Do What You Love, Or Else

“Do what you love” has been said so often, and with such relentless sincerity, that it’s easy to dismiss as one more pastel commandment from the gospel of decorative optimism.

Do what you love. Follow your bliss. Live, laugh, love.

Please wipe the counter when finished.

I understand the resistance. Too often, “do what you love” gets packaged as a privileged little slogan, as if everyone can simply leap from the crushing machinery of bills, illness, caregiving, debt, rent, bad bosses, and Tuesday afternoons into a sunlit life of artisanal fulfillment. That version is not wisdom. It is a throw pillow with a podcast. But beneath the cliché is something true and much more demanding.

Doing what you love is not the same as doing whatever feels pleasant, profitable, impressive, or charmingly aligned with your personal brand. It is not permission to abandon responsibility in the name of authenticity. Quite the opposite. Done rightly, doing what you love is the alignment of calling and commitment, delight and duty, private passion and public good.

Rather than an escape from responsibility, it is what responsibility looks like when love is allowed to breathe deeply, all the way through it.

Toni and I have seen this again and again along our Journeys to Love: people whose affection for a place, a craft, a community, a need, or a vision became not merely something they enjoyed, but something they built. Their love became a craft or career, then it quietly became service to something greater. That service in turn made life, and the people with whom they shared it, better, fuller, bigger.

Whit Hiler and Griff VanMeter, two best friends in Lexington, Kentucky - or, as they put it to us, “heterosexual life partners” - were looking for new directions in life when they compared notes on the things they loved. Not surprisingly, Kentucky was at the top of the list.

Tourism in the state was suffering. Southern stereotypes were not helping. Nor, in their view, was Kentucky’s dreadfully pedestrian official slogan: “Unbridled Spirit.” They saw the potential for more. After all, as they told us, Kentuckians made some of the greatest cultural contributions of all time.

They were the first to sing “Happy Birthday.” They invented fried chicken and slapped the first high fives. They created bourbon, bluegrass music, and the “motherfreaking Kentucky Derby!” They made the world cooler with Clooney, Johnny Depp, and Hunter S. Thompson, more beautiful with Loretta Lynn, the Judds, and Diane Sawyer, and produced champions from Ali to Seabiscuit.

Their conclusion was less chamber-of-commerce than battle cry: Kentucky kicks ass.

So, naturally, they set out to make that the state motto.

They ran a crowdfunding campaign for a Super Bowl ad and later opened the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall, employing a full-time crew of artists and marketers selling everything from gold-plated KFC drumsticks to genuine Kentucky Derby winner horse droppings. Their love for their home state became a business, a joke, a civic rebrand, a neighborhood engine, and a way to give back, with much of their proceeds supporting Kentucky’s state parks.

This is what love looks like when it refuses to sit politely in the corner and be inspirational. It makes things. Sometimes those things are bourbon-themed T-shirts and professionally packaged, certified genuine, gold-plated Secretariat poo.

In Pocatello, Idaho, we met another man whose love had taken a wonderfully particular form. Don Aslett loved clean things.

“And not only things,” he told us during our visit to his seven-million-dollar, state-of-the-art, energy-efficient, environmentally sustainable Museum of Clean near the Idaho State University campus, “but clean living, clean language, clean politics, clean planet. Anything clean is beautiful!”

Don’s passion for the pristine led him to start a janitorial service in 1957 to pay his college tuition. Nurtured by his love for the immaculate, that business grew to employ more than five hundred people and generate nearly two hundred million dollars in annual revenue, supporting his vision and the large family he had dreamt of.

Since then, Don wrote more than forty books in ten languages, appeared on television shows from Dick Cavett to Oprah, and built the Museum of Clean in a renovated World War I-era warehouse. Because devotion to clean living meant more than sparkling countertops, 80 percent of the removed materials from the renovation were recycled. The landscaping was designed to be water-wise. Non-reflective windows, passive solar design, and exterior LED lighting reduce energy use dramatically, while a rainwater collection system supplies water for landscaping and toilets.

