There is an old saying that if you can find something you love to do, you’ll never work a day in your life. But this is probably bad advice.

Here is a simple graph, from Seth Godin, to help explain:

The problem with fun things (y-axis) is that they’re fun. So lots of people want to do them. And if there’s a small or no market for said fun thing, then it’s probably a hobby. (Hobbies are still important.)

Sometimes you can be fortunate where something that previously had no market eventually has a big market. Take, for example, tinkering with computers in the early days.

This is what Chris Dixon was getting at when he said that what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.

But if this doesn’t happen or if a big market already exists — and you do want to be successful at something fun — it’ll likely follow a power law.

Meaning, you’ll need to be the very best in the world and it’s almost certainly going to be a “slog”. (Bottom right quadrant.) One example of this would be the phenomenon of “starchitects.”

And that’s pretty much it for the fun stuff. The rest of this graph is for things that are difficult, which means that 3 out of these 4 quadrants are difficult and/or a slog.

This is not nearly as much fun as not ever working.