“Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” is another college-counseling standby of unknown provenance.
That is probably the biggest load of crap foisted on pop culture in a while. I love what I do, and I work every day. This morning's task is reviewing a help file for accuracy. Hol-ee shite, that's not why I got into programming computers when I was 12. But it needs to be done, and I'm one of the ones that can knowledgeably review it. I really should write that test plan, but I keep putting it off for obvious reasons. Oh, sure, I get to play Puzzle Solver by shuffling some bits around, and it's what I spend most of my days doing, but it ain't all fun and games.
And that's just Working for The Man(tm). Gonna start a brewpub? Maybe an online SaaS business? Oh, my friend, your crap work has just begun; so much so, you might have to leave the fun stuff to your employees. You will work every day, and hard.
Don't get the wrong idea, I look forward to going to work most days, and I've been doing this for a long while. But there's a reason they call it "work", and there's a reason they pay you. Enjoy the hell out of the enjoyable parts, and when the less enjoyable work comes, remember that you are (if of the average HN demographic) paid handsomely for it.
I decided, after burning out of Startupville a bit ago, that I was going to take some time off and... wait for it... write a novel. I love writing, I love blogging, so how hard could this be? It's the next natural step, right?
I thought this would be a dream experience, sitting at my computer and creating beautiful prose for hours a day, my creativity flowing like a river.
After about 20,000 words (a debut novel should be between 70-100k words), it turned into hard work. One thousand words a day becomes quite tedious, especially when the initial steam wears off.
Great, so I pushed through for months, putting in the daily grind. Draft complete at 90k words! First round of edits, cutting almost 20,000 words (about a month of work, all for "nothing"). Back at the writing grind again to get the word count and story aligned to be more marketable.
Edit number two complete. Edit number three complete. Beta readers telling me there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This character sucks, this character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc. Just now wrapping up edit number four, and I'm actually quite happy with how it reads.
But now... onto the business end of this deal, querying agents. Agents reject about 99% of the pitches that come into their inbox. The 1% gets a full manuscript request. Of those 1%, about 10% get offers of representation.
An offer of representation often turns into several more rounds of edits before the agent will sell it to a publisher. So if I'm lucky enough to get an agent, it'll be even more editing (my least favorite part of this process so far).
THEN, the agent has to successfully sell the book to a publisher. The odds that this happens also pretty low. And since I'm a first-time writer, I'd be looking at a pretty small five figure advance for what will end up being about two years of work.
Anyways... writing, my favorite form of art, has become a roll-of-the-dice grind. I'm not sure I would go back in time and do this again, but regardless, I've come this far so...
I think chasing a "dream career" whatever that is can be a tough lesson in setting realistic expectations in what it means to make money.
It sounds like you were doing another form of startup. Perhaps some writers bang out the prose and have an editor help to trim the fat rather than trying to wear all of the hats required to launch a new novelist.
Also:
> Beta readers telling me there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This character sucks, this character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc.
I think what makes a great story, and novelist for that matter, are some of those rough edges and you should ignore the critics just like an opinionated CEO might be advised to do. Those people may be looking out for you, but you're the artist and can use your vision to create your world with your unique voice!
Writing is a discipline. I'd expect it (like almost any other discipline) to take around five years to reach journeyman status. I think a lot of people assume that writing is a lot easier and simpler than it actually is. The folk knowledge says that you should expect to write around a million words before you find your voice.
I think the secret to all of this is that the energy and enthusiasm of passion is ultimately overcome by pain. And pain slows us down, makes us retreat.
But if you find your work fundamentally painless, you can put any amount of passion in on top: you're still getting it done on your lowest days, and on your good ones you will cruise into exceptional output.
As such you can derive the well-known market preference for "bandaids over vitamins" from the sum total of all individuals looking for a way to take more of the pain out of their work. But the biggest optimization you can make is simply in choosing which work to do.
I once self published a book. Biggest mistake I made was writing it before i had an audience to sell to. I would take small snipets of your book and distribute for free to places where your target audience hangs out. Then publish more free bits on your site for email address. Maybe some complete short stories.
Then once you have an audience that likes your shit promote a book to them, and leverage those sales as social proof to go more broad.
I will teach you to be rich does this really well. I don't have a good analogy for fiction but I'm sure they exist.
You may want to consider self-publishing, depending on the book. It's pretty easy these days and there's no particular "vanity press" stigma on Amazon.
To make it easier, go back in time, choose different parents and become the 'first coder that be became POTUS', then write your novel.
Or go up to the top of a mountaintop at just the right time for the sky god to make an appearance and hand you the third testament.
Or, go back in time again, choose different parents and become a record scoring footballer. By adopting this strategy you would have the slight challenge of creating a time machine but you will also not have to write those 90000 words, a ghostwriter would be able to just magic out of thin air whatever you bark out loud. They would sort out the plot holes and the movie deal too.
