'I Say What I Mean' As 'I Mean What I Say'

The key, I have been repeatedly told, to a life full of happiness is to do what you love. This, I have discovered, is not as easy as everybody makes it out to be. "Oh yes," the seemingly ever-present "they" say, "Just find a job that allows you to do what you're passionate about. Then you'll love going to work every day and your life will be Elixir Of Life (which I will explain later) and Cheesecake."

I've found two problems with this philosophy thus far. The first issue is that I've had several jobs which I would qualify as doing "what I love" - I've been a maths teacher, and I've been a games programmer - and let me tell you, my experience with both of these jobs was less than stellar.

At first the experiences I was having with these jobs was wonderful, and I looked forward to work every morning - setting out with a smile on my face and a song in my heart (like some kind of bizarre Disney caricature.) Soon, however, I found my "free-time" passion for these activities waning. My internal monologue was something along the lines of "I just spent my whole day trying to make an electronic dog avoid disco fleas, why would I want to go to my own projects now? I need to do something different from that..."

This is the same issue that I have when I try to play games like WoW - the fact that you have to go out and kill 500 boars and collect six reams of paper from the haunted lumber mill three territories away, and that in order to actually get anywhere in the game you have to do this basically on a nightly basis makes makes the whole thing feel like something I'm being forced to do, rather than something I'm doing to wind down. That point, and the fact that if you're in an instance, people take it way to seriously, sucks the fun right out of it.

The second issue that I have with the "Elixir and Cheesecake" philosophy is that I'm lactose intolerant, so whilst I'd like to be able to enjoy cheesecake on a daily basis, I don't believe it would make for a lifestyle that is particularly conducive to pleasure.

Something that I have found, however, is that the secret is not doing what you love - rather it is loving what you do. The two concepts are most definitely mutually exclusive...(I suspect that my regular readers may expect some kind of link hidden among these words to a Charles Dodgson book - so I guess I'd best not disappoint.)

My current job has me as an Information Technology Service Officer (ITSO - It's fun to say, try it - email me video footage of you saying it - that's how slowly this day is going!!) which, you would imagine, could be quite boring and frustrating.

I, however, have a tactic that I use to ensure that I'm always engaged by my job - I make a game of it. Okay, so I know that sounds exceedingly lame, but it really does work wonders for my morale. I discovered on my first day here that people are awarded points for the various ways jobs are handled (for example, logging a phone-call job gets you 1 point, whilst logging and e-mail job only scores you half a point.) My mind swam with possibilities - there were points...there were collectibles.

Ever since then my day has consisted of me sitting, waiting for phone-calls and emails to come in, so that I may grab them while no-one is looking and get the precious beans (points) for myself. This isn't just a single-player game...It's not a co-op multiplayer game...It's competitive - and I play to win.

The moral of this story is that turning the most mundane activities into a video-game like reward system is often a great way to make them more fun. When I was younger I used to practice swimming by having various mathematical lap-counters running through my head (how many had I done, how many did I have left to do, what was that as a percentage, what was the simplest fraction I could make from that, and so forth) and I soon learnt to apply the same theory to cleaning my room, and so forth - though I'm yet to get any achievements, but I suspect they're just really hard to unlock at this level...