Humans, when they do the same thing over and over again, tend to get bored. The human mind wants new avenues to explore, new creative outlets. Newness and variety satiate the human soul.
Hence, the idea that you love your work, is mostly short lived. No matter how much one person loves their work, the diminishing marginal utility of returns means that they will love it less with time, and hence they need something else to be able to focus on.
The human brain and mind always wants new things. This, I personally term as the need for NAC (NeuroPlasticity & Creativity), that is how a human brain generally evolves and progresses over the course of it’s lifetime.
Having said this, if we are going to have to work to earn a living, we would much rather work in a domain that is not very time costly for us. it makes sense to associate a cost with the time we spend, while working. That is the opportunity cost of being able to do something else with our time. If we love / like / reasonably like the job that we are doing then the Personal Opportunity Cost(which maybe different for different people based on their inclinations & likings) associated with that activity will be relatively low, else it will be relatively higher. The idea of assigning a cost to the time that we are spending in any activity is a very logical and easy way to understand our return on the time invested (ROTI).
I am hereby labeling the concept of the Personal Time Cost as PTC. Happiness is when the PTC is zero, meaning, the state of eudemonia is that state wherein a person is free to do anything that the like w/o any force of any kind. That is when PTC is zero for a particular activity for a given person. higher PTC is generally associated with a feeling of burnout and lethargy, the mileage has run out and we need to rest, relax and rejuvenate ourselves for the onward journey. This is how humans work. We perform and function in sprints, not very efficiently in long marathons.
If we are anyway going to have to work to earn a living, its better to work in a high ROTI field, compared to a lower ROTI field for ourselves. It’s also useful to chose a field wherein one can work in a geolocation independent manner, time independent manner. This increases the ROTI values because we are generally happier working from anywhere rather than working from a fixed location. We are generally happier working at anytime, rather than working on fixed scheduled times. One may need to maintain self-discipline and an apt routine in order to be productive and efficient when one is a master of one’s own time for instance in a freelancing career or a career wherein one does not have a boss or anybody to report to. They aims and ambitions, and optimal decision making need to guide one’s self.
We humans also work in cycles of higher energy, pumped up, inflow states and low energy states.
We need to maintain apt warmup, pump up, momentum building routines to reach a state of flow, stay in it for an optimal amount of time and perform before cooling down and then relaxing and changing work.
It makes sense to work on the internet an earn a living via the internet since work on the internet satisfies most of the above aforementioned criteria – of the work being geolocation independent, time independent and duration independent.
Given that a person anyway have to work and exchange their time and efforts for earning money or building up their net worth via building up the value of equity in a company, higher ROTI activities will cause less fatigue and give more mileage, as they will be associated with dopamine releases inside the brain of the particular individual.
That is the relevance of the advice of liking what we do in work, as mathematically explained, as optimally possible.
Note: ROTI = Return on Time Invested.