Or you could go back to startupsville again and scratch this itch. It should be possible to crowd-source decent novels in a way that is not so humiliating and nigh on impossible. I know this has been attempted before but the nearest we have to it at the moment it self publishing on Amazon where people do reviews and people buy on the basis of those reviews. There have been success stories with this. But we know those reviews are bought and everything is corrupt.
Joking aside I do think that there is another way of getting published - write the book that needs to be written. Not a rehash of ideas, something new. A new story that does not fit into the existing pantheon of beginnings/middles and endings. Something that people must read and must get their friends to read, no publicity needed. You could make this free and entirely web based, no ISBN number or dead trees. Much like how musicians do stuff for free on YouTube and then a publisher courts them to do something for money. However, even this is not strictly easy and the stories you hear of this often involve a musician who happens to have chosen the right parents, e.g. Lily Allen and how she started on Youtube, only later do we learn of the famous and well connected dad.
Writing a book that has to be written might not be passion though. If you discovered some unjustice going on and were compelled to write then that would not be passion, more of a moral question of not staying silent.
Anyway, regarding the original article, why is it that 87% of people in the workplace are clock watchers, as if serving an eight hour school detention on a daily basis? Clearly they are not following their passion. But, of the 13% that don't clock watch and do have some passion for what they do, these people can be in any department, office or factory. They are not necessarily writing novels, making music, teaching yoga or directing films. Passion is more of a transferable skill that should be taught.
Well, you can't be satisfied all the time. That's not how brain chemistry works in healthy individuals.
You can enjoy what you do most of the time though. Thanks to your brain also. I find it harder when working for somebody because money is not necessarily a good enough motivator. But when working on my own project and faced with a tedious task (writing tests, fighting dependencies or whatever it is that you despise), I think why do I want to do it (e.g. I want my project to succeed it and it needs it). You can try to achieve your goal without the thing that you don't like. If you think that this is not possible, then wanting your project to succeed and wanting to do this task are the same thing. They are connected.
Once you realize this it makes things much more simple. Most of suffering seems to come from some semi-conscious story in your brain: I want A but without doing B. Either it's possible to do that or it's not. If it's not then it's just wishful thinking that is only bringing you misery.
The way you think and wire your brain really matters. Instead of "I must do X even though I don't want it". Think "If I want A then X comes with it - do I still want A?". Or find a way to A without X.
For me at least, having that stated explicitly in my mind alters my perception of X. Because it really is hard to hold two logically inconsistent beliefs in your mind when you bring them both into focus. Your brain quick fix is usually some "but..". That's where you need to eliminate wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is imagining reality in some other way than it really is and only leads to frustration.
Accepting things that already are should come pretty naturally though. You may want to change something. But you can't change the past.
I agree, but you're not going to counter bumper sticker phrases with multi-paragraph quasi-Buddhist philosophy. :-) So I just stick with "what a load of crap".
But you're coming at it from a different angle, I feel. Instead of "finding your passion", I hear you advising a different way of looking at it such that one can find fulfillment (for lack of better phrasing) in whatever job by matching the story in one's head to reality. I'm on board. Hell, I've been happy doing janitorial work. Was it my passion? Well, no. But it needed to be done, and I could do it, they're paying me, and in the end there's something satisfying about a clean floor. That was enough for me at the time.
Ray Lewis (NFL linebacker) said something along the lines of "I get paid for Monday through Saturday, Sunday I do for free".
I feel like that with coding a lot of the time. I get paid to deal with all the crap work, but those times I get to code something novel or unique are times I would still want even if I didn't have to work.
My passion is audio but my job is writing software.
I have a lot of friends in the audio field, and something I've noticed is that doing your passion for a living can take the fun out of it.
For instance, my friends in the audio world don't sit around listening to new loudspeakers, or designing new loudspeakers. They mostly spend their time marketing products and filling orders. Working in audio isn't a whole lot different than working in any other retail field.
But when I work on audio projects? I can do whatever I please, because I'm not doing it to pay my mortgage.
> doing your passion for a living can take the fun out of it
I think this is really a corrupt idea that floats around, and many times influences younger people away from trying to find a career and instead landing themselves in crappy jobs.
For example, some people like to work on cars, but they don't get a job in that because their dumb uncle said this to them, so they spend their time grinding away at a fast food joint and going nowhere in life. Maybe they can poke at their 15 year old car once in a while, but overall their quality of life is not very good, and they basically never get to work on cars. If they had instead gone into professional car service, they would have a decent paying job and be able to reach a comparatively higher standard.
Does that mean that it's not work? Of course not. You will always have to do work and it's not always pleasant, but at least you can leverage your interests and strengths. If you get bored or annoyed at working on something you used to think was fun, then take a vacation or find something else do to over the weekends to get your mind off it. If you are annoyed that it's not fun anymore, then -- welcome to adulthood.