The museum features its own garden, art gallery, and library. It is part civic project, part environmental statement, part child-friendly wonderland, and part love letter to the sacred dignity of getting rid of stains, grime, and junk.

In his late eighties when we visited, Don was still delighting in his creation. Rather than retiring to his villa in Hawaii, he was leading tours for children and families through his labor of love.

“There’s way too much junk in people’s lives,” he said. “In their homes, but also in the ways they do things and how they deal with one another. Nothing changes lives for the better more than getting rid of the junk.”

That is not just a cleaning philosophy. It is a spiritual discipline with a mop.

On our way to visit the American Gothic house in Eldon, Iowa (the backdrop for Grant Wood’s iconic painting of a grim farm couple with a pitchfork and joy issues), Toni and I stopped in downtown Ottumwa for coffee at Top Hat Coffee and Entertainment.

There, beneath the second-floor balcony stage of its old Main Street building, we met owner Sheri Locke: educator, woodworker, antique dealer, architecture lover, and author of Angels Visions Miracles Dreams.

Following a brutal assault in 1995, Sheri lost her ability to walk, speak, and write for several years.

“I went from being a successful television station sales manager, a high school band director, building homes… I even had a piano store for a few years,” she told us. “Then, I found myself challenged to use sentences and words and walk a few steps.”

Following a recovery she credits to deep faith and love for God, Sheri had a dream “so real that you could taste it, touch it, and smell it,” about starting a coffee shop and soup kitchen in downtown Ottumwa, a half-hour drive from her home.

She shared the dream so often with her neighbor, Gary, that he eventually drove her to town to “get it out of her system,” which is one of the more practical beginnings to a miracle I have heard.

When they pulled up in front of the building that now houses Top Hat Coffee, a realtor was putting up two “for sale” signs: one for the storefront and one for an adjoining building out back, now the location of her Blessings Soup Kitchen.

Sheri and Gary married shortly thereafter. Their expansive love for one another, God, music, people in need, and antique wholesaling now supports a neighborhood coffee shop that employs a devoted staff of college students and features local music and art. They also fund a rehabilitative mentorship workshop and retail employment site, STARR Industries, supporting and employing Iowa’s homeless and recently homeless.

That is what alignment looks like. A dream becomes a building. A building becomes coffee, music, soup, jobs, shelter, dignity, and a place where people can come in from the cold.

Whit and Griff, Don Aslett, Sheri Locke, Kentucky for Kentucky, Ticonderoga’s Star Trek Elvis, Jed and Katie at the Spud Drive-In, and so many others whose love stories we’ve encountered along our Journeys delight us because they show the power of aligning the people, places, and things they love. That alignment matters.

When love is both the origin and the product of what we do, and all the stones between align in their stream, the crossing becomes not only possible but irresistible. It inspires us, our children, our families, our communities, and people we may never meet. That is why doing what you love is not merely a luxury or platitude. It is an imperative.

Of course, it is hardly ever easy.

Sometimes paying bills, making rent, putting food on the table, caring for children or parents, meeting medical needs, holding things together for one more month or one more year, requires personal sacrifice. There are seasons when we do what we must because circumstances demand it. Anyone who sneers at that from a seminar stage should perhaps be assigned six months of night shifts, a leaking roof, and a dental bill large enough to require its own zip code.

The danger is not in doing necessary work for a time. The danger is in forgetting that it was supposed to be for a time. The danger lies in moving from “This is what I must do right now because circumstances demand it” to “This is what I must do because it is what I have always done.”

That quiet surrender is how people lose the thread of their own lives.

Life is challenging, and suffering is an inevitable part of it. Awful things happen outside our control. Bodies fail. Economies wobble. People leave. Dreams collapse. Cars make expensive noises that mechanics describe using phrases that may as well be Latin and bird calls.

But suffering is multiplied when we separate our calling from our responsibilities, as though love belongs in one compartment and work in another. That division is both unnatural and unproductive.

