Slashdot Mirror
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. "
If kids don't believe that they can do what they want then the only reason they won't be dissapointed is that they don't realise there is anything better.
:)) and if they try and fail then so be it.
I say encourage kids to do what they want (within reason
Tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.
Laugh It Off
YOu can always geta job doing what you love. Just realise that money isn't all that important, and go for it.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
when i grow up i want to work in a cubical.
also, my other car is a cubical.
.cig
This is less and less true the more you value having a family. :(
nah, don't worry, in the corporate world, no one uses logic.
No Sigs!
Don't go into debt. You need to decide what your priorities are- enjoying your job, or that new house and new car.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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'?
That said, I think s/he might have focused more on finding ways to experience wonder from moment-to-moment. This isn't easy when you're slinging hash, or heading toward the 11th straight hour of wrapping up a code project for a manager named Godzilla.
Life really is moment-to-moment, and very, very non-linear. There are ways - without becoming a mindless new age fanatic - to deal with the everyday.
Many years ago I read a book on Aesthetics called "Art in the Everyday"; it had a big impact. (I think it's out of print, and most people would probably find it pedantic).
Wittgenstein had a great way of dealing with this; he said (to paraphrase) "don't wonder about why you are, or what you are, or how you came to be, etc. - simply wonder THAT you are.
Again, this is not about contemplating one's navel, but rather using good, time-worn techniques (meditation, etc.) to get beyond all the stuff that weighs us down, and use that weight as a lever to achieve some internal peace.
It's tough drilling down to the moment in difficult times, but there's peace there, no matter what. I wish we could teach our kids more about how to do that.
Lastly, none of this means quiting the world, and withdrawing. On the contrary, it's about finding ways to pay more attention to the world on a moment-by-moment basis. that's deosn't preclude anyone from being/doing in this world in any number of ways - i.e. agressive entrepreneur, waiter, writer, coder, nanny, stay-at-home-mom, etc.
Someone wrote a whole essay expanding on the above. A
w hards.htm
choice quote:
"These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider's view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism."
The whole essay, "Dabblers and Blowhards" is here:
http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blo
Matt
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.
So I figured, damn the torpedoes: I'm going to do work I find interesting and enjoyable, or leave academia. After all, what's the worst thing that could happen? I'd end up doing stuff I hated, and have more money.
So I stopped worrying about what I thought other people would find interesting, and started working on problems that fascinated me. These days, I love my work and for the first time I really feel like I have a future in science. The thing is, if you find your work incredibly interesting, others may or may not find it exciting. But if you are an intelligent, curious person and you find your work boring, odds are damn good that other people will find it boring. And as far as I'm concerned, there are too many fascinating problems out there to waste time on the boring ones. These days, I wake up, and run over the dozen or so research projects I'm dabbling on, and say, "What do I want to work on today?", closely followed by, "And how long can I stall on this dissertation thing before my advisor kills me?"
What does the education system expose your kids to today?
STDs mostly. I'm not kidding, 25% of Americans age 15-39 have genital herpes.
While I generally don't admit it in face-to-face settings, I too fall into that statistic... but I'm not foolish enough to kid myself into blaming the educational system. Even at a young age I understood some of the negative consequences some actions might carry. Most generations since the '80s AIDS scare have grown up with a more realistic perception about sex.
Yes, since the day I found out, I've learned far more about STDs than I ever have at school. And yes, I wish the hassles of living daily with this was imprinted more on me back then, it might of made me more paranoid. But I certainly knew I was taking some chances redeeming those glory hole coupons at the fair last year.
Go home to my wife and family. And do whatever we want. Well, afford.
I don't love my job, and I don't expect I ever will, nor will I need to. I do enjoy my job, however, and I'd look elsewhere if I didn't. Wanna do what you love? Try the missus.
Well, he did say they couldn't add...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Maybe the most important thing is not doing what you love, but doing who you love.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Bottom line:
(A) you have a roof over your head, and can get food in your belly when you're hungry, and nobody is about to beat you up or murder you...
AND
(B) this is not going to change in the immediate future...
THEN
(C) Any further problems you have are in your head.
This is true on multiple levels. On one hand, people fail to enjoy the work they have in front of them -- sometimes work they chose for themselves -- because it doesn't match their ideal of perfection. They're weighed down with "shoulds" ("I should have a better boss than this idiot") and "mights" ("The project might fail and they might blame me") and wild inferences ("The fact they didn't take my suggestion to use Linux means they disrespect me.").
On the other hand, people also mishandle priorities. This is what I think a lot of people talk about when they tell you you should "do what you love".
Suppose you have the talent to be a professional musician. Trying to become on is risky, but it's important to understand the scope and character of the risk. Failure doesn't mean for people with middle class backgrounds that they'll starve or die of exposure on the street. What it means is that they won't be able to live in as nice a house or in as a desirable suburb as their parents; or at the very least that their path to those ends might be delayed by four or five years. If you can break into your second choice field several years late, I don't think it hurts you at all to have trod a road less travelled. When you throw in the towel and go to law school like dad wanted, maybe you'll specialize in intellecual property law, or maybe you'll have a particular interest in contracts. Or if it's med school, maybe you'll become a hand surgeon, or a psychiatrist interested in art therapy. What will happen is that whatever you do you'll bring more of your personal uniqueness to it than if you did what was expected.
In any case, going straight to law school is, in my opinion, a mishandling of priorities. At the age when this decision faces people, the things that a successful law career (and Dad's connections) would bring aren't all that important to you. Some would argue this is immaturity, but I'd say that immaturity is appropriate for young people, who having the slack that more years ahead and no family to provide for have no rational reason, in my opinion, not to stock away memories that will last a lifetime and deepen the individuality they bring to their mid-life career.
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