Doing What You Love

I was watching the press conference of Brett Farve who recently announced his retirement from the National Football League after 17 years of playing the game. Like most great athletes who decide to hang it up, Farve began to cry during his announcement as he realized he was leaving behind a successful career that brought him great fulfillment and joy.

Watching this made me wonder about the future. Most people have a job or a career in which they put in hour after hour of work all the while longing for retirement. Why is quitting your career and retirement such a great thing in the work force? Why is that the goal of working? The answer is the lack of love for the job. When an athlete is in the height of their career, nobody wants to even think of the possibility of them quitting. But we make retirement the ultimate goal.

Are you doing what you love? At the end of your career when you begin to reflect on how hard you worked, will you get emotional at the thought of never doing again what you've done for years? Why not?

What is the one thing that you love to do? What is that one thing that is so important to you that the thought of walking away from it makes you teary eyed? Why should fear, doubt, discouragement, age, background or anything else stop us from doing the one thing we love? I think the bulk of the unhappiness that people experience in their lives is a lack of purpose and an absence of doing a job that they love. Why not begin to think about the possibility of looking at retirement as something to delay because of love as opposed to something to look forward to because of the lack of love.