Find What You Love

Mark Manson's essay, titled after a line attributed to Charles Bukowski, "Find what you love and let it kill you". The idea: everything you do moves you toward death, so the real question is what you choose to spend your life on, knowing it will cost you.

The real question

We all die. When doesn't much matter, since you won't be around to care. What matters is the long chain of choices and habits that lead there. If every day brings you a little closer to the end, what are you choosing to let "kill" you?

Bukowski

Bukowski was a notorious drinker and troublemaker who spent decades broke, sacked from jobs and unpublished, eventually sorting mail at a post office. He wrote for about 30 years before getting a modest book deal, and when he took it he chose to quit and risk starving rather than stay and go mad. His writing is brutally honest about his worst and best sides. He understood that the good parts of life don't come without the ugly ones: no love without pain, no meaning without sacrifice.

Meaning is the new luxury

People no longer just want security; they want purpose, and they imagine that once they find "the one thing" they were meant to do, everything will click. Manson says it's nothing like that: finding purpose is a long, muddy, hailstorm of a hike, and you have to love the hike.

• It's trial and error: try something, notice how it feels, adjust, try again, sometimes hundreds of times.
• Even when you find it, it changes, because you change.
• Doing what you love isn't always loving what you do. Like choosing a spouse, you're choosing what you want to stick with even on the days it drives you mad.

How passions evolve

Manson's examples: an interest in speech therapy leads to voice acting, then cartoons, then, decades later, drawing comics just for love. An interest in fitness becomes posture, then body-language coaching, then consulting, then finally a massage and acupuncture clinic. Like love, meaning is rarely found at first sight. It's built brick by brick over years.

See also

• The Most Important Question of Your Life
• Why Some Dreams Should Not Be Pursued
• Strong Identity
• Kill Your Day Job

Summary of an essay by Mark Manson (markmanson.net), drawing on the life of Charles Bukowski.