'Choose a job you love' is incomplete advice

Instead, find work that gives you flexibility and control.

Image created via Midjourney

There’s a famous saying, attributed to Confucius: “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

Recently, I shared my own advice from this post on Threads:

I think "Choose a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life" is incomplete advice.
Choose work that puts you in control of how you spend your time. Choose work that gives you the time and mental bandwidth to do things you love.

We don't all have the luxury to choose work we love. Sometimes, it's not possible because of financial obligations or other barriers.

But work that offers a lot of flexibility gives you the time and mental energy to do things you love. We're all capable of creating boundaries for ourselves and not letting it consume our lives (even though sometimes that feels hard).

Someone replied to my post and asked, "How long after you unsubscribed from the rat race were you able to 'choose work'?"

And that's a valid question, because it wasn't immediate. In fact, it was a bit like a boomerang of flexibility.

Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of freelancing full-time and basically four years since I started on down a new career path. I've talked a lot about my career pivot before, but I want to outline a specific timeline of events that led me to where I am now: doing work I love with a lot of control over how I spend my time.