"Motivation is weather, discipline is climate"

Why are we lying to young people about work?

The pendulum continues to swing, from the post-war grit of our parents' values, to the easy-going idealism of our own upbringing, perhaps back now, toward a more measured perspective on what it takes to succeed.

Here’s what I highlighted:

We tell them that if they just find their passion, work will magically transform into endless joy, as if difficulty is just a symptom of being in the wrong job rather than an inevitable part of doing anything worthwhile.

We've convinced an entire generation that if work feels hard, they must be doing it wrong.

Everything worth having lives on the other side of effort. Everything good requires tending. Everything beautiful demands maintenance.

The people who understand this most deeply are often the happiest, because they've made peace with the beautiful burden of nurturing. They know that the dishes exist because they've been eating good meals all week. The laundry piles up because they've been living a life worth getting dressed for.

And to extend this: I see people online constantly lamenting that they can't make or keep friends in adulthood, as if friendship is something that just happens to you rather than something you actively create. This, too, requires intentional effort. Want to get invited to dinner parties? Start throwing them. Menu planning, grocery runs, washing dishes until midnight while your guests laugh in the next room. Want good friends? Be the one who texts first, who remembers birthdays, who shows up with coffee when someone's having a terrible week. Be the person who helps with moves even when you'd rather stay home in your pajamas, who plans the group trips that everyone will remember years later.

We cannot keep buying the fallacy that everything meaningful should feel effortless, including the relationships that make life worth living.

We've made "work" synonymous with suffering, when it should be synonymous with building. Tending a garden requires effort, but you get to eat the tomatoes.

Our cultural obsession with finding passion has obscured a more fundamental truth: discipline matters more than motivation.

Motivation is weather: changeable, unpredictable, often absent when you need it most. Discipline is climate: the steady, reliable conditions you create for yourself regardless of how you feel on any given day.

This is why the influencer dream is so seductive and so dangerous. It promises intensity without consistency, passion without discipline, reward without work. It's the lottery ticket approach to career planning, and like most lottery tickets, it's a tax on not understanding probability.

What kind of life do you want to build? What values do you want your work to reflect? What skills do you want to develop? How do you want to contribute to the world around you? What kind of people do you want to work alongside? What are you willing to sacrifice for those things? What discomfort are you willing to endure? What would make you proud to be tired at the end of the day? If you want flexibility, are you willing to trade some security? If you want creativity, are you prepared for financial uncertainty? If you want to help people, can you handle seeing them at their worst? If you want to build something, are you ready for the loneliness of starting from zero?

Good work should do at least one of these things: fund the life you actually want to live, align with values you can defend at dinner parties, surround you with people who challenge you to grow, or teach you skills that compound like interest over decades. Great work does several of these at once.

Life is modular, not linear. You don't choose a career at twenty-two and stick with it for forty years like some kind of professional arranged marriage. Instead of hunting for the mythical perfect tree, follow your curiosity. What ideas make you pause while scrolling? What conversations do you find yourself returning to days later? When a friend mentions something interesting at dinner, what makes you want to know more?

In nature, adversity isn't the enemy of growth. It's the condition for it.

Ultimately, here's what I think we should tell young people about work: it will be harder than you expect and more rewarding than you can imagine, sometimes on the same day.

...hard work isn't the tax you pay for living, it's the tuition for a life worth having. Everything good requires work. Discipline trumps motivation. Meaning emerges not from avoiding struggle but from choosing struggle that serves something larger than yourself.