What Doesn't Feel Like Work?

I confided in a dear friend and fellow designer recently about how I get a weird feeling in my stomach when a potential client emails or calls me. I’m never excited. I compare it to how I felt playing baseball as a teenager. The older I got, the more I dreaded playing baseball. Before games, I would pray for a rain out. I didn’t enjoy the game and it didn’t help that I was terribly afraid of getting hit by a pitch, or a line drive. For my teammates, it all seemed to come naturally. For me, I would have rather stayed home and played Final Fantasy IV.

These days, I don’t pray for rain. Instead, I do whatever I can to avoid a new design project. My two go-to barriers are a client intake form and an increasing hourly rate.

In his Conversations with Tyler interview, Ben Westhoff says that you should “follow what you really want to do and what you’re really interested in.” Further, he says, “And there’s stuff that, just intrinsically, you know more about, that inspires you more, and so again, you want to get to a point where it doesn’t feel like work, like you would be doing this anyway.”

I’m suspect of this kind of advice because I don’t always think it’s an option for everyone. Ignoring my inner skeptic, though, I ask myself, “what doesn’t feel like work?” And, more importantly, “what do I do that doesn’t cause dread?”

A few things come to mind:

Listening to the interview with Westhoff and writing this post.
Teaching, and preparing for class. Sometimes it scares me and causes anxiety, but there’s a difference between those feelings and dread.
Writing for this project in the research methods class I took in Fall 2019.
Taking photos, especially of people, and sharing them combined writing.
Design, but more so the idea of design (creativity) and its history.
Traveling to foreign places. That doesn’t mean it has to be far. The Ethiopian restaurant on opposite side of town will do.
Meeting in a small circle with friends and strangers to talk about dynamic topics (I think I would like being a counselor).
Writing monthly updates and sharing links to content that inspires me.

I’m going to sit with these thoughts some more and see where they lead. In the meantime, I will continue to write, teach, take photos, study, read, and do many of the other things I love (even if some of them have no economic value).

To be continued…

Here’s a portion of the transcript from Westhoffs Conversations with Tyler episode:

WESTHOFF: Just follow what you really want to do and what you’re really interested in. I came up in alternative weeklies, and for how underpaid we were, that was made up for by the fact that we could write about whatever we wanted. We were encouraged to follow our interests, whereas at a daily paper, you might have had a certain beat that you always wrote about every day.
And there’s stuff that, just intrinsically, you know more about, that inspires you more, and so again, you want to get to a point where it doesn’t feel like work, like you would be doing this anyway.

Westhoff then moves into how he writes. As an aspiring writer, I love to read about how other writers write. It translates into design as well.

When I first dreamed of being a writer, I thought I needed all these life experiences. I needed to go running with the bulls, and I needed to maybe be an alcoholic. I just needed to really live.
But my feeling on that has shifted a lot. Now I think just the opposite, that there’s plenty of stories out there. The things to write about are all around you, and you need to discipline yourself, get your health right. Like I said, I try to be very careful about what I eat. I’m very big on exercise, long distance running, yoga, getting my body right, getting enough sleep every night. It’s not glamorous, but I feel like it benefits my work a lot.
COWEN: So you’re a big believer in practice?
WESTHOFF: Yeah.
COWEN: What do you do to practice writing, to become a better writer? Obviously, you write, but what else can you do?
WESTHOFF: This is part of that, but just journaling. When people think about writing, they think, “Oh, I have to write a profound short story.” But I always say, “No, just write everything that’s happening to you.” Nonfiction, to me, from the average writer, from the entry-level writer is almost always a thousand times more interesting than some fiction they’re writing.