What's love got to do with your job?

The irony of a industralised work-based era is that it is driven and has roots its very nemesis: rest. Both go head to head. We work as hard as we do so that we can rest. Rest is the natural state; we are born and bred into it. It's the optimum state we seek. Look at the freedom we get when we are younger to just be, and enjoy our lives. Work doesn't even come close in comparison. We are abruptly required to make the sudden shift, once we're older and work is inevitable because money doesn't fall from the sky (at least for most of us). It is much less an option for most people. 

Enter passion: that you've got to love what you do. The idea makes sense. What's love got to do with it? Nothing except that we don't have spend the better part of our days like we hate how we spend it. Love and work are a happy couple. Love is happily single and work feels crappily single without love. But this whole fairy tale romance ends once we have achieved the quota we need for rest. It's like the side chick/dude that makes you temporarily happy and you both know what to expect from the relationship within particular time windows only. The one that makes you permanently happy—the lifelong one—is rest. To have your working day and go home. To take your vacations and holidays. To leave work on time (after going to work on time) and go back to whatever it is that you call home, family and happiness. All reasonable jobs and work exists within this context. 

But as humans do, we get carried away and disillusioned. We lose this context and forget why we work in the first place. It is common to get excited and make the side chick the main one, and vice versa, but no one is ever truly happy that way. That does not mean you must not love what you do. If you can, great! If you can, try to but you may not be as lucky. You may get a little lucky, or even just lucky enough to not complain. 

When unlucky in love, most people do their best. As they say, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with". All it takes is two decent people to make a relationship work and let both give and take equally in the market for hearts, atleast keeping the necessary quantum of love and respect alive (if not more). In the market for jobs, it works exactly the same way except between a decent job and a decent employee. It's important to note here that in both love and career, merit has an equal role. 

But what is a "decent job"? It is not the perfect one. It's more towards the bottom of the pyramid, though still heavy on required skill. It forms a larger proportion of work done that gets lesser eyeballs and mind space. It is marketed less than the type of jobs where love (passion) meets work in a grander fashion (which is not entirely unexpected). 

Those with these jobs primarily want to earn their rest. Meanwhile, they search and hope to find that more incredible chemistry sometime, with fingers crossed. Till then, they've got to pay the bills and secure their futures. It doesn't mean they don't like what they do or are less enthusiastic about it. It just means that they make the relationship work and keep it professional. They also pursue growth anyhow. The idea is to achieve chemistry that ensures the continuity and security that they're looking for. The job word for it is career. 

At a basic level, all jobs should be decent - enough for people to afford to give rest its priority and work its healthy place. This effects working hours, pay scales, leave and working conditions, among the larger recognizable factors. At any stage of advancement, work remains a institution that is for people's benefit, and not the other way round: people for the the benefit of work. No sales targets, profit goal or any other such business assertion must displace people (read employees) as the centre or make them the means to these ends by any leadership or management (also people). That doesn't mean a business is cut off from its necessary oxygen: people and the skill they bring. It means that however high or wide your organisational goal is, you don't deviate from the very purpose that they work for. If you must do it to ensure sustainability of your business, and their security, we have a serious work culture problem. 

That makes the main chick the side chick and it's all downhill from there, no matter how rosy it feels. Drawing the line, as just another working professional too with the same motivation (for most), needs to be done before everyone forgets why they're there and gets caught in the rat race where you're always running and never stop. 

But there's a better way to handle this passion-based attitude to career. Meet purpose. Unless we are at the real bottom of that pyramid, we all have the chance find our purpose, or even just a place where we see ourself valued with our skills and passion. Once there, we will be happier and we will love our jobs and have the passion that makes work a blast. Sometimes, the passion finds us and it doesn't necessarily have to be our job. Till such time when either hasn't happened, we don't need magic to be an asset to the organizations we are building our careers in. 

To stay happily working is not a fate that's difficult to find. As with love, lovers and relationships, it's also not always easy to crack the code. A wrong place or time can be devastating. 

So then, to passion, purpose, career and love, and not mixing them up to be any other.