~ Paul Graham
"Do what you love" is all well and good. But how does that one actually do that?
As kids, we think and are (somewhat) made to think work and fun are opposites. Also we are told or it's implied school is tedious as it's a preparation for grownup work.
So work as fun, something to love seems foreign.
But then a lot of adults say they love their jobs. Why?
...presumably (because of) the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.
But where did that come from? As imitations of (most of the) successful people who actually do love what they do.
All this means, kids when they grow up are confused: work is supposed to be not fun (a thought instilled by schooling) but you are supposed to love it.
But then there's a different way to think of it (as Graham did when he got to college):
The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit of so many years my idea of work still included a large component of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.
"Most people underestimate it".
upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second
It (do what you love) doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month
Lower bound: you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure.
To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire.
One test for this would be "to try to do things that would make your friends say wow".
What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige.
Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.
The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living.
The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money.
All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences.
Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it—finding work you love does usually require discipline.
If you jump around (trying to "find what you love"), how can you be sure you are actually trying to find what you love to do or just being lazy. Two ways:
- "One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy."
- "Another test you can use is: always produce."
"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like.
Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it.
Two routes to getting to do work that you love:
- The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don't.
- The two-job route: to work at things you don't like to get money to work on things you do.
Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.
It's also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like.
I like this essay because it tackles an important question. Work does form a significant part of our lives. Also, it does provide a lot of food for thought. Eg: One possible reason why parents are conservative.
Other thing to pair with this could be Cal Newport's "So Good They Can't Ignore You" which overlaps with some of the thoughts here but not exactly.