Find what drives you crazy

Everyone keeps repeating: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you only do things that give you pleasure, boredom will catch up with you quickly. The real, long-distance fuel revealed itself to me during a conversation with an experienced leader at a previous company I worked for. I heard an important sentence then: “A good leader should annoy you a little with their expectations.”
Adam Mastroianni later confirmed this idea in one of his excellent essays, placing it in the context of human relationships. Many of his arguments also appear in this text.

Irritation, like cholesterol, comes in a good and a bad kind

Bad irritation drains your energy and makes you look for the nearest emergency exit. It’s being stuck in traffic, a crying baby on a plane, or a coworker who claims to know something while clearly having no idea what they’re talking about. This kind of irritation pushes us away.

But there’s also a good kind of irritation, one that pulls you toward the problem instead of away from it. It’s the feeling you get when you see a slightly crooked picture frame on the wall. You can’t ignore it. You have to walk over, straighten it, fix it. That “I have to” becomes the engine of action.

That engine only starts once you stop being a novice.

Only when you go deep into a subject do you begin to feel this creative restlessness. A novice usually feels great, because swimming in ignorance often comes with the illusion of complete understanding. The first real steps into a field make you realize how much there is still left to discover. True, motivating irritation appears at the point where missing information becomes a physically felt itch. If you only skim the surface and feel all-knowing, you’ll never reach that annoying moment where real learning begins. You need to know enough to see the gaps.

That “itch,” born from noticing gaps, is the best signpost for future generations.

Instead of asking young people about their passions, we should examine their tolerance for specific flaws in reality. What keeps you awake at night? What in the world around you feels so fundamentally “crooked” that you feel a physical need to walk up and straighten it? Finding the right source of frustration is, in essence, finding your calling. Don’t be afraid of impatience. It’s the spark that ignites the change the world desperately needs. Passion gets us started, but the right kind of irritation keeps us growing.

The same principle that builds a professional calling also governs our hearts.

Real love can be irritating. We mistakenly assume that loving someone or something means constant admiration. Alain de Botton puts it well when he notes that maturity in love is accepting that every partner will annoy us in some way. Love is often a collection of small, recurring tensions that arise precisely because we truly care. Partners, friends, and loved ones irritate us because they have expectations, because they’re different from us, or worse, because they mirror us. This irritation isn’t a sign that love is ending. It’s proof that it’s alive. When you stop feeling that small sting of impatience when something goes wrong, it usually means you’ve simply stopped caring.

If irritation is proof of engagement in love, it also becomes the foundation of authentic leadership.

A leader who annoys you is a leader who probably cares. Real leadership isn’t about being a “nice guy” who nods at all your ideas. The leader I mentioned at the beginning captured it perfectly: a good leader should irritate you just a little. They should expect more, disrupt your comfort, and force you beyond familiar patterns. That small, daily frustration is a signal that someone believes in your potential more than you do at that moment.

Healthy social and political systems work the same way. A mature, rational citizen can see that decisions personally inconvenient for them may still be the foundation of the common good. Understanding this requires empathy and a willingness to engage with reality, rather than living inside a self-created illusion.

In the end, we arrive at a simple conclusion: a good life gives you the right to be angry about the right things.

We too often look for activities that let us drift through the day in gentle pleasure. In reality, we should be looking for more experiences that put us in a state of joyful frustration. The sentence “My job annoys me, but in a fascinating way”should become your new career compass. Real productivity doesn’t come from fancy Google Calendar systems. No app can conjure engagement where none exists. If you’re struggling with motivation, you’re probably not irritated enough by the current state of things, or your irritation is the “bad kind” that makes you want to escape instead of dig deeper.

If something doesn’t bother you, it probably doesn’t interest you either.

What pushed you out of balance today strongly enough to make you try to fix it?

---

Want to know more about me? A few weeks ago I shared 52 things I’ll remember from last year, the best movies I watched, and the best books I read. If that’s still not enough, there’s also a short year summary.
Feel free to dive in.