“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”
– Richard Feynman
There’s a popular saying that if you do what you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life.
This saying has always struck me as being too idealistic. Because let’s be honest with ourselves. No matter how much we may think we love our work, there will always be times when it isn’t so rosy.
I know for myself that writing usually makes me lose track of time. It’s so hard to stop writing, because it’s so much fun. I might start writing an article, with the intention of putting out just a few lines or a few paragraphs. The next thing I know, a couple of hours have gone by.
Inevitably, though, there are also times where I think to myself, “God, this sucks.” I might get swamped with other commitments. I might find myself dealing with personal issues. Or, I might think too much about writing a “good” article for the week.
In such times, writing can feel like a chore, like I’m doing just enough to meet the weekly Saturday, 12 a.m., deadline. The words don’t come as easily, and putting out just a line seems like the hardest thing to do.
When this happens, I have to learn to love writing again.
I often find myself coming back to this story of the physicist Richard Feynman. After his involvement in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, and after his wife’s passing, Feynman was burnt out beyond measure. As he put it, physics was beginning to “disgust” him.
Amid his start as an associate professor of theoretical physics at Cornell University, his work made him depressed. No matter what he did to get his research going, he only felt tired. At best, he wrote only two lines on a problem related to gamma rays, before convincing himself that he couldn’t continue any further.
At the same time, he was getting multiple offers from other universities for positions with much higher pay. But none of them managed to lift his spirit. If anything, he only became more depressed, as he couldn’t see himself doing any real work. The only thing that made him feel better was heading to the library every so often to read The Arabian Nights.
At some point, his library routine made him reflect on what made him love physics in the first place. Just as he loved reading The Arabian Nights for the sake of it, so it was with physics. He didn’t get into physics so that he could score high-profile gigs like The Manhattan Project or have theories named after him. He did it simply because it was fun.
As he remarked, “Why did I enjoy (physics)? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.”
He remembered a particular fascination he had when he was in high school. He noticed how water would curve narrower as it flowed out of a faucet, and he sought to understand why. It didn’t matter to him that other people had already studied this phenomenon, or that it wasn’t “important for the future of science”. He did it purely for his own enjoyment.
With this realization, he tackled his work with renewed vigor. He said, “Just like I read The Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”
One day, he was in the cafeteria when he saw someone playing with a plate, which had the university logo on it. As the plate was thrown, it wobbled in the air. And as Feynman noticed, the logo on the plate was rotating faster than the plate’s wobbling.
As he studied this phenomenon, he discovered that when the plate was at a slight angle, the logo would rotate twice as fast as the plate’s wobbling. He continued to study deeper, wanting to understand the reasoning behind this 2:1 ratio.
Sharing his interest with his colleagues, he was largely met with indifference, as they didn’t see the point of his study. But Feynman wasn’t discouraged. He said, “I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.”
Feynman’s fascination with spinning plates soon led him to explore the bigger questions in physics. He began to wonder if the equations he had figured out about the spinning plate could explain how electrons wobbled in an atom.
He said, “Before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing” – working, really – with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.”
Feynman eventually won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his theory on quantum electrodynamics, which accurately explain how light and matter interact. According to Feynman, a helpful way to understand this theory is to visualize spinning plates.
As Feynman’s story teaches us, we can learn to love our work again by simply doing it for its own sake. This means letting go of expectations, be it from ourselves or from other people. This means letting go of our ideas of what “good” or “important” work is, and to work on something that genuinely excites us.
For me, writing tends to be a drag when I’m working on article that I think I “should be working on”, usually because the topic is merely trendy, or that it sounds like an intelligent thing to talk about. It’s not unusual for me to abandon a draft, even when it’s more than halfway done, because I couldn’t find it in me to write anymore.
I couldn’t write something that I’m not personally invested in, or that I’m not putting my whole being into. For better or worse, that’s just not how I’m wired to work.
It always helps for me to approach writing confessionally, to simply write about what’s currently on my mind — whether it’s something I find interesting, or whether it’s a problem that I’m trying to resolve. Writing this way, one line after another, I would eventually lose track of time again.
To this I may add, it’s completely normal to fall out of love with our work at times. Life might get in the way. Or our work might start to feel banal or mechanical, especially after we’ve done it for an extended period of time.
This can be a healthy thing. We can embrace these out-of-love moments as opportunities for us to try different ideas, and explore new interests in our work. This way, we allow ourselves to grow, and our work to become even better.
The actor Christian Bale has a similar perspective on his work. He said, “I’ve got this love-hate thing with work. But I actually think the love-hate thing is quite a healthy thing to have. If all you do is love, then you’re just going to imitate what you love, right? It takes people to fucking hate it at the same time to make any sort of change to what they’re doing. And to me, that’s when it becomes interesting.”
Sometimes, it takes falling out of love for us to appreciate how much we really do love what we do.
Izzat Zailan 