Work is something we do, something we create.

We might have been able to raise it to an art. We might be pouring all our heart and love into it.

This work might be everything we care for as well as the most important thing we do. This can lead to identifying ourselves with our work.

It still isn’t a reason to identify ourselves as our work.

By making it personal everything that comes with the work does become personal too. Through making it personal we make it, for example, very difficult for ourselves to take decisions involving risks. Would they fail, we would start to see ourselves as failures. Once you’ve started to take your work personally it’s hard to look at failures or mishaps or other issues involved in that work.

By identifying with something you create an attachment. The strange thing with this type of attachment is, that it is a cause of unhappiness. If you don’t achieve your goal, you’ll feel like a failure. If you achieve your goal, on the other hand, it will only please you for a short moment. Once it’s done there is a bit of pleasure followed by the search for something new that can become the work we do.