That is truly the difference between having a job and setting yourself up for a successful career.
That's funny, I've been following my passions and now I'm a data scientist.
I can split my friends into two groups: those that followed their passions and are happy, and those that did not and have loans for silly things, egos that depend on their career, and a consistent need for validation by society.
Following your passion isn't about instant gratification, perhaps people are disappointed by this.
Reminds me of how an excellent engineering manager I know calls such tasks like "review help file for accuracy" as Chimney Sweep—work that needs to be done, but is utterly mundane. And rotate such tasks across the team to ensure that no one person is stuck with too much "chimney sweeping".
Excellent summary, I have run my own business for 7 years and there are plenty of days that I don't enjoy. Fortunately there are enough fun bits and good moments that in the main I like what I do - I would not do it for free though, even if I didn't need the salary ... I'd probably go mountain biking instead.
There are a lot of things that people enjoy as a hobby on their own terms that they'd probably find a lot less fun if they had to do it every day on someone else's terms.
I was very into photography as a hobby at one point (still am to some degree) and I even toyed with the idea that maybe this is something I could do professionally. But the reality is that I would have unlikely become a staff photographer for Life or National Geographic and would much more likely have ended up as the photographer for the college news service--who was actually quite good but mostly took photos of rich alums shaking hands with the president.
Everyone differs of course. But, in general, one good strategy is to do something that you like well enough most of the time, you're good at, pays well and use your spare time and money to pursue things you like as hobbies.
I was a professional photographer for about ten years, and it definitely had a big negative impact on enjoying it as a hobby. The biggest factor contributing to that without question were the problem customers that came along. I enjoy creating. I do not enjoy the customer service or mundane business aspects.
I once warned a friend of mine who was buying a business that he was actually buying a job. That turned out to be more correct than either one of us expected.
Finding your passion is just a way of saying Don't do what you despise for a living. There are a lot of people caught up in horrible jobs that they hate but can't leave due to obligations: family, bills, sometimes identity. Doesn't necessarily mean fun but manageable pain, with a little friction and opportunity to grow as a human being.
Working a "whatever" job also isn't finding a passion, yet it's a perfectly serviceable way of funding your life as you pursue things outside of your employment hours. As long as it isn't destructively draining you, and isn't assaulting your psyche, it can just be plain work.
I think the upshot of the quote is supposed to be something like this:
Figure out the set of interests which pique your curiosity. Know the difference between that set and the set of interests that society irrationally deems respectable through peer-pressure, propaganda, and other FUD. Pick something from the first set (possibly intersecting the 2nd set) and you are unlikely to feel like every day is filled with a sense of dread and drudgery.
But here-- as in the original quote-- there is a hidden premise that the audience already has interests in the first set. I think there's also a premise that the audience also has the tools to investigate a particular topic and grow in knowledge, skills, and self-awareness.
That last part is key. If nobody in an audience has the will or ability to investigate the world around them, it doesn't matter what platitude you feed them.
This is so true! After founding my own company I quickly learned that the price for having these joyful moments is also having to deal with stuff likes taxes, hiring, etc.
But then again, this can also become a highly enjoyable thing. I hated it for the first months but after a year, I actually enjoy the business side as well. It challenges me as an engineering person to leave my comfort zone, and provides for a chance to learn something new.
To find what you love is a good thing, always. The path taken may sometimes be unpleasant but in the end it will be rewarding if you stick to your goals.
There is so much truth in the Nike claim :-) "Just do it."
To play devil's advocate: it sounds like you let your 12-year-old self pick your career, not knowing what it would entail, and now you're trying to rationalize it. You say you love your work, except what you have to do this morning, and you're putting off another task that needs doing ("for obvious reasons"?). That's not exactly the behavior I associate with love.
It's called "work" because it needs doing, not because it's inherently unpleasant. Your boss won't make a penny more just because you don't happen to like doing it.
(I see the same thing with relationships. There are people I'd be miserable to be with, but that certainly doesn't mean everyone would. Likewise, many people pick a mate in high school and then discover 10 or 20 years later that their teenage self wasn't such a great decision-maker, or simply that they've changed as they've grown.)
I switched careers recently, after many years in software, and now I adore going to work -- every day, every task. I cannot believe they pay me for this. How would you know if all other jobs would also be "crap work" for you if you haven't tried any of them yourself?
EDIT: I'm glad I used a throwaway for this comment! Are people so offended by the concept of needing to try something to discover if it's pleasant or not? Or that another job might be a better fit for them?
Agreed that something being called "work" doesn't mean that it has to be unpleasant, but like you said, it's called "work" because it needs to be done, and in most cases ALL of it needs to be done, even the parts that a given individual might not enjoy. It also might be true that even though a person doesn't like some aspects of their work, they still get a lot of fulfillment from other aspects of their work, and are also compensated well financially, so as to make it worth the tradeoff to sometimes have to do tasks they don't enjoy. And really are there people that truly take great delight from reviewing a help file? Somebody has to get it done. As long as that kind of work doesn't become the only type of work you are doing, what's the problem?
