You Gotta Love Business
I co-host a bi-weekly podcast with my good friend Sean McCabe over at seanwes.com/podcast, where he and I talk about (to put it generally) creativity and business. During a recent episode we were discussing the business side of freelance work (billing, sales, documentation, book-keeping, etc.) and how it comprises a significant portion of the freelancer’s time. He argued that if you wanted to experience success as a person in business for themselves, you had to love business.
Can’t I Just Love Something Else?
I struggled with this idea. I argued that maybe you could love your creative pursuit so much that the business stuff, that you don’t like to do, becomes tolerable. Sean and I left that point, not completely in alignment. I just couldn’t see why you should have to love something on the sole merit of the amount of time you have to spend doing it in order to make something you truly love possible. Do I really have to love business? He’s such a boring guy.
Two Kinds of Love
Last night my wife and I were talking about this same idea and I came to a realization. What if it’s not about feeling love or affection for something, but expressing or showing love in the way that you do it. For the sake of my argument, it comes down to two different kinds of love:
1. The love we feel
For example, I feel love for making things with my hands. I have an affinity for sitting down at my desk and carefully sketching out the lines of a project and watching it become what I have envisioned in my mind.
2. The love we show
I am expressing love when I pay close attention to the details of each line. When I slow down to make it perfect when I’d rather speed up and get it done. When I spend an hour thoughtfully recounting in an article all of the ideas and inspirations that led me to this piece.
A Conscious Choice
The second kind of love, the love that we show, is applied quite naturally to the things for which we feel love. Even with those things, however, showing love is still a conscious choice. This is how I believe we can love business. We can express love for it by intentionally applying our values, our attention to detail, our creativity and ingenuity to the way that we do business.
Let Me Count the Ways
Practically speaking, this might look like following your own design process for making a beautiful and functional invoicing system. It might look like coming up with a creative way to lead customers through a meaningful experience with your brand. It might look like taking the time to craft a well-written article about your process with a particular piece. It might look like triple checking your math when doing accounting related activities.
Expressed Love Wins
So how do you express this kind of love, this attention to detail, this level of care, to something you don’t enjoy? You choose to. You commit to. This is the key. You make up you mind about what you will do, and surprisingly, often times, your affection will follow. But, even if it doesn’t, love isn’t relegated to an emotion that you feel while you’re doing something. In the end, whether it’s something you enjoy or not, if you do it without expressed love, it’s not worth doing in the first place. Love what you do.