The Like Versus Love List

None of my friends will admit to watching an entire episode of Jersey Shore. (If you’re reading this from the future, and this intimate look at life in New Jersey is off the air, imagine the book Lord of the Flies, powered by Red Bull and Axe body spray). 

If you ask my friends if they have seen the show, they will respond, “I caught a little while flipping channels.” Somewhere, millions of people are watching whole episodes, but apparently I don’t know any of those people. Or all my friends are liars. It’s one of those two.

The grandfather of Jersey Shore was a show called The Real World. It was a similar concept: throw attractive, opinionated people in a house they couldn’t normally afford. Add liquor. Shake.

To be honest, I used to watch not only whole episodes of that show, I’d watch marathons. I’d sit down and not blink for hours without realizing it. Time, space, common sense, all forms of normal life were put on hold when I’d watch The Real World. But when I got married, that changed.

It changed because you start to realize the silliness of giving a show like that four hours of your life, especially when you say it out loud. “Oh, you wanted to go out to that café for brunch with some friends? That’s one thing we could do. Or we could watch two hundred and forty straight minutes of MTV’s The Real World.”

That kind of thing happens a lot when you get married. It’s not “your” time anymore; it’s “our” time. A layer of selfishness gets worn away, which might feel more like torn away as you start sharing your time with someone other than yourself.

Then you have kids and your time gets even smaller. You go from “your time” to “our time” to “their time.” An additional layer of selfishness gets stripped and you find yourself with a very different clock than you had when you were young and single and watching someone intoxicated debate the merits of jumping off a roof into a pool on The Real World Cancun.

The misconception is that you have less time to do the things you love when you get really busy. And it’s a misconception that will carry over into your pursuit of trying to balance a full-time dream and a full-time job.

The reality is that when you get busy doing the things that matter to you, you actually have more time to do the things you love and less time to do the things you like.

Working on your dream job and your day job forces you to decide which things are a priority to you.

It forces you to make a like vs. love list.

Because you won’t have as much time for the things you like. Just like I couldn’t spend four hours watching The Real World marathons once when I got married and had kids. I liked doing that, but I didn’t love doing that. If I had a free hour, I wanted to invest it wisely. I wanted to spend it jogging or writing or doing something that mattered to me. My hours cost me too much to spend them on The Real World. If my wife and kids were out of town, I planned my time accordingly so I could get some freelance work done and hustle on the Stuff Christians Like book. I gave up some freedom for doing things I liked, but what I gained was a tremendous amount of love.

Though on the surface I was busy, I was actually spending a ton of time on things I loved. More so than I ever did when I was single and not making decisions based on my list.

That’s one of the simple rules of hustle. Do more of the things you love and less of the things you like. Make your hustle matter. That’s not to demonize TV or any other activity people might classify as down time. But be deliberate about what is really a like and what is really a love. And then hustle to keep love a bigger part of your day than like.

The unfortunate relationship between quantity and quality

I’ve become the kind of author I used to hate. I’m not talking about the guy with elbow patches on his corduroy jacket and a pipe in his mouth and a wry barb about the Spanish-American war. I’ve got no problem with that guy. In the right setting I find him delightful. The person I really used to dislike is the author who told me writing was hard work and took time.

I wanted writing a book to be easy and simple and above all, fast. So when I’d read books on writing and they’d say, “Write 500 words every day for a year,” or, “Write and rewrite and rewrite some more,” I’d feel like my dream had done the old bait-and-switch on me.

I thought chasing my dream would be easy. If you love something and feel passionate about it, shouldn’t it on some level always come naturally? When I think of the stereotype of people who follow their dream, I think of someone glistening with syrupy happiness, not sweat. They laugh the day away and have tickle fights and long conversations with good friends under shade trees.

That was my impression of what it means to follow your dream. It might have been hard work, but it was work you loved, so you didn’t notice it was difficult or frustrating at times. It didn’t “feel like work at all.” It flowed out of you with very little effort.

I was wrong.