Dan Shipper on doing what you love:

What you love is very often not something that you feel immediate passion for. It doesn’t smack you in the face after 10 minutes and tell you that this is something you’re going to do for the rest of your life. That happens only very rarely, or in the movies. 

Love doesn’t start out as a hurricane that sweeps through your life and changes everything in an instant. It starts out as a seed. Barely alive, easily overlooked, fragile and small. But given attention love grows. Given proper care it sprouts and springs up through the dirt. Given years to blossom it buds flowers and grows branches, snaking its way through your life until it consumes it entirely. Given enough care the thing that you love becomes the lens through which you see the world. 

But it’s so easy to miss because it starts out as something so tiny. It starts out as something that you did without even realizing it. When you’re bored on a Saturday afternoon, your friends aren’t around, and you’re looking for something to do. Maybe you sit down and play piano. Maybe you write on your blog. Maybe you fire up TextMate and start coding. 

Everyone has something like this. And even though it may not look like it, that is the seed of love. Because it may start as something that you just do when you’re bored. But given attention and time you start to get better at it. You start to figure out the ins and outs, to gain skill. You probably don’t even notice that this is happening.

Dan reasonably argues that to do something you love, you have to come to terms with the following questions: What is love? How do I find what I love? How do I know if I love something?

It’s a process.