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How to Do What You Love

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the world-needs-ditchdiggers-too dept.

fnord_ix writes "Paul Graham has another interesting essay talking about How to Do What You Love. He talks about the lies that adults tell kids about what work is, and how work is equal to pain." From the article: "I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later. "

3 of 482 comments (clear)

  1. The Puritan Work Ethic by pen · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's a related article, The Puritan Work Ethic at Anxiety Culture.

  2. Re:getting them to know what they might love is ha by scrote-ma-hote · · Score: 3, Informative
    Roberts C. Genital herpes in young adults: changing sexual behaviours, epidemiology and management. Herpes 2005;12(1):10-4.

    They would tend to suggest the figures are closer to 1.4% in males and 2.2% in females. But if there's any conflicting data on this, I'm more than happy to accept it!

    PS The Pubmed ID of the article is 16026639. You can get the abstract here

  3. Re:Blah. by rolfwind · · Score: 3, Informative

    Perhaps the author of "Dabblers and Blowhards" should follow irony in his own title. From near the beginning of his own essay:

    "But the emailed links continued, and over the next two years Paul Graham steadily ramped up his output while moving definitively away from subjects he had expertise in (like Lisp) to topics like education, essay writing, history, and of course painting. Sometime last year I noticed he had started making bank from an actual print book of collected essays, titled (of course) "Hackers and Painters". I felt it was time for me to step up.

    So let me say it simply - hackers are nothing like painters."

    From the wiki on Paul Graham:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham

    "Graham has an A.B. from Cornell and a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard, and studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence."