I just googled the phrase “working long hours” and almost fell off my chair.
The overwhelming majority of results state that working long hours will kill you: it causes heart disease, damages brain function, increases the risk of dementia, increases pregnancy hazard, destroys families, etc…
Where’s the love?
The hidden assumption behind these horrible google results is that people don’t love their work. Otherwise, spending long hours at it would contribute to their health and happiness instead of killing them.
Working long hours is the only surefire path for getting better at anything. It’s essential to the kind of exceptional, excellent performance that allows people to achieve great things.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell estimates that unless one puts up with 10,000 (ten thousand!) hours of practice, there’s no way to become excellent at anything.
And people who manage to comply with the 10,000-hour rule are invariably in love with what they do: they would certainly die in the attempt otherwise!
These people’s motivation is not only in achieving the level of exceptional excellence they aim for — they love the practicing per se.
Gladwell’s book encourages us to reconcile with working long hours as the enabler of excellence that makes us flourish, one of the keys that makes life worth living — not a sure cause of death.
Of course, too much of a good thing can also be damaging. It’s important to not become a workaholic even if we love our work.
But the bottom line is clear: struggle and damaging stress is caused by people spending most of their waking hours doing something they don’t find fulfilling and meaningful — something they don’t love.
Zombies
People who don’t love their work and keep doing it can be classified into two categories: zombies and conformists.
Zombies don’t even realize they don’t love their work — or worse still, that they hate it.
They have internalized a ton of socially imposed reasons for sticking to work they don’t love (status, a “secure” source of income, family or peers’ opinions on “honorable” or “real” work, etc.) to such a point that they have subconsciously assumed that apathy and boredom are simply inevitable qualities of work.
Zombies are so disconnected from their true passions that they firmly believe they just don’t have a vocation, calling or life-purpose. They simply can’t fathom any alternative work they would love.
So in a way, zombies can only be half-killed by long hours of soul-crushing work: they’re half-dead in the first place 
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Towards resurrection
The very first step for a zombie to come out of the world of the living dead, is to realize they don’t love their work but are sticking to it for all the wrong, socially-conditioned reasons — to become aware of their conformism.
I recently posted an essay that explains a process for becoming aware of conformism, braking away from it, and discovering the work we love. I’ll summarize its key points here, but after reading this post, I highly recommend you to read the essay too.
To become aware of your conformism, you need to answer a simple question:
If you had no need to generate income and you wouldn’t obtain any sense of status, prestige or approval from friends and family from your current work… would you still do it?
If your answer is positive, congratulations. You’re on the path towards true happiness.
If your answer is negative… congratulations too! You’ve just realized you’re a conformist — which isn’t good at all, but it’s certainly better than being a zombie 
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Confusion and fear
Waking up from zombie-state brings about quite a complex feeling.
In a way, it’s refreshing and uplifting. But it also starts a swirl of tormenting internal conflicts. Our egos find it hard to accept that we have settled for a zombie existence for so many months, years, or decades.
Besides beating ourselves up through the workings of our ego, we feel a stark form of fear due to the uncertainty about what to do next, if we were to step away from our current line of work.
As I said before, zombies are so disconnected from their passions that even after waking up, they usually can’t figure out what they would rather be doing with their lives.
Taking the plunge
If you have just woken up from zombie-state and become aware of your conformism, I urge you to take the plunge and quit the work you don’t love once and for all.
Quitting the work you don’t love is the single most important step in discovering the work you love.
Quitting the work you don’t love is the most direct way of solving the problem of breaking away from conformism and finding the work you love.
The reason for this is that human brains hate contradictions between beliefs and behaviors — what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”.
Because working in what we don’t love and realizing it’s not a good thing causes cognitive dissonance, our brains will quickly come up with all sorts of rationalizations for eliminating the contradiction:
“Maybe our work is not so bad after all? Shouldn’t we be grateful to at least have a job with so many people living in the streets? The pay is actually quite good… maybe I should just wait for a while?”
Once our inner chatter starts whispering these questions, it’s hard to not listen.
Besides rationalizing the status quo, our brains will effectively block us from perceiving any clear opportunities for alternative lines of fulfilling work. This would worsen the belief-behavior contradiction.
But by quitting the work you don’t love, you cleanly and definitively cancel the contradiction.
In my previous essay on this subject, I tell my own story of how it all “started to come back”, how I “remembered” all my long-forgotten passions as soon as I took the liberating step of quitting the work I didn’t love during late 2008.
And working insanely long hours in the things I love, which include this blog, has been exactly the opposite of death for me: when compared to the days I worked many less hours in something I didn’t love, it feels like the purest form of resurrection.
What are your experiences with, and views on the process of gathering the courage to quit work you don’t love? What are they on finding work you love, and joyfully spending an insane amount of hours on it?
If you liked this post, make sure to check out the non-conformism and love-oriented work resource round-up.
Pablo Galante says:
Querido Alan,
Laura and I read your very interesting entry while having breakfast. We find particularly interesting the concept of ‘cognitive dissonance’, certainly not easy to separate the real reason (good reasons or bad ones but the real ones) of our actions from the rationalized justifications that we might try to find.
A point to give further thought is the need of deciding in isolation of your circumstances the path of your life. There is nothing wrong with doing something for honor or for material gain, I will say, as far as you are fully aware of the real reasons why you are doing something.
Un abrazo,
Pablo