Do What You Love vs. Love What You Do
A few young mentees asked me how I chose to do security as my career. When I look back, I didn't choose security. It was just a task assignment to port OpenSSL to a proprietary embedded system more than 20 years ago. I had no idea what RSA stood for at the time, but I accepted the challenge by spending a lot of time learning security and cryptography. Then people thought I must be good at security and they kept giving me more security related opportunities, from Identity Management, Single-Sign-On (SSO), to now running the largest Hardware Security Module (HSM) fleet in the AWS Cloud.
Would I have chosen security as my career if I had a different choice? I am not sure. But this is an irrelevant question if you accept the the "absurdity" of life, as the renowned philosopher Camus put it.
I chose to "love what I do"!
The mantra "do what you love" has become a modern-day career choice gospel. Yet, this perspective can be misleading, particularly for those whose passions and natural aptitudes are not clear, don’t align, or whose life circumstances don't offer the choices they would like to have. There are blessed ones like Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. He got a body natural for an elite swimmer and he got into swimming in early age, under a top coach. Then he trained insanely hard to be the best swimmer in human history - 8 gold metals in the Beijing Olympic Game in 2008 might be an unbreakable record.
But I find for normal folks like you and me, it is better to follow the path of "love what you do the best", instead of ONLY "do what you love", because
you may not really know what you love: love means unconditioned giving - you will do that thing day and night, even without being paid. Are you sure you know what you love?
what you love might not be what you are good at enough that the society is willing to pay for that particular talent of you
your environment, or fate, may not allow you to do what you love.
To find love in what you do it begins with self-awareness, recognizing one’s strengths and weaknesses, and understanding the environment one is nurtured in. Then you try a few things that you can choose or are given to you, to discover what resonates and where your competencies lie. Hopefully that leads to unearthing a vocation that, while may not be your first love, could become a beloved endeavor of you through deliberate practices, continuous improvements, mastery and the satisfaction derived from making meaningful contributions to the society.
"At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death... But Sisyphus raises rocks... concludes that all is well. ... The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy"
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