Our calling is to align our love, our work, and our faith, not faith as proof but faith as the step we take toward what we trust. This means not only spiritual or religious faith, but faith in the people, places, and purposes to which we entrust our lives. In other words, our calling is to do what we love.

Our responsibilities are to our families, partners, homes, communities, work, faith, and ourselves. These are not opposing forces. They naturally belong together. More than that, when aligned, they do not merely ensure our own well-being. As with Whit and Griff, Don, Sheri, and so many others, they create value and joy for the world around us.

Doing what we love is not just about us.

That may be the part our culture most often misses. We have turned calling into a private fulfillment project, as if the highest purpose of love is personal satisfaction. But love is never content to remain private. It wants to reach beyond us to make something, tend something, heal something, clean something, feed someone, sing somewhere, preserve a place, build a better room, or at the very least put a sufficiently ridiculous slogan on a T-shirt and use the proceeds to help fund a Kentucky state park.

When we partition our calling from our responsibility, frustration follows. Not always dramatically. Often it arrives as a vague but growing inner undercurrent of anxiety and uncertainty. Even when things are otherwise fine, we feel a little off, as if some essential current has been switched off during business hours. Love is put on hold while we are on the job and on the clock.

Maintained over time, this unnatural separation forms wedges between vision and intent, purpose and pursuit, awareness and care. The energy spent managing, massaging, or burying that misalignment is energy that might otherwise flow freely into the people, places, and things for which we are responsible and to which we are devoted. It can be hard to see the whole of our lives from such a divided place.

Though it’s not an original metaphor, shaping a rough diamond is a useful metaphor for seeing that whole. One specific cut - a job, a role, a responsibility, a long season of necessary work - may be fine and brilliantly reflect light from a particular angle. But for the entire diamond to really sparkle, every facet must be symmetrical and in alignment. When that happens, light reflects evenly and shines through without distortion.

As the jewelers of our own lives, we owe it to ourselves and to those we love not to finish the cutting, lay down our tools, hold the thing up to the light, and ask: What if I had only made that one cut differently? If I just would have…

That is the “or else” in “Do what you love, or else.”

It is not a threat from the universe. It is not cosmic punishment. The stars are not waiting to revoke our existential parking privileges because we failed to monetize our passion for watercolor owls. The “or else” is regret. Do what you love…

…or else, you may wake one day to discover that you gave your life’s best time and energy to things you never loved and responsibilities you held through habit and beyond their own need for you.

…or else, you may find that you were so busy protecting yourself from risk that you never aligned your work with the love that might have made it meaningful.

…or else, you may realize that the world did not need you to become impressive nearly as much as it needed you to become whole.

Doing what we love does not always mean quitting the job, moving to the mountains, opening the coffee shop, building the museum, launching the campaign, or selling road apples in the name of regional pride. And doing what we love does not necessarily make life easier.

In fact, it often makes life more demanding, because love has an annoying habit of asking for our actual participation. It wants hands, time, courage, patience, revision, apology, imagination, a second coat of paint, and sometimes a mop. But work aligned with love carries a different kind of weight.

It doesn’t drain us, even when we’re weary from it. It joins us, gathering the scattered pieces of our attention and returning them to the people, places, and purposes we are here to serve.

So maybe the question isn’t, “How do I escape this life and find the one I love?” Maybe the question is smaller, harder, and far more useful: Where, in the life I already have, is love asking for better alignment? It starts there.

One cut. One conversation. One brushstroke on that watercolor owl. One responsibility reclaimed not as burden, but as devotion and a step along the way.

It’s not everything. But it’s a place where a little light gets into life and shows us the next possible cut. And as Whit and Griff will tell you, that kicks ass.

Scotte Burns is a writer, speaker, and co-founder, with his wife Toni, of Journeys to Love, a multimedia quest to explore love’s origin, nature, and purpose through more than 100,000 miles of motorcycle travel across America.