Do You Love Your Job? When Love Isn't Enough

If you love your job, you'll never work a day in your life

That is utter nonsense.

Micaela Terzi dismisses one of the most repeated sayings about passion and work in just a few words.

You can love what you do as much as you like, but that does not mean it will be easy. Quite the opposite.

Passion, like falling in love, has an overwhelming force that, if poorly managed, can get in the way of reaching our goals, for example by paralyzing our ability to act or make clear-headed decisions.

Motivation makes us intentional: it helps us do what we truly want.

There is another aspect too: we cannot assume that the love we feel for what we do will necessarily be reciprocated. When it is, it is wonderful. But it is not that common.

And above all, forget about “and they lived happily ever after.”

Let’s leave “forever” to fairy tales and return to the real world, where change is normal and, as a result, love for one’s work can come and go, on either side of the relationship.

What matters to us can change over the course of our lives. At one point it may be money, at another self-expression, impact, or the time our work leaves us to do other things we enjoy or to be with the people we care about.

If I want one thing and my work consistently gives me something else, my needs are not being met and something important begins to get lost.

If we feel that our love is not reciprocated, I am not saying that we necessarily have to change jobs. But we can begin to reflect on what we really want for ourselves at that moment.

The first sign, which I invariably ignored

I have deeply loved certain projects and struggled to walk away from them, even when it was obvious that they were no longer giving me what I wanted. The first time was the hardest and, even today, if I am honest, I still experience it as a real form of grief.

The first sign, which I invariably ignored, came from my body.

I could feel that something was wrong, that I was not “well,” but I could not say exactly what was wrong. Where I had once gone to the office or worked on different projects with enthusiasm, I started struggling to get out of bed and no longer wanted to go to work.

I felt the way I did when I had just started middle school and would wake up in the morning with a stomach ache, wishing I did not have to go.

Then that discomfort became stronger and stronger, turning into a kind of generalized anxiety.

I was constantly on edge.

I never knew what the day would bring, whether it would be a good day or a bad one.

Then I started struggling even to work with the people who, until shortly before, had been the ones I felt most comfortable with. Arguments and misunderstandings followed. I realized that things were moving in a direction that was no longer aligned with my vision.

Knowing the difference

The work I do, my profession, is one thing; the company I work for is another, even if they may seem like the same thing. If I am out of alignment with a company’s values, I can continue doing the same job somewhere else, where my own vision and the company’s complement each other. Sometimes, however, people feel they cannot leave, for all sorts of reasons.

But if we decide to stay with a company, our values and the company’s do not necessarily have to coincide; they should not, however, contradict each other.

If one of my core values is wellbeing and my company is focused primarily on results at the expense of people’s wellbeing, then something is wrong.

For people who work for themselves, I think things become even more complex: a freelancer is both the worker and the company. And above all, people usually become self-employed because they have a project they are deeply passionate about.

Saying no to certain working rhythms or to unreasonable client requests can feel impossible. We end up working at any hour of the day or night and always answering emails, because we can no longer see work as... work.

We experience it as our life, as our greatest passion.

We do not feel the fatigue; we feel as though we are doing things with extreme ease, so it does not even seem like work.

But over time, this attitude comes at a cost.

When a job feels deeply “ours,” we tend to push ourselves beyond our limits.

In this case, it is essential to work not only on our values, but also on our needs and our boundaries.

Organizations often describe themselves as “big families,” thinking this can motivate people and make them feel better.

For me, the myth of the big family at work can become very toxic. In a company, trust is not something we can take for granted: it has to be built. The same is true of passion, the meaning we find in what we do, and wellbeing.

When I work with managers and entrepreneurs, I often hear them complain that people in their companies are not engaged or motivated. But if we look more closely at the situation, we often find that senior leadership is constantly asking for more and pushing people through change without creating a path that helps them navigate it.

A foosball table in the cafeteria is not enough to make people feel good at work.

Nor is it enough to create complicated platforms full of services nobody is interested in.

Workplace wellbeing is built by listening to people and their needs, without assuming that what I think is “good” for everyone actually is.

“You can’t give up”

Looking back, there is one project in particular that I loved viscerally. At a certain point I realized that something was no longer working. And yet, between the moment I understood this and the moment I actually left, not months but years went by.

Four things mainly kept me there: the professional and personal relationships I did not want to jeopardize; my love for the overall project I was carrying forward; the negative consequences I thought the people working for me would suffer; and that insidious voice telling me: “You can’t give up.”

I pushed myself all the way to the point of no return.

Then there was a bereavement in my life, this time real rather than metaphorical like the grief of letting go of a much-loved project. I was finally able to put everything into perspective.

I realized that all that suffering to keep alive something that was no longer there made no sense.

I left the project and suffered enormously.

I still remember the moment I burst into tears in front of my mother and said: “I’ve got everything wrong in my life.” A bit of a drama queen, I have to admit, but at that moment it was genuinely how I felt.

In reality, that decision was the best one I could have made. It allowed me to rebuild myself and taught me so much about who I am, what I look for in work projects and in the people I want to work with.

When opposing emotions coexist

There are moments when I deeply love what I do, while at the same time I can feel “hate” for certain contexts in which I do it or for certain situations that arise.

When we talk about emotions and feelings, we need to remove the “either/or” filter. Either I love it or I hate it. In reality, it is not like that.

I can love my job and hate it at the same time. It can make me happy and unhappy. It can fulfill me and worry me.

We experience layers of emotions. We feel many of them, all at once, but sometimes we cannot tell them apart.

Navigating emotions means feeling everything: even the emotions that seem contradictory.

Accepting all these “layers” means treating them as valuable data to collect and analyze, helping us decide how to act.

If we exclude certain emotions, pretend they are not there or do not allow ourselves to feel them, pieces of the puzzle are missing and choosing becomes more difficult.

When we ignore our emotions and leave them out of the equation, we switch on “autopilot” and simply do what has to be done, not because we have chosen it but because we do not know how to choose.

In the end, a choice has to be made. Otherwise, we risk remaining in limbo forever.

About Micaela Terzi

Micaela Terzi is a business coach who works with individuals and companies to turn ideas and goals into concrete projects. She combines her experience as a startup founder with Emotional Intelligence and Design Thinking to create tailored paths.