Here’s how to never look back at your life with regret.

1. Do what you love.
2. Conserve resources as much as you can so you don’t get distracted from what you love.
3. Stick with it until you’re done. Ignore people who tell you to do something more reasonable.
4. Be confident knowing that if you love it, others will love it too. Not everyone, but enough to form community. Then when you stick with it long enough, you’ll end up doing something people love, appreciate, respect, and have never seen before. Now they see you as inspirational.
5. Repeat as often as you like.

Some people ask at this point, what if I don’t know what I love. For them I offer a step before step 1.

0. Figure out your emotional system — what you love and why — because the later steps will create in your life what you work on. If you know what you love you’ll work on what you love. If you think you love something you love but don’t, you’ll work on something you don’t love, which you don’t want to do. So learn your emotions.

In other words, know thyself.

Or, if you prefer not to put in the effort to know yourself, just hope for the best while doing what everyone else does. Or buy a lottery ticket. Same thing.

In other words, I recommend doing step 0. My Model and Method give you that.

Some people ask at this point how to get from step 0 to step 1. For them, going from knowing yourself to knowing what you love isn’t obvious. For them, I offer a middle step:

• Do things you like. See if you think you can love them. If so, continue to step 1. If not, you at least accomplished part of step 0. Try again until you love what you do. Don’t doubt you’ll love something. Remember, loving something starts with liking something plus dedication.

This step depends on quantity being the route to quality, which my recent post, The route to quality is through quantity, covers.

After you finished, if you want to augment your success

6. Share what you love so others know to bring you more of it and to support you continuing to do it.

Some people at this point ask, what if what you work on never leads to recognition. If the world never recognizes what you did and you get no money, power, or fame, you spent your time doing what you loved. How can you complain about that?

To review

0. Figure out your emotional system — what you love and why — because the later steps will create in your life what you work on. If you know what you love you’ll work on what you love. If you think you love something you love but don’t, you’ll work on something you don’t love, which you don’t want to do. So learn your emotions.
   • Do things you like. See if you think you can love them. If so, continue to step 1. If not, you at least accomplished part of step 0. Try again until you love what you do. Don’t doubt you’ll love something. Remember, loving something starts with liking something plus dedication.
1. Do what you love.
2. Conserve resources as much as you can so you don’t get distracted from what you love.
3. Stick with it until you’re done. Ignore people who tell you to do something more reasonable.
4. Be confident knowing that if you love it, others will love it too. Not everyone, but enough to form community. Then when you stick with it long enough, you’ll end up doing something people love, appreciate, respect, and have never seen before. Now they see you as inspirational.
5. Repeat as often as you like.
6. Share what you love so others know to bring you more of it and to support you continuing to do it.

• ← Op/Ed Fridays: Challenges in helping the planet even if you’re the world’s richest person
• People who suck at things tell you how awesome they are. People who are awesome at things tell you about the disasters they went through to get their skills. →