rescue the princess from the castle? Then you need to be okay with rose bushes shredding your legs. Because if you’re not, she’s not getting saved. Do you want to find a new job? Then you need to be okay with the pain of handing out a hundred resumes and going to a dozen job interviews and being rejected by every single one of them except one. That hurts! But it’s the pain and punishment on the way to a new gig. Want to find a partner? I hope you like going on a hundred bad dates and having your heart broken three times. Remember the study asking if you’ve had enough one-night stands? There is pain on the path.
So ask yourself the big question.
Do you love it so much you can take the pain and punishment, too?