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How to Do What You Love
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. "
Sometimes you don't ever get to do what you love, but you still have to make a living. I think you're fortunate if you find something you love to do, but I don't think it's right to tell kids that it's what should happen either. That would just be a big disappointment if it didn't turn out that way.
Somewhere along the way I chose things electronic (and computational) and here I am...
What does the education system expose your kids to today?
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
I used to work on dull stuff.
Then I worked on interesting stuff.
They they took the interesting stuff and made it dull stuff in a foreign land.
Now I work on dull stuff.
As you work, remember who's creating the value, and who's getting paid for it without creating value.
I think if you love your job %25 of the time you are doing OK. Politics and tedious work 75% of the time is worth the programming 25% of the time. I just think about the money when I am getting yelled at for not being able to read a manager's mind.
It's easy to preach about how to do what you love when you're independently wealthy.
Certainly Graham's own actions are a large part of the reason why he's independently wealthy, but if he or anyone else thinks that luck was not an incredibly huge portion of it, they're wrong. And yet he (and other people like him) constantly preach on "here's how to succeed", as if, following their own advice, they themselves would actually succeed in any meaningful number of independent test runs of reality.
I don't mean to denigrate Graham, what he accomplished, or the fact that his own talents and efforts helped tremendously in those accomplishments. But these sorts of articles always strike me as unwarranted general conclusions from absurdly small sample sizes.
The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it
Sorry, that's an incorrect statement, and I wish it would die. It's simplistic and not based in reality and just gives lazy people and excuse to dodge doing important work. I'm sick of hearing it.
Look at the flip side, if you find something you love doing, will you still love it if you get paid to do it?
More specifically, would you still love it if you had deadlines to deal with?
People who love their jobs either thrive on the pressure, or have 'easy' jobs that they don't have to take home with them. For example, my mom loves her job because it's low stress, and when she goes home, she doesn't have to worry about work at all. I love my job because I'm an integral part of my company. We both have hobbies we do outside of work that neither of us could ever make a living doing (or would want to!). Sure, in bizzarro world, someone would pay me to sit on my ass and watch weird movies all day, but I would quickly hate it because the other facets of my personality would get ignored. Likewise, if I did my day job for free, I would not get anything done because the pressure would be gone.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
"It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed."
Dag B
Well, I don't have kids, but still being in the UK education system I'll give my views. I believe that here, as in the US, more and more children are leaving school without necessary maths skills. Calculus has been remove from the maths GCSE syllabus, fewer and fewer children are taking science GCSEs. I'm told that the requirement to do at least one language GCSE has also been removed. IMO, this is arrogrant in the extreme, the UK is already trailing the rest of the world in languages, this will only make things worse.
At A-level the situation is even worse. In my further maths class we had 8 people. Out of a year of 200. And 4 of them dropped out. The problem is that no-one these days seems to be prepared to tell kids the truth about studying: languages, mathematics, sciences etc. will open a lot of doors to highly paid, skilled and interesting work. Media studies will probably not, no matter how easy it may seem.
My father spent his life doing what he loved to do -- flying. It was his dream to fly when he was a child, and he managed his life so that he could do it as long as possible, even turning down promotions and better pay so that he could continue flying.
He made sure that he flew them all, too, from fighter jets to the largest commercial planes, from props to jets to helicopters. He never got tired of his job, and would often tell me to do what I enjoyed doing, and that the money would come eventually. He said that while he struggled with making enough money to keep his family going the way that he wanted to, but he never doubted. After I left home for uni, he moved into a better flying position and tripled his salary, finally allowing him and my mother to make the kind of money that they really wanted. It took many years for that to happen, though.
If you ask him, he'll tell you that he loved flying until the end of his career. Sure, he made some errors in judgement and would change some things about his life if he could go back, but he'll still say what he's always said -- "Do what you love to do, and then you'll do it well. When you do something well and it doesn't seem like work, you'll be successful at it." I used to call it "subjective pay per hour (SPPH)," meaning that sitting in a 40 hour a week job where every day feels like an eternity gives a lower SPPH than working twelve hours a day doing what you love and never noticing the time speeding by." I think a lot of people on this site know what I'm talking about.
I have had a lot of problems with my father over the years, but this is one area where I believe he hit the nail right on the head.
Put identity in the browser.
"reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later."
Forking lies.
In primary school they told me I was doing dull stuff now so I could do fun stuff in high school.
In high school they told me I was doing dull stuff now so I could do fun stuff in uni.
In uni they told me I was doing dull stuff in first year so I could do fun stuff in second year.
I started work and they told me that I had to start at the bottom with the dull stuff and then I could work my way up to the fun stuff.
I'm starting to think it's all just a big lie to keep the masses working hard to achieve something that will never come.
- Jessta
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
It is my believe, that most of the succesful people in the world have one thing in common; they dare to take big risks.
This personality trade is also shared with most of the "losers" in the world.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
In my experience as somebody that was there, "the work you love" is a moving target.
... software developer.
:))))
...
My personal story is one of jumping around in school from area to area trying to find what i liked the most. Going through highschool, i've tryed (the optional classes on) electronics, chemistry and biology. I went to the University and started on physics. A year later i moved to and eventualy got a degree in electronics engineering.
All the while, ever since i got my first computer (a ZX Spectrum 128A) i was doing programing for the fun.
Eventually when i got out of University i started work as a
I spent the next couple of years marveling at how people were paying me to do something i would do for free
Now, if i was still 25 the story would end here - unfortunatly things change
The problem is, after some years working 8 h/day on something you love, it starts loosing it's appeal. To me it was a mix of:
- It started loosing it's challenge. No challenge, no fun.
- By making my work out of my hobby i've placed myself in the situation of constantly having to do it, even if i don't feel like it. Thus for me software development morphed from fun to obligation.
- In the quest for keeping my work challenging i've been moving upscale - from developer to designer to technical architect/analyst. This means that:
* It's harder to find a position at the level that i enjoy the most.
* I have to do side tasks such as "career management" in order to position myself to land a job doing what i enjoy the most. By "career management" read "doing boring stuff for CV improvement purposes".
* Higher level positions require me to develop skills other than the ones needed for software design and development - a slow process.
- There are few big (challenging) projects and many small (stupendously simple) projects/tasks. Thus when i started there were a lot of projects that i found fun, now there are few.
I still have moments of pure enjoyment from my work, but it went from 90% fun, 10% obligation to 10% fun, 90% obligation.
...to just love what you happen to do?
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
Various people have various needs. For every individual who needs ambitious work and a good challenge, there is another individual who NEEDS routine work where no brain work is involved.
/. how many people would rather code all day long than have to do a manager's work. I'm pretty sure that the non-techie type in the population see programmer's job as being as boring as wiping floors, yet there a bunch of people willing to do it and loving it.
As they say, having too many generals and not enough soldiers is not a good thing. Fortunately, not that many people really want to be generals, managers, PHB or whatever position needs to take responsibilities. Just looking around here on
The key is to doing what you love is to know yourself, know your needs, so you can translate them into something productive.