We have a hard time really telling others what we love to do. Many times it turns into this humble brag of stuff we don’t really love to do, but it sounds impressive and we know others won’t judge us based on the answer.

I tell people all the time I love fishing!

I do love fishing, but not as much as I probably tell people. Sometimes going fishing sucks. It’s cold. The fish don’t bite. You get sunburned. You have to get up super early.

What I really love is being on the lake by myself, fishing, when it’s a great mild temperature. It’s quite with a slight breeze. I can hear the water and the birds. And it helps if I’m also catching some fish, but the serenity is really what I love.

Too often I find people define themselves by what they hate versus what they love.

I don’t like recruiting, I just want to do my HR stuff! What stuff is that? You know doing the benefits and the employee relations things, and the… Oh, the stuff that has no accountable measures? Okay, I get it, having pressure on your sucks! But what is it that you really love to do?

It doesn’t really help us by defining what we want to do around what we hate, because in any thing we do we probably will have some hate and some love. If that’s the case, the best way to decide what you’ll do is by deciding what is it that you actually love to do because if you love some portion of it, the stuff you hate really doesn’t seem to bad.

The opposite would be that you decide you want to work at a job because you don’t hate anything about it. Well, okay, so you don’t hate it, but is there any part of it that you love? Because if you don’t love any of it, you probably won’t end up liking it either.

It’s not just work, this works in all aspects of our lives. If you are out in the world telling everyone what you hate, it will probably push most people away. If you are telling them what you love, it might not bring everyone to you, but it will definitely bring some folks to you that share that love.

Define yourself by what you love, not what you hate.