What Work Suits Whom

"What doesn't bring in money isn't really work." This is how quite a few people think. In their minds, whatever we do beyond our jobs is just play. Life has no need for such frivolity... What a terribly mistaken notion! Our lives are both short and precious. There's no point in simply working away our existence. Many people, doing nothing but work, end up mentally unemployed day after day.

Our main limitation is that we can't simply escape our present circumstances, even if we want to. We're like that frog sitting quietly in a pot of water—even as the temperature rises, it doesn't flee. The heat keeps building until it reaches a point where the frog no longer has the strength to escape, even if it wanted to. When it could have fled easily, it chose not to. When it wants to flee to save its life, it no longer can. We're just like that. We're always too late. We understand everything, but belatedly, when there's nothing left to do.

Suppose someone lands a job doing work they don't enjoy. Unable to find anything else, they're forced to continue. Doing this monotonous work against their will, they gradually begin to lose their senses. You only have to look at people who must keep working in such conditions—there's no spark in their eyes, no smile on their faces. Their movements and speech become robotic. They do the work because they have to, with no other motivation. Their mental strength was depleted long ago, and their life force is slowly diminishing. Yet they continue working. They have to survive, have to keep their families alive. If they lose their jobs, they'll starve to death. They have life, but no happiness.

Does no one find happiness in their work, then? They do—when someone gets a job they actually want and can apply their skills and enthusiasm to accomplish something, then receive proper recognition for that work. Then they discover a purpose in their work, develop a desire to achieve something greater. They come to believe that what they're doing isn't merely about collecting a salary—there's joy in their hearts, they have a position in their office. If everyone in this world could be paid for doing work they love, or if their work received proper recognition, the world would be more beautiful, and human productivity would increase tremendously.

We're forced to focus far more on what we should do than on what we want to do. The greatest satisfaction comes when someone can do their chosen work in their own way, and the people around them praise that work. The joy of living through creation is infinite. People love to receive recognition for their work.

We have only one life to live. A person who could have been a famous musician ends up spending their life working at a bank! Someone who could have been a good painter spends their life as a clerk! A person who could have been an excellent English teacher spends their life as an electrical engineer! Someone who could have been a fine writer spends their life as a businessman! A person who could have been a legendary sculptor spends their life as a politician! Countless people in this world move toward death while committing grave injustice against their own talents. Every human being is born with the capacity to be great in some field or another. Many are forced to live as mediocre people, trying to live according to the wishes of family and society. Those who don't think like everyone else aren't necessarily thinking wrongly—perhaps they're thinking something that others lack the strength to contemplate.

Suppose you had no financial worries whatsoever. If someone then asked you, "What work would you choose to spend your life doing?" Whatever you think in response—that's where your preference lies. If you could make a living working in that space, you'd never tire of work, never feel overwhelmed, and the quality of your work would improve. Early in life, everyone develops an inner sense of what they can and cannot do. Whether or not they accomplish much in life, people instinctively understand what they were born to do!

Suppose someone has the capacity to create. They will inevitably feel an inner impulse from this ability. They'll recognize their own capacity or feel a certain urgency. They'll see that what they can do effortlessly, or what they feel confident and comfortable attempting, others perhaps cannot manage even with great effort. Yes, an artist lives within them.

Let's say you enjoy analyzing a subject, thinking about others' work and explaining it to reach conclusions, developing business plans for organizations in your own way, observing various operations and employees' activities, working methodically to improve institutional policies. This means you possess all the qualities needed to be an organization's administrator.

If you love bustling about, can organize others to advance some project, and can take complete responsibility for a specific area of business operations, you could probably become a first-rate supervisor. If you can work with people, motivate them to get work done, and feel genuinely enthusiastic about who did what, how much they accomplished, whether they did it properly—then you could be a good manager. When you find joy in work, it feels like responsibility rather than burden.

When someone dislikes their work and does it only out of necessity, if anyone asks why the quality isn't better, they offer these standard responses: I don't have time to organize the work properly. The pay isn't enough for me. If the work environment were better, the quality would improve. None of my colleagues are particularly good, so I can't do the work my way. I can't possibly do better than this. I could have taken much better jobs if I'd wanted to... All sorts of excuses arise in the mind. People can conjure up thousands of excuses against what they don't want to do. Conversely, people can steadily pursue work they love even amid hundreds of obstacles.

Everyone's day has twenty-four hours. How someone uses this time and how much they use depends on how far they can advance in their work. Time is the one thing in this world that never shows favoritism to anyone about anything. Whoever can extract the most from this time for themselves can go the farthest. The busiest person can't find as much time as they want, while others perhaps can't figure out how to spend the exact amount of time they have. Both leisure and busyness depend on how we each manage to use time. What seems like leisure to one person is busyness to another. Some wonder: what are they so busy with? Others wonder: how do they find so much free time?

Let me teach you a magic trick. Many of those who claim they have no time at all, you'll notice, keep themselves busy with tasks that will be of no use whatsoever in their lives. If we spend time on unnecessary work, we'll find we have much less time to spend on necessary tasks. Those who don't waste time on trivial, unnecessary activities—or spend less time on them—and properly accomplish what needs doing will undoubtedly advance much further than the rest.

