Find difficult work that you enjoy.

I've been thinking about this sentence a lot the last couple weeks.  My father always told me to find work that I love, and my best friend's dad always told me to find work that pays well.  My best friend and I had a bit of a rivalry based on this dichotomy... love versus material success.  Both of our fathers were computer programmers, both successful in their fields, but with completely different reason philosophies.  In the end, I ended up wanting to be an artist and my friend ended up going to law school, so it plays itself out in a pretty cliched fashion.  Except then I joined the tech world when I realized I didn't like the self-promotional aspects of being a writer. 

Tangentially, another thing that my father used to always get on my case about was the difference between the meaning of "hard" versus "difficult".  "Surfaces are hard, work is difficult."  Haha.  So when I start thinking about hard work, I can't help but hear the nagging voice of "surfaces are hard" and feel pressure to call it difficult work instead.

The concept of difficult work has been on my mind because I've lately been feeling burned out on some difficult work in my life, and I'm trying to rally back to the point where difficult work invigorates rather than punishes.  Difficult work needs to be framed in enjoyment.  The work must be done out of love and enjoyment, rather than necessity or force.  It can be the same work in both cases, but done for different reasons. 

What is difficult work?

A) Work that hurts.
B) Work you don't want to do.
C) Work that you don't know how to do.

I just found this article ("Eureka! It really takes years of hard work") that mentions an acquaintence of mine, Scott Berkun, and his book that I interviewed a tiny bit for, "Myths of Innovation".  Debunking the idea that innovation comes in a brilliant moment of inspiration, thousands of get rich/thin/powerful/smart quick books quiver in their boots.  But, luckily for them, difficult work doesn't sell.

Difficult work means that a book isn't going to solve your problem, therefore why buy a book to try to learn this?  But I wonder if there are any good resources out there that generalize the anatomy of what good work is... a discovery process that leads to a learning process that leads to an action process that cycles back to more discovery, learning, and action processes.  In the meantime the ability to focus, notice distraction, and re-focus becomes essential.  Also, a reward and cost balance must be negotiated... you have to know why you're doing something, and know what it will cost to do it, and have resources to take on the unknown factors that will become apparent as the processes proceed.  Flow needs to be achieved.

The symptoms of true flow are outlined in the book, Flow, which is essential reading for pretty much everyone.  Here's the list, taken from the Flow wikipedia page.

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).
2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Not all of these symptoms are necessary for an experience to enter the flow state, but they're all present sometimes.

Another way of saying it might be to find work that requires you to pay a lot of attention to it.  And, that work, on some level, must be a reward in itself.  A learning experience, a growing experience, something that makes you feel like you belong in the universe.   An experience that becomes richer and richer as you dive into it.

Where to start?

A good place to start is at the discovery phase.  The task of finding difficult work that you enjoy is in itself a potential candidate for the difficult work.  Finding difficult work that you enjoy is in itself difficult.  So, the discovery process of understanding what you enjoy and why, what you love and why, could be the first piece of difficult work.

What is difficult in your life and do you enjoy it?  I know that we can't always admit publicly when there's work we don't enjoy, so you don't have to admit that stuff publicly.  But privately, admit what work you don't enjoy and set out on a task of finding out what you do enjoy.