Careers?

As many of you know I'm passionate about music, and I'm currently pursuing a career in sound engineering. But lately I've been having second thoughts. I was chatting to my mom and Cate the other day, and we were talking about what I'm going to do. While I love music, I do have two problems: I get bored of anything very quickly, and I'm fairly lazy.

So while I absolutely love music with everything in me, I am bored of sound engineering. I was chatting to a friend of mine, and he's just finished studying sound engineering. He's a really great guy, and a hard worker, and I was just looking at what he's done. Right now he's working as a freelance engineer, doing little gigs here and there, and working in a few studios around Cape Town.

Now, while he's an awesome engineer, I think I'm better than him. When I say that I don't mean that he's a fool and I'm a genius, but what I mean is that I have a better understanding of music than he does, and I have a finer tuned ear than he does. For example, he didn't know how phasing worked [a fairly common principle in sound engineering], or how to get a kick drum to sound tight.

But while all of the above things are true, he's a much harder worker than I am and so at this stage he's likely to be much more successful than I will be, specifically in the short term.

Now, I've been thinking, should I be working harder? Or should it be coming naturally? I hear so many stories of people who love their work and say that they don't feel like it's work because they love it so much. And yet for me everything feels like the biggest mission in the world.

My friend, we'll call him George, loves tracking bands, working with music, and mixing tracks. When George is finished mixing a track, he doesn't just let it go, he does it again. Not because the first time wasn't good enough, but because he enjoyed it so much he wants to do it again.

I on the other hand did a mix of New Altum's 'Close Enough', and it sounded ok. I didn't go back to it because I didn't want to. Someone said I should remix it for fun, and when I sat down, I just didn't feel like it. It was a mission just to rename the tracks again.

So what does this mean? Is sound engineering the wrong thing for me? Or am I just the laziest person in the world? I know that hard work has been something I've never really learned, but there's just very little life in what I'm doing. It doesn't feel wrong, but it isn't right either.

I know that at the moment I'm emotionally on a bit of a slope, and things aren't going well, and maybe these type of decisions shouldn't be made at this time, but at some stage I should be enjoying what I'm doing, and that's not happening at the moment.

So, what do you think? Am I being too hard on myself? Or is sound engineering wrong for me? What's your experience with work? Do you love it, or hate it? Or is it a bit of both all the time?