Don't do what you love, be who you are
And if you do have to work, make sure you’re still being yourself
We’ve all heard the phrase: "Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life." It’s one of those sticky memes that I find found both inspiring and suspiciously simplistic. It suggests that aligning your passions with your work is the golden ticket to happiness and fulfilment.
But I do wonder if it’s true?
What if the relentless pursuit of doing what you love isn’t the ultimate solution but a trap? A trap that ties your identity, your happiness, and your worth to external markers of success, productivity, or impact.
Is achievement an adaptive behavior?
I grew up believing that achievement was the surest path to fulfilment. But I’m now exploring the idea that achievement is less about who we are and more about what we learned to do to survive.
As children, we may have developed a need to achieve as a way to secure love, safety, or validation. When those things felt conditional—based on what we did rather than who we were—we learned to equate our worth with our productivity. This kind of adaptive behaviour can push us to accomplish great things, but it also has a shadow side.
When the need to achieve becomes a default mode, it can drown out other parts of us—the playful, curious, creative parts that dream for the sake of dreaming. The parts that don’t need an audience or a paycheque to feel alive.
The danger of conflating authenticity with impact
We’ve been sold another narrative alongside “do what you love”: the idea that becoming our most authentic selves will naturally lead to being more productive, impactful, or successful. I admit to being guilty of reinforcing this story but through my work I’ve come to see the negative aspects of it.
This conflation sets up a dangerous expectation: that authenticity must produce something to be worthwhile.
But what if authenticity isn’t a tool for achievement? What if it isn’t causal?
I’ve come to believe that the journey of becoming more authentically you isn’t about becoming a better entrepreneur, artist, or changemaker. It’s not about being a better capitalist, environmentalist, or anything else. It’s simply about being you for the sake of being you.
Two separate journeys
There’s value in untangling two separate but often intertwined journeys:
The inner journey: This is about learning to be yourself—curious, playful, and unapologetically whole. It’s not tied to what you produce or how you’re received. It’s about exploring who you are without expectation or outcome.
The outer journey: This is about deciding how to engage with the world in ways that feel meaningful and aligned. It’s about making choices—whether that’s earning money, creating impact, or simply existing authentically.
These two journeys don’t have to depend on each other. You can explore the first simply because it matters to you. And then, if and when you’re ready, you can look outward and choose how your authentic self interacts with the world.
Rejecting the causal narrative
Here’s a radical idea: You don’t have to do what you love. You don’t have to turn your passion into a paycheque. You don’t have to align your work with your joy. And if you don’t know what you love, you don’t need to find it.
Instead, what if you just focused on being who you are? On figuring out what feels true to you—not because it will make you money or solve a global problem, but because it’s who you are.
When you untangle your sense of self from the need to produce or perform, something liberating happens. You realise that being authentically you is valuable, even if the world doesn’t reward it. Even if it doesn’t lead to wealth, recognition, or measurable impact.
Conscious adaptation
From this place of self-knowledge, you can make conscious choices about how to engage with the world. Do you want to make money? Create change? Build something that matters? You can—but you don’t have to.
This isn’t about rejecting work or ambition altogether. It’s about rejecting the idea that your value is tied to those things. It’s about doing what feels meaningful to you, even if it’s messy, imperfect, or doesn’t fit neatly into a job description.
A new narrative
I’ve discovered that being happy doesn’t necessarily lead to wealth, and doing what you love doesn’t guarantee you’ll never work a day in your life.
The mantra I prefer is: Be who you are. Work out how to not work another day in your life—but if you do have to work, make sure you’re still being yourself.
This isn’t about avoiding work; it’s about embracing wholeness. It’s about choosing a life where your work, your play, and your dreams coexist without compromising the truth of who you are.
So, you don’t have to do what you love. But you do have to be who you are. If you don’t know how to do that yet, that’s the real work. Start there. The rest will follow—or not—and either way, you’ll be okay.
Thank you for expressing and sharing this; I couldn't agree more with the essence of what you're saying.
These quotes (lacking nuance and context) go from being inspirational mantras to some sort of ideal and we start hearing them as a universal truth: I 'have to' love what I do, so that I will never 'have to' work another day in my life—also assuming that 'work' is something to eradicate completely, as an underlying negative connotation is now assumed with this word.
I see that with every new mindset or opportunity we create, with every new attempt to liberate people in the same homogenous way, we equally create new cages, yet another way to stay trapped in the grind of achieving. The idea we could 'have and be it all' creates this belief that we should and, in addition, that our lives need to look like certain way. It becomes a cycle of striving for freedom while reinforcing the same systems that keep us shackled by 'ideas turned ideals' we supposed to aspire to.
Untangling and detaching our sense of worth and belonging from our external outputs is, indeed, a liberating endeavour, and how this looks like is highly personal; I belief here we have an opportunity to inspire, learn and grow from and with each other, to celebrate each of us individually, expressing ourselves and our quirks even more, rather than forcing us to 'be' and 'do' the same.
I relate to what you call the inner journey as a vertical alignment, from root to stars and everything in between. As we continue to decondition, it's often a challenging and confronting journey to come into alignment with our whole selves, truths, contradictions, and complexities, but, in my experience, a necessary one that can reveal what is truly important, not in a philosophical sense, but in a deeply personal and experiential one.
The outer journey I see as our horizontal alignment, spanning 360 degrees, and it is about opening up to what is outside of us, from that aligned place of self. The outer journey, as you say, then can become this beautiful extension of that internal process. In this space I often ask myself: "What wants to happen when I am here? and I just wait for my body to respond before I take further action. These journeys are a dance between being and doing, receiving and acting, grounded in a way that feels true to who we are in the moment.
We are worthy just by being born; we belong just by existing, and I think your closing words "you'll be okay" give such permission to breath and surrender a little bit more in trusting ourselves and the universe. It reminds me of this phrase by Domingos Sabino (leading candidate for creating this saying): "Everything is going to be fine in the end. If it’s not fine, it’s not the end.”