People can be passionate about something and it doesn't necessarily mean that the passion is a positive thing. You can be passionately angry, or passionately annoyed and upset. This is why it's useful to reframe passion as something that is not purely positive.
Advice that my father gave my siblings and me, "Make a career out of a field you're interested in, with colleagues you can tolerate, that affords a standard of living you can accept." All three of these criteria are fairly weak individually. The first is not passion, merely interest. The second is just "tolerate". And the last one is flexible in that people may have different expectations in income. The power is when all three combine: they should hopefully form a life of decent work experience and financial stability. Admittedly a lot more pagmatic than finding and making a career out of the thing you enjoy most - but considerably more achievable.
There are plenty of things I am more passionate about than software development, but doesn't fulfill the other two categories. Those make for good hobbies, but usually not good careers.
The advice isn't bad, it's just being interpreted badly.
You may find computer programming totally boring, and you may find environmental volunteering very fulfilling. But you're good at programming and it pays well. So take your passion, environmental volunteering, and work hard to get a programming job that is related to environmentalism. Now you're doing something boring, but in service of a cause that is meaningful to you.
> "How to cultivate a “growth” mind-set in the young, future-psychology-experiment subjects of America? If you’re a parent, you can avoid dropping new hobbies as soon as they become difficult. Beyond that, there’s not a clear way to develop a growth mind-set about interests"
...Or, don't tell your kids what they should do, don't prevent them from trying new things, and engage them in different subjects in a way that inspire wonder and instill a sense of possibility and accomplishment.
I respectfully disagree. I think this is precisely where the "follow your passion" advice logically concludes a lot of the time and it results in a painful search for gainful employment. I spent years trying to follow this mantra and it left me unfulfilled, confused, and resentful.
As soon as I went back to doing what I am innately good at, I became much happier. I instead focused on improving my skills and having a positive impact at my workplace with the people I work with. This has lead to far more fulfillment than when I was "following my passion."
I also would like to add that I think "follow your passion" is largely broken because its hard to know what that even is a lot of the time. And then taking something fleeting and attempting to build a life on top of it is reckless. This week I might enjoy cooking and trying to get better at that. Should I then drop everything and go to culinary school? This week I enjoy carpentry, should I start a carpentry business? Now its gardening, should I become a landscaper? etc...
Well first off, I'm sorry you had that experience, that sucks, and I'm glad you're better off now.
I think what I'm suggesting is that if you have an idea that your passion might be gardening, you don't have to become a landscaper. You could work for a company that develops non-patented disease-resistant seeds, or a company that grows plants for sale in big box stores, or maybe even a small start-up that tries to connect small farmers that grow unique crops to restaurants that want to provide a unique menu.
Maybe it should be re-worded as "try to combine your skills with your interests".
I disagree with that. If you don't know a long term passion then obviously you can't just find gainful employment. The point of 'follow your passion' is more of opportunity and what your passions are worth to you. You don't just quit your job and launch into the wild, you make responsible decisions over time that can lead you into something that is more fulfilling in your life.
I'm glad you figured out what works for you, and I agree the mantra of 'follow your passion' is very misleading. But if we're all comfortable being where we're at nobody goes anywhere. And at the same time only following what you wanted also tends to lead nowhere.
There is only so much need for programmers in environmental volunteering. There is a great need for programmers who can write software for insurance companies. I know a number of great programmers who have left those jobs because they are doing boring. The ones who remain find things to enjoy outside of work. Some love programming and are happy to be paid to do it, but most are just great programmers doing a boring job 9-5 and going home at night to something they love. The only thing they love about their job is it is 9-5, overtime is rare, and they have to take a two week paid vacation every year (a fraud prevention measure to make it hard to cover any wrong doing).
Likewise, nobody is passionate about hauling my trash to the dump. (I have kids in diapers so my trash stinks) Nobody is passionate about cleaning septic systems. The jobs have to be done though.
All of the above jobs have something in common: well paid compared the the level of skill required. The people who do them have learned to do their job, and they have learned to find something else in life to enjoy.
I could be inspired to haul trash. If I knew the system put in place was designed to get people to minimize their actual trash, that organic waste was being reused properly for compost, and that multi-stream recycling was in place, I would feel pretty good about what I was doing. Work in waste management: save the planet.
Sure there will be boring tasks to do in every project, but there are usually interesting ones too. If you can have fun with your co-workers, it also makes boring work more enjoyable.
The most boring job I ever held was working in an office supply store. The people were boring, the customers were boring (and there weren't that many of them). I even worked in a warehouse on a packing line. That was pretty boring work, but the staff there found ways to amuse themselves and it was always busy. The days went by quickly.
> Now you're doing something boring, but in service of a cause that is meaningful to you.
