Funny I forgot about this, but now that I think of it, I did martial arts classes for years and it never felt like work.

I played basketball for years and even the drills never felt like work.

I guess it's the difference between work and play.

I don't know what the psychological underpinnings are for the subjective qualitative difference, but I think this may relate to the "effortlessness" of Taoism vs. the "effort" of Buddhism. Just hypothesizing.

I can read for hours and research subjects of interest and it's never "work".

I can practice something on the piano that I like, which is difficult to play, and it's not "work"; but doing contrived exercises with the same finger-movements feels like work.

I not only find it totally believable that playing guitar was subjectively NOT work to Jimi Hendrix, but I would go further and say he NEVER would have gotten to where he got if it DID seem like work.

If you only love the glory, and not the process, how will you even persist long enough to get there?

A few further examples -- Kobe Bryant LOVES basketball. There are a lot of talents who go into the NBA for the paycheck and then underachieve; it's just a job to them. Kobe isn't the best athlete in the NBA -- many can jump higher or run faster. But he is the most skilled, and the best seemingly-impossible shot maker in the history of the game. Kobe, 13, joins the Sonny Hill summer league in Philadelphia, where a counselor scolds him for listing the NBA as his future career. "The guy said NBA players are one in a million," Kobe says. "I said, 'Man, look, I'm going to be that one in a million.' "

Lance Armstrong LOVES riding his bike. It was his route to personal freedom in football-loving Texas, and he would go for a ride any time he needed to think.

Adam Lambert LOVES performing. He was always performing and singing since he was a child. He would drive his little brother crazy by always singing and dancing to things on the radio and making up his own versions of songs.

And these are just people with a high level of COMMERCIAL success. All of them would have had their own success of some sort, by doing what they loved, even if they didn't become millionaires.

So it kind of depends on what you mean by "amount to anything". By whose standards?

I remember some story, which was a true story, possibly from Outliers, I don't quite remember; it was about parents making their kids do something that the parents wanted. Something like: A surgeon had wanted to be a dancer but he was forced to be a doctor; he received some prestigious award that all his fellow surgeons coveted, but he was miserable. "But you've been recognized by all your peers as being the best surgeon!" "Yes," he responded dejectedly, "but I'm the worst dancer!"

A further example was of two parents who had been forced into respectable professions; the mother had wanted to be a pianist instead. So she decided that wouldn't happen to HER daughter; she hired private music tutors. Except the daughter had no interest in piano... she was being forced into it!

Even if you get what you want, you have to have the capacity to enjoy it, or it won't mean anything to you. Depending on the state of your hormones and neurotransmitters, this can vary drastically even over the course of a single day.

The biggest dichotomy I see now is between Creators and Consumers. Most of our socialization has the effect of turning us into the latter. How many stories have we seen of people making a million dollars off something that ANY of us COULD do, but they actually went and DID it?

Unlike the school and work system, which reward conformity, there is a huge amount of real-world success from being DIFFERENT. If you get really good at ANYTHING, you can probably make a living from it. Even just being weird.

Society serves a very useful purpose, though, because the more it turns everyone into consumers, the less you have to CREATE in order to make a living. Just look at Mob Wars or Reddit.

So whichever angle you approach it from, personal satisfaction or commercial success, it seems the way to go is to do whatever is subjectively RIGHT for you.