When I was young, when I made the choice of changing my job because of my interest, someone gave me advice and told me, "Do what you do and love what you do." At that time, I felt "specious" after listening to it, but I still hoped for "whatever I want" and finally made the choice of job-hopping. Looking back many years later, although I was engaged in a job that I was interested in, after a period of entrepreneurial experience, I realized that if I really want to do something, it is often not as simple as choosing a job, and it is best to know everything. On the other hand, work is essentially the same. Even if you choose a job that looks "interesting", there will still be troubles and boredom.
The essential difference between "doing a line and loving a line" and "loving a line and doing a line" lies in whether ability leads to interest or interest leads to ability.
The logic behind "doing one thing and loving another" is that interest comes from ability and can be cultivated completely. After a person gains a sense of competence in one thing, that is, a sense of accomplishment, he will feel satisfied from the heart. This pleasant feeling forms interest and then becomes positive feedback, encouraging yourself to work hard to complete the next ability. This forms a virtuous circle. This kind of thinking can make people find ways to overcome difficulties and form new abilities and interests when they encounter difficulties.
The logic of "love a line and do a line" is that you need to be interested to do it well. Once people with this kind of thinking encounter difficulties, the first thing they are more likely to think of is not how to overcome the difficulties, but whether this matter is really of interest to me. If you encounter a few more big difficulties, you may lose interest in what you felt passionate about at first.
When we look back on the sources of interest when we were young, we will learn something.
For example, a primary school student, because he studied some first-grade mathematics before entering school, showed that he mastered it faster than his classmates when he was teaching, and naturally he was more interested in mathematics. With interest, he will invest more in this area to maintain his initial advantage. If the child's advantage can be maintained all the time, unless there are some setbacks and accidents in the process, which seriously hit his self-confidence, he has a good chance to become a top student in mathematics in the future.
There is such a counterexample. At first, a child shows certain advantages and interests in a certain subject, but later, for some reason, such as insufficient follow-up investment, this advantage narrows or even stops, so the child is likely to lose interest in this subject and even become disgusted.
In the previous example, interest comes from capacity building. In the latter example, the loss of interest comes from the loss of ability. So even if you are interested at first, you can have some desire for competence, but this desire for competence driven by interest is not strong enough.
This shows that "doing one thing and loving another" is a relatively better strategy. Otherwise, a person will go to the collapse of self-confidence in the continuous cycle from "loving one line and doing one line" to "doing one line and not loving one line".
However, does "doing a job and loving a job" mean that you can't change careers?
Although we made that analysis above, it is obviously wrong to say that we can never change careers. Because different industries do have different development speeds, some industries have to develop faster, even several times faster, because of the trend of the times and historical opportunities.
Whether to change careers actually depends on what your long-term goal is.
Do you love a certain industry very much and hope to make a big difference in it? Or do you actually have no obsession with what to do, just want to get wealth and freedom faster?
The difference between these two big goals is an important issue that affects whether you should consider changing careers.
If it is the latter, then it is possible to change careers. For example, if you find another better opportunity and decide to try it, you may find that the speed and reward of success after trying are much higher than the original path.
For example, Spencer, who is now famous, only taught English in a key high school in Ningbo before going to Hong Kong to do offshore financial business and write from the media. If he insisted on the education industry in the way of "doing one thing and loving one thing", he may not have achieved such great results until now.
Even the former may be affected by changes in the market and industry. For example, for an extreme example, a person especially likes to make a BP machine ... but there is no market space for BP machines in this era, and he can only make models for museums no matter how much he loves.
Therefore, the question now is, how to make a choice or balance between "doing one thing and loving another" and not completely insisting on one thing?
In fact, this is still a short-term and long-term problem.
In the short term, a person actually doesn't have many choices in external resources. What options do you have now are basically the optimal options, because if there is a more suitable one, you have already chosen it before (at least not much different from the optimal one). In other words, it can be understood as the "stable equilibrium point" in economics.
If you are doing a job, it means that you can't actually find a better job at present-otherwise you will go (maybe you can find a job that looks better, but the reason why you didn't go is probably because you are worried, maybe you are far from home, maybe your salary doesn't increase much and you think the switching cost is too high, maybe you feel risky, so you just can't find a better job at the moment); You can't help doing this job-whether it's to make money, to exercise yourself or to kill time-otherwise you would have chosen not to do it.
This statement may be a bit extreme, but in a short enough period of time, this is the case.
In every short period, one can only choose internal factors. Such as attitude and effort.
Therefore, in the short term, the relatively good strategy is: work hard, do what you are doing now, improve your wisdom and accumulate resources.
Among them, the promotion of wisdom is the most important, because wisdom is the ability to make choices. In this regard, I analyzed in the last article that choice is more important than hard work, and improving the ability to choose is more important than making a good choice. )
The best way to improve wisdom is to learn by doing. If we only rely on thinking instead of doing it, the knowledge we get must be incomplete and lack of foundation.
Therefore, in the short term, we must adhere to the principle of "doing one line and loving one line".
In the long run, people can choose not only internal factors, but also external factors. Because through countless short-term accumulation, it has created significantly greater resources-including: stronger wisdom, richer experience, higher quality contacts, more money, and even deeper failure experience. The size of these accumulated resources determines the scope and quality of the choices that this person can make.
When there is a choice and the time range is long enough, which way should we take, which is faster or even faster?
Or we can put it another way, which road will lead to faster growth and higher growth rate?
If you don't think about this problem, you will fall into the long-term dimension of "low-level diligence."
I know people who have been doing hopeless business for a long time in an underdeveloped old state-owned enterprise. Twenty years later, they didn't get a promotion, but their salary increased a little, but compared with inflation and rising house prices, it was raining in Mao Mao.
So, the conclusion is this:
In the short term, we must choose "do a line and love a line"; In the long run, we must pay attention to the choice of path.
It's not over yet. One last question. Where is the boundary between short-term and long-term? How long does it take to "do one thing and love one thing" and how long does it take to "change careers"?
In fact, it depends on your preparation time, and this preparation time depends on how well you do your current job and how well you know the future path choice.
One indicator of this judgment is the growth rate. When your growth rate in the current platform is obviously not as high as that in the new choice path, it is time for you to make a change.
In fact, in essence, this is still a matter of choice and hard work. Did you make the best choice before you began to work hard? Or work hard first and think of a better choice? This is one thing.