Booknotes: The Wealthy Freelancer p. 18: My ideal day

"Envision your ideal day" exercises are a bit suspect in my book. In this case it's subsequently clarified as "envision your ideal WORK day", which is a very different thing. Here we are confronted squarely with the conflict between what might be termed the "Ferris ideal" and the "Vaynerchuck ideal". The former takes as read that "work" is the last thing you want to be doing and the goal should be to rearrange things so you do as little of it as possible. The latter takes the view that so long as you hit on what you are truly passionate about, you will work 18 hours a day but love every minute of it. Both have merit. Both also miss the essential third perspective, which I'll call the "Rowe ideal" (for Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame). This last view of work acknowledges the uncomfortable fact that if it weren't for people dedicated to doing labor that they don't really enjoy, the industrial infrastructure wouldn't exist to enable a few lucky and motiviated individuals to embrace either the Ferris ideal or the Vaynerchuck ideal.