How to Answer the Question ’What Do You Love Doing?’

…when you don’t know what you love doing

Photo by Eunice Lituañas on Unsplash

Have you ever asked yourself ‘What do you love doing?’

I have asked myself many times over the course of my career and life. These are all of the things I have enjoyed:

• Writing books
• Sharing advice with young professionals
• Writing and delivering speeches
• Playing badminton
• Reading

But I only arrived at this through a careful examination of my life, and doing a lot of small experiments.

Maybe you are trying to figure out what you love doing so that you can make a career out of it. Except you don’t know what you love doing because you don’t have enough experience. So here’s a trick I learned from Derek Sivers in his book Hell Yeah or No, which I think will be helpful to you.

Instead of asking yourself “What do you love doing?”, ask yourself “What do you hate not doing?”

In my experience, that question is infinitely better because:

• You often do not know what you love doing, but you can easily identify the things that you hate not doing
• Career advice like ‘follow your passion’ is awful…