Dating : “Doing What You Love” Doesn’t Lead to a Fulfilling Career.

Half of marriages end in divorce, proving that love isn’t the best way to choose a partner… or a career.

Romantic love is the foundation of a successful marriage and the same thinking often supports career choices. The slogan “do what you love” is the bedrock of career change advice, suggesting that love of an activity is the key to a fulfilling career, in the same way that love of a person is the key to a successful marriage.

When 42% of UK marriages end in divorce, the logic no longer stacks up. Our sense of love isn’t very good at knowing what is best for us, otherwise we’d all choose the right partner straight off the bat. Why should our love for an activity take us automatically to the right career, when marriage proves our love senses are not very accurate?

Arranged marriages exhibit far lower rates of divorce, as low as 6%. While we must consider many cultural and legal factors which may influence this low rate, it’s still very, very low. These marriage statistics suggest that using feelings of love to decide life-changing courses of action appears to be a pretty poor tool.

Dan Lok nailed this point in a YouTube video on the subject of finding a fulfilling career. First and foremost, do what you can, not what you love — if you love it, that’s a bonus. Every career will have parts that are unenjoyable, such as hiring staff, writing image captions, talking to your accountant, stretching a new canvas, travelling, or sitting at a desk. These are activities which need to be endured to reach a goal — success in our given field.

Most of the activities we love are hobbies. Monetising a hobby is a surefire way to lose the joy found in that hobby, by regimenting it, whilst earning a poor income. Most hobbies have low barriers to entry and hence exist in over saturated markets full of reclusive genii. Take photography, everyone wants to be a high-earning, sophisticated photographer, hence the photography trade is full of bitter, under-earning photographers working on dull jobs for very little money.

Only doing what you love suggests an over-sized ego, demanding the nice things in life, combined with an inability to endure the grind or delay gratification. Doing what you can, as Dan Lok suggests, shows fortitude, humility and acceptance.

If you give up the pursuit of something you love because the journey gets tough, or you feel your love waning, you are surrendering any chance of success. That’s why the divorce rate is so high amongst romantic-love based marriages, because people fall out of love, then give up on the relationship.

Arranged marriages start with the absence of love and work to create it. Love is the goal, not the starting point. Wives in arranged marriages report higher levels of happiness than wives in non-arranged unions. Watching the love grow in a situation is more rewarding than starting on a high and trying to maintain it.

Love what you do, rather than do what you love. Do what you need to and focus on your goals, and you have a better chance of reaching them with love for your work. The journey might become unbearable along the way, but don’t give up. When you reach those goals and bask in the success, you might just find that you’ve fallen in love along the way.