On Doing What You Love

The best advice I’ve ever received is to follow your passion. It basically means: do what you love. I know the second part of that sentence is that the money will follow – but trust me, sometimes the money doesn’t really matter if you are doing what you love.I was born in India, and raised in Crown Point, Indiana. I would say my defining characteristics are my ability to laugh at myself, poke fun at others, and my love of reading.

Reading defined my existence. It probably defined my personality than anything else in my life. I learned about different worlds, foreign cultures, and most important, reading allowed me to find out who I was and what I really wanted....And what I wanted was to read. I read anything and everything. Work was anything that wasn’t reading. In college, I chatted with one of my friends, an English major (who could make money doing that??) and she mentioned an internship as an editor in a publishing house.

I was pre-med at the time, and basically flunking organic chemistry. I realized that this was the job for me—it was perfect. I could read, talk to authors, read, edit books, and read some more. I could talk about books all day long with no one to stop me!I graduated in 1999 and accepted a job at HarperCollins Publishers. There, I lived in a very shady area of Jersey City (rent was $300 a month) and my starting salary was $22K. I loved it.

Now, I’m a full editor. It’s taken me a few years and the salary is higher, but it’s a job that I can’t imagine leaving. I don’t doubt for a moment that for me this is the job I needed – and I can’t imagine that I was once set to go pre-med.When you are doing what you love, you are happy. Happiness to me breeds serenity. And if you have the passion for whatever it is, be it a plumber, an editor, or whatever, you’ll be successful. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, and maybe not in the same terms you thought you would be when you started, but the work becomes its own reward. In doing whatever it is that you know you’re good at, the work is no longer work. It transcends work and becomes something else. It becomes passion.And don’t worry...I’m still waiting for the money.

Devi Pillai graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 2000.