## Metadata - Author: [[charity.wtf|Charity]] - Full Title:: Thoughts on Motivation and My 40-Year Career - Category:: #🗞️Articles - Document Tags:: [[Career tips|Career tips]], - URL:: https://charity.wtf/2025/07/09/thoughts-on-motivation-and-my-40-year-career/ - Read date:: [[2025-07-16]] ## Highlights > (Y’all, it does not need to be *this hard*. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0a9dp9q6f3h2g9aekz1fa8a)) > My work has brought me so much growth and development and community and friendship. It brings meaning to my life, and the joy of creation. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0a9epqg68r1nnm5czj716zv)) > So many people have never experienced work as anything but a depersonalizing grind, or an exercise in exploitation, and that is *heartbreaking*. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0a9f02jw8acqdmdxkta4zs1)) > (People who glamorize things like farming, gardening, canning and freezing, taking care of animals, cooking and caretaking, and other forms of manual labor *really* get under my skin. All of these things make for lovely hobbies, but subsistence labor is neither fun nor meaningful. Trust me on this one.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0a9frnxk0xkfztygdfnr095)) > There is joy to be found in building a company, or competing in a marketplace. > To be honest, this is not a joy that came to me swiftly or easily. I’ve been doing this for the past 9.5 years, and I’ve been *happy* doing it for maybe the past 2-3 years. But it has always felt like work worth doing. And ultimately, I think I’m less interested in my own happiness (whatever that means) than I am interested in doing *work that feels worth doing*. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0a9h0zb00ankq20qp0zdvjn)) > Sometimes you may have a strongly held belief that some mainstream business practice is awful, so you take a different path, and then you learn the hard way why it is that people don’t take that path. (This has happened to me more times than I can count. 🙈) > Ideals in a vacuum are just not that interesting. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0a9jjzqz8bh27f26z5hkha0))