Finding your passion is much better advice than doing what you think people want you to be doing with your life. I honestly think that's all it means. Do something that connects to you. People don't like to think about being all alone in the world, but the hard truth of life is one day we might be. You don't want to stick yourself in a panopticon of memories reminding you of choices you didn't choose independently. It's not the worst thing to happen to a person, but it's very similar to the abstract functionality of PTSD. Trying to escape yourself while finding your own value system can be just as imprisoning, especially if your value system actually winds up aligning with whoever chose whatever for you.
I've made these mistakes in life, so, trying to return to a version of myself where I had my own passion. But it just loops back around, and that's...it sucks. Finding stuff to do that resonates as crystal clear true to you is really, really important. Don't knock it because being respected and valued and admired by others is nice to experience. Here in an instant and gone in a flash. And if those things don't connect to you at core, it's really, really hard rebuilding yourself without going completely insane. It breaks you down and you have to build yourself back up again. Over and over. It seems to come at a cost I can't identify entirely. Sort of thing that makes you want to stare for a thousand miles and just wonder 'why'. And if you can't find anything in your life to be joyful and accepting about, it just leads to a silent variant of rage. Strong arguments, prickly, walled off people. This gets compounded if the only things you seem to enjoy may be a bit on the stigmatized side of things, or simply, not in line with current trends. So this cycle, of being broken and having to rebuild yourself, you don't want it to control you. You want to have control over it.
Finding your passion, accepting it. Very important to being happy and being able to improve lives around you.
I disagree here. Telling our kids what they should do is a good-sized chunk of a parent's job, all the way from "Don't touch that stove" to "Pick a public place to meet strangers from the internet." "Don't major in art history at a $30k/year school unless we win the lottery" is the same class of advice, and you can be sure my kids will hear it from me.
"Don't major in art history at a $30k/year school unless we win the lottery"
If you put it in precisely those terms, I would wager one of your kids will, of all possible career choices, choose to major in art history for exactly $30k/year.
> Now you're doing something boring, but in service of a cause that is meaningful to you.
I think this is a good balance.
Another way to look at it is from a "theory of change" [1] mindset. I discovered this idea a few weeks ago, from a HN comment, I believe. You envision some type of change that you want to bring about in the world, and then you work backwards in concrete steps in order to figure out how to make it happen. What's cool about this is that it gives you a clear purpose for going outside of your comfort zone and learning new skills. E.g. maybe you're a programmer, and you want to get the US on renewable energy. You're good at programming, but through your analysis you realize that persuading people (politics) is the most likely path to your goal. So you start improving your interpersonal skills.
As far as growth mindset, it's strange that the article said "Beyond that, there's not a clear way to develop a growth mindset about interests." The canonical book on the topic [2] offers many more ideas on how to cultivate growth mindset.
But not everyone has the potential to be Steve Jobs. Not just because most people are rather more ordinary, but because there are a limited number of jobs that are really fun, greatly admired, and fairly well remunerated, which is what most people want.
The problem is, the people who give these sorts of speeches are the outliers: the folks who have made a name for themselves in some very challenging, competitive, and high-status field. No one ever brings in the regional sales manager for a medical supplies firm to say, "Yeah, I didn't get to be CEO. But I wake up happy most mornings, my kids are great, and my golf game gets better every year."
That's most people. But what does Steve Jobs have to tell them?
I find that even when I'm working on projects I'm passionate about, there are still days - and plenty of them - when the work is a relentless grind of frustration and dullness.
Even when you're doing exactly what you want to do, it's still going to be tedious a lot of the time. And even if you're in the lucky position of being able to hand grunt work over to other people, admin, management, planning, and other distractions are never going to go away.
Interestingly, top CEOs rarely talk about their inner lives, so we have no idea how happy or fulfilled they truly are.
The first thst happened when I became a lead is that I got to do a lot more of the thankless grunt work so that my teammates can focus on implementing the (relatively) fun new features.
Everyone wants to be the exception, no one wants to deal with reality. Especially in the age of social media where we can watch the exceptions enjoying their life all day long. And the few moments where it might show that they aren’t, you don’t even see those. We even try to mimick what we see by broadcasting our own lives into the ether in the hopes that somone sees it and tells us how great we are.
The reality for most people is they will not have a fulfilling or meaningful career. Most people do mostly worthless work for a paycheck they can enjoy elsewhere. This is oddly MORE true in tech than in many other jobs like trade. If you’re a plumber and you fix a pipe at least you know somone used it. You can spend decades in tech working on things that go nowhere, never get released or idle and then collapse and make good money doing it.
But that’s the system we have. You are paid whatever you can convince society that it owes you and the correlation to your actual contribution is increasingly more and more loose.
I think for the vast majority of Americans their passion is simply making money. Some are better at it than others.
