Tag: Not-for-Profit

Do Good = Feel Good

Live & Learn17 Comments

zinnia35 members of our team participated in a volunteer day yesterday.  We spent the day weeding, cutting, seeding, planting, scraping and painting for a non-profit organization that works with children with social and learning challenges while providing care for animals and nature.

If you’ve followed my blog, you’ve seen a number of posts on the importance of doing what you love. The staff at this organization who was guiding our team through various lawn, gardening and fence painting projects was all-in.  You could feel their commitment.  You could feel their love for the children, the gardens, the animals and their work.   Inspiring?  Over-the-top.  Good people?  Crazy Good.  And yet more Good…

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Do what you love?

Live & Learn256 Comments

We’ve all either given or received the career advice: “Follow your dreams.”  “Do what you love.”  “Love what you do.”

Recently, there have been an increasing number of counterarguments making the case that if we were all going to “do what we love,” we’d starve doing it.

I came across a 2006 post by Paul Graham: “How To Do What You Love” that offers what may be the best thought-leadership on the subject that I have read.

Graham is an essayist, programmer, and investor. In 1995, he co-developed the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.  Graham’s blog is one of the most followed in the blogosphere.

It is an essay (longish for those of us with ADD) but I would encourage you to read it in its entirety as my excerpts below don’t give his work its due:

“To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.”

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