A painter loves the work itself; a writer chases the finished book. Founders and consultants who enjoy daily tasks, client conversations, and team camaraderie tend to succeed most. Pick work you'd do even if nobody saw the result.
Are you a painter or a writer? There's an old saying that painters love to paint and writers love to have written. Enjoy the fruits of the work as opposed to the work itself. And as someone who's done some writing, I can certainly sympathize with the agony of writing itself, but I consider myself a painter and I hope that you can be a painter too. A painter finds joy in the work itself that we do. We find it to be interesting. We find it to be meaningful because of the conversation we're having because of the intellectual challenge of the work, because of the change that we're able to create in the people who we serve, because of the colleagues. There are all sorts of ways that we can get meaning from our work and to actually enjoy those paint strokes. And what I find when I'm helping builders or founders or what have you in my various consulting or investing practices, the people who are enjoying the work, the people who are painting, those are the ones who are going to be the biggest success.
