One of the easiest ways to build an amazing company is to do something that you love. That may sound obvious, but there are people that love doing things that you and I might think sound tedious.
For example, Todd Graves (the founder of Raising Cain’s Chicken Fingers) loves being a fry cook. It’s not what he does much of these days, with over 800 stores to run, but he never shied away from it. Most of us would work the fry line as little as possible and get out, but he was known to jump in and help years after he “should have” stopped doing it. He loved it, his passion showed, the quality of the output from his restaurants shows that it works.
That story (and others like it) is from David Senra of the Founders podcast. David shares that because he’s the same way — he loves what he does and he’d rather do that than almost anything else.
This also comes from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, where he shares:
Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
Lastly, this applies to me (though admittedly not as strongly as those others yet). I greatly enjoy the work we’re doing at GreenMellen, I enjoy reading, I enjoy writing, and very little of it is “work” to me. Certainly there are parts of it I’d like to shed at some point (dealing with invoices, for example), but the vast majority is great stuff. I don’t dread having to put together another post on here, or dig into a fresh book — in fact, I’d rather do that than almost anything else
I have no desire to be a fry cook, but I’m glad that people love doing that.
What part of your work do you really love doing?
