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JOHN PAUL DEJORIA

I love what I do, or I wouldn’t be doing it.

G. M. RAO

Money and security are very important to everyone. Personal satisfaction and passion for a particular thing you do is more important. That is why it is important to dream.

If you have a full-time job, you probably spend around 250 days of the year at work. Two hundred and fifty days is over two-thirds of the year, so if you’re not doing what sets your heart on fire and fills you with passion and excitement, you are wasting a lot of precious days of your life.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle.”

Steve Jobs

Cofounder of Apple Inc.

If you’re at home raising children, make sure this precious time of your life includes something that you love, and do it as often as you can. When I was at home raising my children I needed a creative outlet, and so I threw myself into cooking. I took cooking courses, bought books, and practiced and cooked until I had perfected every cooking method I could find. Cooking became my bliss. When I returned to my job in television, the first television show I developed was a cooking show, and because of what I had learned, the show became very successful. With its success, my career in television production flourished.

JOHN PAUL DEJORIA

When you are passionate and you like what you’re doing, when it is what you want to do, not what you have to do, you always do it better because you’re doing it with love.

For some reason many of us have separated our bliss from our work, and we don’t love what we do every day. But life doesn’t have to be like that. The fact that there are people who are blissful and living their dream for their work tells you that it’s possible for you, too. You don’t need to know what your dream job is, because your bliss is connected to it, so all you have to do is follow your bliss and it will lead you to it!

G. M. RAO

I don’t work because I have to work. I work because I enjoy the work. To me work is worship, because it is with a sense of purpose and gives happiness and contentment not just to me but to those around me.

LIZ MURRAY

I don’t think I’ve ever said: “I’m going to work.”

What kind of job can you imagine yourself doing where you wouldn’t ever say, “I’m going to work”? Your work should embrace your passion or special talent, and be something you would do whether you were paid or not.

LIZ MURRAY

I have to have fun in what I do. If I don’t have some kind of fun, if it doesn’t blow my hair back, if it doesn’t feel like magic, I just can’t stick with that. I must pursue things that make me feel like it’s Christmas morning when I was a kid and I couldn’t wait to get out of bed. If I start dreading something or wanting it to end, it’s a symptom that something needs to change.

MICHAEL ACTON SMITH

At Mind Candy we love working with people who don’t take themselves too seriously, who can have fun as they work. None of this is life or death, even though some people would like to think of it like that. I think you enjoy life and you have a lighter spirit when you have fun at work.

“I didn’t set out to be rich. The fun and the challenge in life were what I wanted – and still do… but I have found that, if I have fun, the money will come.”

Sir Richard Branson

Entrepreneur/Business Magnate

Be True to Yourself

When your work is your bliss, you will be happy. Doing a job you think you should do instead of doing what you love is leading a false life. So many precious people are living a life that has been put upon them by well-meaning parents, teachers, or society, or even by a friend or partner, and they’re miserable. We’re seeing the evidence of the misery in people through the alarming increase of mental health problems in the world. Shut out what everyone else thinks, have the courage to follow your own bliss, and you will be immensely happy.

JOHN PAUL DEJORIA

There’s a lot of things one wants to do that maybe isn’t commonplace or that everyone else agrees with, but if it makes you happy, by gosh, go after it. It’s so rewarding, being true to yourself.

MICHAEL ACTON SMITH

I left university and got a sensible job in a bank, and I realized quite quickly that it just wasn’t for me. It didn’t speak to my soul. And I realized I was pretty much unemployable.

G. M. RAO

When we pursue a dream, there will be several pulls from different directions, from stakeholders, family, friends, and society. In my case, there were many such situations. For example, when my brothers with whom I was in partnership for our family business had different aspirations, I exited the partnership to pursue my own dreams.