Why I Never Watch the Clock at Work

I finally understood why I never watch the clock at work, waiting for five o’clock to go home.

It hit me that I love what I do because, in what I do, I get to do the things I love. I am living my interests through my career and somewhere along the way, the line between personal passion and professional purpose disappeared.

Traditional career advice tells you to keep hobbies separate from work, assuming passion and profit live in different worlds. My experience in lifestyle technology proves the opposite. When your job connects directly to what you genuinely care about, motivation becomes automatic.

During marathon training, when someone asks about fitness tracker battery life, I do not check product specs, I know from personal experience how these devices perform during 20-kilometer runs. That credibility cannot be faked, and customers sense the difference.

Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report found only 23% of employees worldwide are engaged at work, while 59% are “quiet quitting.” Three-quarters of workers trade time for money while their real interests wait for weekends.

Engaged employees create compound advantages. Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, analysing 12,000 diary entries from 238 employees, found that progress in meaningful work has the strongest positive effect on emotions, perceptions, and motivation.

I’ve found that meaning doesn’t only come from boardrooms sometimes it’s found in the life my work allows me to live. As a creative explorer in tech marketing, I don’t have to force product positioning because the products I market already power the life I live.

When I speak about Samsung electronics devices at industry events across East Africa, attendees often ask detailed questions about real-world usage scenarios. They want to know how the galaxy watches perform during Nairobi’s rainy season, whether galaxy buds maintain connectivity during long journeys, or how our smartphones handle network switching in rural areas outside major cities. These are questions you cannot answer from global product specifications; they require lived experience in these specific markets.

At a cycling event in Karura Forest, I watched participants struggle with audio connectivity during fitness tracking. Six weeks later, I used these observations to inform our Galaxy ecosystem development priorities. That insider knowledge became competitive intelligence no market research could match.

The competitive advantage of authentic expertise compounds over time. While competitors can copy features and match pricing, they cannot replicate genuine enthusiasm backed by personal experience. When your morning training run doubles as product research, when your weekend adventures inform user experience design, when your personal fitness goals align with business objectives work transforms from obligation into opportunity.

Yet this approach is not without risks. The danger of turning passion into profession is real: hobbies can become obligations, personal sanctuaries can become performance pressures, and market downturns can threaten both livelihood and leisure simultaneously. I have seen colleagues burn out when their love for cycling became tied to sales quotas, or when their photography passion grew stale under commercial pressure.

The key lies in what psychologist’s call “autonomous motivation” engaging with work because it aligns with your values and interests, not because external forces compel you. Dr. Edward Deci’s Self-Determination Theory research at the University of Rochester shows that autonomous motivation leads to better performance, greater persistence, and enhanced well-being compared to controlled motivation driven by rewards or pressures.

This distinction matters enormously in practice. When companies sponsor community events that employees would attend anyway, participation feels natural. When product development incorporates user feedback from team members who are actual users, innovation happens organically. When marketing messages come from people who genuinely believe in what they are selling, customer trust follows.

The shift from traditional career compartmentalization to what I call “life integration” is becoming a competitive necessity. In industries where authentic expertise drives customer confidence, companies that can attract and retain genuinely passionate employees gain sustainable advantages that financial incentives alone cannot create.

Consider the alternative trajectory: spending eight hours daily in environments that conflict with your interests and values. The psychological research is unambiguous about the costs. Dr. Christina Maslach’s work on burnout at UC Berkeley shows that value misalignment is one of the strongest predictors of professional exhaustion and disengagement. When your work contradicts your interests, every day becomes an exercise in managed dissatisfaction.

The question for ambitious professionals is not whether passion matters in career success, the evidence overwhelmingly confirms it does. The challenge is identifying employers whose values, and missions create natural alignment with your authentic interests, then having the courage to pursue those opportunities even when they require short-term sacrifice or uncertainty.

The technology sector, particularly lifestyle technology, offers ideal conditions for this convergence. When your product testing happens during personal workouts, when your user research occurs through your own daily routines, when your professional expertise grows through pursuing personal interests the traditional boundaries between work and life become irrelevant.

The professionals who master this approach understand something essential about sustainable success: when work mirrors life, excellence becomes inevitable. They have discovered that the highest-performing career strategy is about work-life integration where passion and profession reinforce each other in an upward spiral.

The choice is stark: spend decades compartmentalizing your interests and enduring professional misalignment or find the courage to seek roles where your authentic passions become your competitive advantages. The clock stops mattering when you stop working and start living your interests through your career.

The author is Head of Marketing Mobile Experience Samsung Electronics East Africa.