Why Do What You Hate?

There are a couple of views on this.

A. Play to your strengths. If it’s not your talent, why bother, right? Stick with what you’re good at.

B. Work hard and improve. If you aren’t good at it, it just means you haven’t practiced hard enough.

I mix and match.

It’s taken a few bumps in the road, but the older I get the clearer it is that your work should be your strength, your passion. Those words used to intimidate me because I thought that I didn’t feel strongly enough about anything to call it a “passion”, I wasn’t good enough at anything to call it a “strength”. I didn’t pick up on the fact that if you do it your whole life long, whether or not anybody’s telling you to, just because you can’t stop yourself – that’s a strength. That’s a passion. If you’re going to spend a lot of time doing something anyway, and if you need to be good enough at it to be paid enough to keep a roof over your head, then, yes, yes, a thousand times yes, play to your strengths.

But then it comes to playing, and there, ironic though it may be, I often choose to do for fun the things I have to work at. One of my favorite bloggers Gina put it exactly right when she was talking about competing – how she hates it, but she does it because of that, not in spite of it. I like getting better. I like learning. I like doing things I haven’t done before. I also like laughing, and when I’m trying to do something I’m not good at, believe me, there’s plenty to laugh about.

Do you do what you hate? What? Why? Why not?