How to find work that you love?

On the one hand, the luckiest people are those who love their work.

On the other hand, why make work out of the thing you love? I'm always reminded of Wallace Stevens. He was an insurance executive and a poet. As Wiki puts it:

After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined since it would have required him to give up his vice-presidency of The Hartford..

Makes you think. Many people have a job they enjoy and a passion they pursue. It's ok to keep those things separate.

Quoting krishnamurti

Is it even possible to find work that we love(ie the work that eventually becomes our life, the work, infront of which work/life balance is BS)

Or is it the other way around, i.e we begin something and that eventually becomes the thing that we love/passion?

"Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors Nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. And such blasphemy is not possible so long as the entire Creation is understood as holy, and so long as the works of God are understood as embodying and so revealing God's spirit." -- Wendell Berry, Christianity and The Survival of Creation

Reply to fishfry Charles Ives, 1874/1954 an American pioneer in selling insurance (estate planning products) was also a composer. This piece is interesting, or the sound track of a headache, depending how you feel.

I didn't know, still don't know, how to find "work I love". I stumbled into three or four jobs that I liked reasonably well (lets not go overboard with the love bit) for a while (1, 2, 3 years...) but which then turned to the usual soul-deadening thing that they have to pay people to do, because nobody would do it for free.

Good jobs are hard to find, and jobs that are good tend not to stay that way for long, because most jobs exist within organizations, bureaucracies, institutions, and so on, which by their nature, tend to control what their employees are are doing. Not only what they are doing, but how they are doing it, and the sort of experience they are having while doing it. Control is what ruins most jobs that might be good and makes most jobs that might be barely tolerable into experiences one wants to escape.

I've always worked in the non-profit sector, and small organizations aren't all that different than large organizations. Work can be good (once in a while) in a big as well as a small organization.

For me, a very good job would be one where I am hired to create something new, kind of edgy, and am left alone to find a way to do it. Creating is interesting. Carrying out the task gets to be a drag fairly quickly.