I help people get data science jobs for a living (and I'm an otherwise annoying career advice giver to others) and this is the ONLY book I recommend everyone to read. I've read it probably 10 times and it's a quick read, finds a good balance between stories and developing his framework further, but much harder to implement the advice.
But he installs a powerful mental framework for thinking about careers and gives you a new way of looking at the world. You may not see "results" immediately, but it really helps you focus on how to determine what work traits are meaningful for you and the types of career moves you should make to match.
Deep Work is an excellent follow up on the tactics / daily practice, and also a must read for knowledge workers.
In particular, I used the advice in the book to help me stay motivated when working on code bases that old, large, occasionally crufty, and once in a while downright nasty. Over time, I've grown to actually enjoy this kind of work.
And as it turns out, it's pretty useful to enjoy the 'dirty jobs' of programming. Companies don't run big old code because they're on love with it. They do it because the code is making them money. And because it's making them money, and they know it, they're not afraid to pay to improve it. And the neat thing is that when working on this kind of code, you often get to work with fun newer bits of tech, too. For example, there's no reason you can't use React to spice up an old ASP.NET Web Forms site, as long as using React is the best/fastest way to deliver value for the task you're trying to accomplish.
I'm not sure if any of that it useful, but at least it's one bit of data indicating that the book motivated someone to push through the pain and become good at (and enjoy) something that wasn't a passion at the start.
Didn't read the article yet, but this is the premise behind that book and a lot of the writings on his blog. I highly recommend this book as well as Deep Work if you're a knowledge worker.
One of the bigger points he makes is putting in the hard work and eventually you'll get to a place where that thing develops into your passion and affords you lots of free time, flexibility, autonomy, respect, etc...
I’ve just finished reading it. He comes up with a series of rules and backs them up with anecdotes though I don’t think they are thoroughly tested. But they do help you think about it more deeply. It helped bring these different ideas I’ve heard before into a more coherent form. Though personally I think you should follow what you’re interested in or suited to as it makes it a lot easier.
I'm a big Cal Newport fan. Compared to other authors I've read, his books seem to have a good mix of practical, technical, and high-level advice. "So Good They Can't Ignore You" in particular is absolutely worth the time to read
Except it's universally true that the most "successful" people in the world did "follow their passion."
A different way to say it is that, people who make big impacts on the world are obsessed with the right problem at the right place, and the right time.
We all know the crank who has been obsessed with some problem or some technology forever, but was just at the wrong place and wrong time to be successful with it.
The VR field has many of these people floating around all pissed off that Palmer Luckey got the glory.
Both people followed their passions, being "successful" just happened to line up for one of them instead of the others.
The reason "follow your passion" is awful advice is because there is no way for an individual to really predict what is going to be a sustainable way to live and most "obsessives" end up only marginally contributing to whatever their field is because the timing is wrong. This pattern seems to hold everywhere, sports, comedy, physics, economics etc...
However I can't think of one example of someone who was wildly successful who was not obsessed or "passionate" about what they were doing. Whether or not you accidentally find it or deliberately seems to be irrelevant.
I for one would like someone to describe how you know if you're passionate/obsessed with something - cause I know for myself I can get obsessed about many different things.
"This study was a preregistered replication, meaning the authors stated at the outset what their hypothesis and methods would be. This process is meant to prevent p-hacking, a shady data practice that has cast a shadow over many psychology studies in recent years."
Yes I noticed that too. I'm starting to think psychology may end up ahead of other fields actually - the replication crisis is much wider than just psychology but it seems to have come to the surface there first. And so they're the first to tackle it.
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That is probably the biggest load of crap foisted on pop culture in a while. I love what I do, and I work every day. This morning's task is reviewing a help file for accuracy. Hol-ee shite, that's not why I got into programming computers when I was 12. But it needs to be done, and I'm one of the ones that can knowledgeably review it. I really should write that test plan, but I keep putting it off for obvious reasons. Oh, sure, I get to play Puzzle Solver by shuffling some bits around, and it's what I spend most of my days doing, but it ain't all fun and games.
And that's just Working for The Man(tm). Gonna start a brewpub? Maybe an online SaaS business? Oh, my friend, your crap work has just begun; so much so, you might have to leave the fun stuff to your employees. You will work every day, and hard.
Don't get the wrong idea, I look forward to going to work most days, and I've been doing this for a long while. But there's a reason they call it "work", and there's a reason they pay you. Enjoy the hell out of the enjoyable parts, and when the less enjoyable work comes, remember that you are (if of the average HN demographic) paid handsomely for it.
I thought this would be a dream experience, sitting at my computer and creating beautiful prose for hours a day, my creativity flowing like a river.
After about 20,000 words (a debut novel should be between 70-100k words), it turned into hard work. One thousand words a day becomes quite tedious, especially when the initial steam wears off.
