Is 'Do What You Love' Actually Bad Advice?

Written By Drew English
Is 'Do What You Love' Actually Bad Advice? | Jacob Krupnick

📺 Watch the video interview HERE: https://youtu.be/8e_VdMZ9yTo

Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Jacob Krupnick calls bullshit on that, and he's got a career's worth of proof.

‍Jacob is a director and the founder of Wild Combination, the production company behind dance films you've probably scrolled past without knowing who made them. He's spent years making personal work nobody paid him to make, and this conversation gets into why he keeps doing it anyway, even when it doesn't pay the bills.

‍We get into what winning actually looks like when there's no finish line. The unfair playing field built into this industry, time, money, and who you know mattering as much as talent. Why making unpaid personal work is sometimes just a way of processing something you haven't fully named yet. And the moment Jacob handed me back my own advice, on mic, before I'd fully earned the right to say it again. He also gets honest about how becoming a dad reordered everything he thought he knew about ambition, more than any day on set ever did. This one goes further than we planned. Come ready to take some notes.

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Takeaways

  • "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" doesn't hold up. Loving your work doesn't stop the parts of it that suck from sucking.

  • Winning is building a game you're still glad to be playing years in.

  • There's no end game for anything. Anyone chasing a destination just hasn't realized that yet.

  • Work stopped being a place Jacob goes and became just another thing he's doing, one that changes shape as his life does.

  • The industry runs on an unfair playing field. Time, money, security, and who you know move the needle as much as talent does.

  • Making personal work nobody's paying for is often just processing an anxiety you haven't fully named yet.

  • Becoming a parent changes your relationship to ambition more than any career milestone will.

  • You can preach your own advice publicly for years and still get caught not living it.

  • How much unglamorous, boring work you're willing to do determines how much you actually get done.‍ ‍

Links & Resources ‍

Drew English
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