There's pleasure in wasting time. There's great happiness in not doing what must be done to achieve greatness in life. Sin and laziness—before these two pleasures, the entire world grows pale! Those who have tasted these joys and pleasures will inevitably fall behind those who have kept themselves deprived of them. If you enjoy two-thirds of life's pleasures in the first third, you must endure the first third's suffering in the final two-thirds. Work out this calculation in your head once—the rest you'll understand automatically. This is time's justice. Time's judgment is never wrong.

Understanding what to let go of in life is far more crucial than understanding what to grasp. The more work someone takes on, the worse the quality of their work becomes. The time one person spends on five tasks, another might spend the same amount of time on just one task. Naturally, the second person's work will be both higher in quality and quantity. Success comes to those who can stick with one task, abandoning everything else. Rather than focusing on how the work feels, what matters is recognizing how necessary the work is. What needs doing may not feel good; similarly, what feels good to do may not be necessary at all.

How did Edison manage such inhuman labor? Didn't he get tired? Of course he did! But he enjoyed even that exhaustion. What made him tired was the work he loved most in life. The infinite happiness he found in making new discoveries, the euphoria that bloomed in his mind when he looked at his inventions—this equaled the purest joy the world has to offer. The fatigue that comes from work we love, work that gives us inspiration and keeps us alive, is itself supremely fortunate. Mental fatigue wears us down far more than physical tiredness. Mental fatigue comes less frequently in work we love. It's through mental strength that people can walk much farther than others.

When you spend ten hours doing what you love, it feels like time flew by in an instant! Yet if you sit idly for just one hour, staring at a wall clock or hourglass without purpose, every moment drags — as if time itself refuses to move forward! Whether we’re truly enjoying our time determines everything about fatigue. The weariness that settles into body and mind after an hour of divine intimacy brings only peace, never exhaustion. In that sweet tiredness, eyes sparkle with contentment, no tears of strain fall upon the chest. Even when the body is utterly spent, people rarely show reluctance toward love’s embrace. Someone who loves movies will come home after a hard day’s work, freshen up, and settle right into watching a film. A book lover chases away fatigue by reading. People pay little heed to physical tiredness when doing what they love. Since the mind shows no weariness in such work, they manage to complete it just fine.

Money doesn’t come from chasing money — rather, if we can love our work and do it in the very best way possible, money will chase after us instead. This requires sincerity toward our work, mastering specific techniques, and mental readiness to labor hard. We live in a world where someone rich today might be poor tomorrow! If a person cannot truly master their craft and make their skills marketable, their life will always remain at risk. So our first goal should be this: whatever we love to do, we must reach a level where very few people can match us in that work. Only by achieving this can we maintain our value.

What others say about us influences us tremendously. This influence happens far more than we realize. Gradually, without our knowing, we begin shaping ourselves according to the expectations of those around us. So we must think carefully about whom we allow to stay near us, or whose company we keep. Spending time with worthless people gradually makes us worthless too. The dust and grime that settles on an electric bulb diminishes its power to spread light. We’re just like that. Though our main driving force comes from our own mind and understanding, what people around us say and think inevitably controls our way of working to some degree, whether we want it or not. It’s natural that others’ thoughts, energy, and goals won’t align with ours. Our friends and family members give advice based on their own experiences, beliefs, and knowledge, keeping in mind their current circumstances. If we mistakenly let ourselves be guided by their philosophy, we’ll gradually lose all our individuality.

Life cannot be lived on borrowed ideas. So we must chart our own path ourselves. If we live worrying about what others will think, we’ll spend our entire lives trying to please everyone else. We get busy pleasing those whose happiness or displeasure means nothing to us, and who are often the root cause of many troubles and sufferings in our lives. When someone’s pointless work becomes an obstacle to your urgent tasks, it’s better to distance yourself from them when possible. The most worthless thought in this world is: “What will people think!” Whatever anyone thinks, if we do our work properly without harming anyone, their thoughts can’t touch us. Even if someone thinks badly of us, it won’t harm us — unless we ourselves become bad. Life is constantly running out. Before it’s completely over, we must make ourselves worthy of life.

Our thoughts are always precious! Someone whose thinking isn’t beautiful can never become a beautiful person. If you want to get ahead of others, you must have more elevated thoughts than others. Those who advance have thinking that’s far ahead too. Great people never worry about petty matters. When a problem or opportunity appears, how someone faces it reveals how far they can go. In any organization, you’ll see two types of people. Some run to their boss when they encounter problems, seeking solutions. Others solve the problem themselves first, then inform their boss. Naturally, the second type of employee will hold higher positions than the first.

If you develop love and skill for what you’re doing, you’ll find joy in working through the problems that arise, and you’ll tire less easily. So even if it means making some compromises with life, it’s better to establish yourself in the sector your heart desires. This way, the quality of work improves day by day, and boredom and fatigue toward work don’t set in. Or if they do, they don’t diminish the quality of subsequent work. The person who can earn a living doing work that feels like taking a break — there are few people as happy as that. Remove unnecessary people from your life, and gradually the extra hassles will begin to fade away from your existence.