Great, so I pushed through for months, putting in the daily grind. Draft complete at 90k words! First round of edits, cutting almost 20,000 words (about a month of work, all for "nothing"). Back at the writing grind again to get the word count and story aligned to be more marketable.
Edit number two complete. Edit number three complete. Beta readers telling me there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This character sucks, this character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc. Just now wrapping up edit number four, and I'm actually quite happy with how it reads.
But now... onto the business end of this deal, querying agents. Agents reject about 99% of the pitches that come into their inbox. The 1% gets a full manuscript request. Of those 1%, about 10% get offers of representation.
An offer of representation often turns into several more rounds of edits before the agent will sell it to a publisher. So if I'm lucky enough to get an agent, it'll be even more editing (my least favorite part of this process so far).
THEN, the agent has to successfully sell the book to a publisher. The odds that this happens also pretty low. And since I'm a first-time writer, I'd be looking at a pretty small five figure advance for what will end up being about two years of work.
Anyways... writing, my favorite form of art, has become a roll-of-the-dice grind. I'm not sure I would go back in time and do this again, but regardless, I've come this far so...
I think chasing a "dream career" whatever that is can be a tough lesson in setting realistic expectations in what it means to make money.
> Beta readers telling me there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This character sucks, this character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc.
I think what makes a great story, and novelist for that matter, are some of those rough edges and you should ignore the critics just like an opinionated CEO might be advised to do. Those people may be looking out for you, but you're the artist and can use your vision to create your world with your unique voice!
But if you find your work fundamentally painless, you can put any amount of passion in on top: you're still getting it done on your lowest days, and on your good ones you will cruise into exceptional output.
As such you can derive the well-known market preference for "bandaids over vitamins" from the sum total of all individuals looking for a way to take more of the pain out of their work. But the biggest optimization you can make is simply in choosing which work to do.
I will teach you to be rich does this really well. I don't have a good analogy for fiction but I'm sure they exist.
Or go up to the top of a mountaintop at just the right time for the sky god to make an appearance and hand you the third testament.
Or, go back in time again, choose different parents and become a record scoring footballer. By adopting this strategy you would have the slight challenge of creating a time machine but you will also not have to write those 90000 words, a ghostwriter would be able to just magic out of thin air whatever you bark out loud. They would sort out the plot holes and the movie deal too.
Or you could go back to startupsville again and scratch this itch. It should be possible to crowd-source decent novels in a way that is not so humiliating and nigh on impossible. I know this has been attempted before but the nearest we have to it at the moment it self publishing on Amazon where people do reviews and people buy on the basis of those reviews. There have been success stories with this. But we know those reviews are bought and everything is corrupt.
Joking aside I do think that there is another way of getting published - write the book that needs to be written. Not a rehash of ideas, something new. A new story that does not fit into the existing pantheon of beginnings/middles and endings. Something that people must read and must get their friends to read, no publicity needed. You could make this free and entirely web based, no ISBN number or dead trees. Much like how musicians do stuff for free on YouTube and then a publisher courts them to do something for money. However, even this is not strictly easy and the stories you hear of this often involve a musician who happens to have chosen the right parents, e.g. Lily Allen and how she started on Youtube, only later do we learn of the famous and well connected dad.
Writing a book that has to be written might not be passion though. If you discovered some unjustice going on and were compelled to write then that would not be passion, more of a moral question of not staying silent.
Anyway, regarding the original article, why is it that 87% of people in the workplace are clock watchers, as if serving an eight hour school detention on a daily basis? Clearly they are not following their passion. But, of the 13% that don't clock watch and do have some passion for what they do, these people can be in any department, office or factory. They are not necessarily writing novels, making music, teaching yoga or directing films. Passion is more of a transferable skill that should be taught.
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You can enjoy what you do most of the time though. Thanks to your brain also. I find it harder when working for somebody because money is not necessarily a good enough motivator. But when working on my own project and faced with a tedious task (writing tests, fighting dependencies or whatever it is that you despise), I think why do I want to do it (e.g. I want my project to succeed it and it needs it). You can try to achieve your goal without the thing that you don't like. If you think that this is not possible, then wanting your project to succeed and wanting to do this task are the same thing. They are connected.
Once you realize this it makes things much more simple. Most of suffering seems to come from some semi-conscious story in your brain: I want A but without doing B. Either it's possible to do that or it's not. If it's not then it's just wishful thinking that is only bringing you misery.
The way you think and wire your brain really matters. Instead of "I must do X even though I don't want it". Think "If I want A then X comes with it - do I still want A?". Or find a way to A without X.
For me at least, having that stated explicitly in my mind alters my perception of X. Because it really is hard to hold two logically inconsistent beliefs in your mind when you bring them both into focus. Your brain quick fix is usually some "but..". That's where you need to eliminate wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is imagining reality in some other way than it really is and only leads to frustration.
Accepting things that already are should come pretty naturally though. You may want to change something. But you can't change the past.
