One of the key tenets of my life is “do what you love.”  It is the reason I spent two years teaching English in Japan (because I wanted to experience living in a foreign country), why I took an unpaid internship at GarageGames as an MBA student (because I wanted to work in the video game industry), and now why I am launching a company with my husband (because I want to run my own business).

However, doing what you love often means doing things you don’t love to do.  I never had a strong desire to learn a foreign language in high school because I wasn’t good at it, yet there I was in Nagoya City, attending language classes and struggling at the supermarket.  I wanted to take a higher paying job, but then I would have been stuck doing market analysis for fiberoptics (true story), so I decided to go the more risky route into video games.  And I hate the legal aspect of running Avalon Labs LLC such as setting up a corporation and paying for trademark work, but it all needs to be done.

Paradoxically, doing what you love often means doing things you don’t like to do.  You have to decide if all the crappy little things are worth the risk/money/time/effort/stress to do what you love.  If it isn’t, are you sure you love what you’re doing?

-Deborah Fike

Share and Enjoy