But you're coming at it from a different angle, I feel. Instead of "finding your passion", I hear you advising a different way of looking at it such that one can find fulfillment (for lack of better phrasing) in whatever job by matching the story in one's head to reality. I'm on board. Hell, I've been happy doing janitorial work. Was it my passion? Well, no. But it needed to be done, and I could do it, they're paying me, and in the end there's something satisfying about a clean floor. That was enough for me at the time.
I feel like that with coding a lot of the time. I get paid to deal with all the crap work, but those times I get to code something novel or unique are times I would still want even if I didn't have to work.
corollary that should be equally well-known: "because nobody is hiring in that field"
I have a lot of friends in the audio field, and something I've noticed is that doing your passion for a living can take the fun out of it.
For instance, my friends in the audio world don't sit around listening to new loudspeakers, or designing new loudspeakers. They mostly spend their time marketing products and filling orders. Working in audio isn't a whole lot different than working in any other retail field.
But when I work on audio projects? I can do whatever I please, because I'm not doing it to pay my mortgage.
I think this is really a corrupt idea that floats around, and many times influences younger people away from trying to find a career and instead landing themselves in crappy jobs.
For example, some people like to work on cars, but they don't get a job in that because their dumb uncle said this to them, so they spend their time grinding away at a fast food joint and going nowhere in life. Maybe they can poke at their 15 year old car once in a while, but overall their quality of life is not very good, and they basically never get to work on cars. If they had instead gone into professional car service, they would have a decent paying job and be able to reach a comparatively higher standard.
Does that mean that it's not work? Of course not. You will always have to do work and it's not always pleasant, but at least you can leverage your interests and strengths. If you get bored or annoyed at working on something you used to think was fun, then take a vacation or find something else do to over the weekends to get your mind off it. If you are annoyed that it's not fun anymore, then -- welcome to adulthood.
That is truly the difference between having a job and setting yourself up for a successful career.
I can split my friends into two groups: those that followed their passions and are happy, and those that did not and have loans for silly things, egos that depend on their career, and a consistent need for validation by society.
Following your passion isn't about instant gratification, perhaps people are disappointed by this.
Would it be more fair to divide your peers into people who searched for their passion, and those who just went with the flow?
When people say "find your passion", I think they mean to say "stumble upon your passion". "Find" is too passive a word, perhaps "search" is better.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving
I was very into photography as a hobby at one point (still am to some degree) and I even toyed with the idea that maybe this is something I could do professionally. But the reality is that I would have unlikely become a staff photographer for Life or National Geographic and would much more likely have ended up as the photographer for the college news service--who was actually quite good but mostly took photos of rich alums shaking hands with the president.
Everyone differs of course. But, in general, one good strategy is to do something that you like well enough most of the time, you're good at, pays well and use your spare time and money to pursue things you like as hobbies.
Your passion is drinking beer, so you are going to open a pub...
I hope your passion extends to cleaning vomit from hard to reach places, and the smell or beer mildew early the morning.
I think the upshot of the quote is supposed to be something like this:
Figure out the set of interests which pique your curiosity. Know the difference between that set and the set of interests that society irrationally deems respectable through peer-pressure, propaganda, and other FUD. Pick something from the first set (possibly intersecting the 2nd set) and you are unlikely to feel like every day is filled with a sense of dread and drudgery.
But here-- as in the original quote-- there is a hidden premise that the audience already has interests in the first set. I think there's also a premise that the audience also has the tools to investigate a particular topic and grow in knowledge, skills, and self-awareness.
That last part is key. If nobody in an audience has the will or ability to investigate the world around them, it doesn't matter what platitude you feed them.
But then again, this can also become a highly enjoyable thing. I hated it for the first months but after a year, I actually enjoy the business side as well. It challenges me as an engineering person to leave my comfort zone, and provides for a chance to learn something new.
To find what you love is a good thing, always. The path taken may sometimes be unpleasant but in the end it will be rewarding if you stick to your goals.
There is so much truth in the Nike claim :-) "Just do it."
It's called "work" because it needs doing, not because it's inherently unpleasant. Your boss won't make a penny more just because you don't happen to like doing it.
(I see the same thing with relationships. There are people I'd be miserable to be with, but that certainly doesn't mean everyone would. Likewise, many people pick a mate in high school and then discover 10 or 20 years later that their teenage self wasn't such a great decision-maker, or simply that they've changed as they've grown.)
I switched careers recently, after many years in software, and now I adore going to work -- every day, every task. I cannot believe they pay me for this. How would you know if all other jobs would also be "crap work" for you if you haven't tried any of them yourself?
EDIT: I'm glad I used a throwaway for this comment! Are people so offended by the concept of needing to try something to discover if it's pleasant or not? Or that another job might be a better fit for them?
There are plenty of things I am more passionate about than software development, but doesn't fulfill the other two categories. Those make for good hobbies, but usually not good careers.
You may find computer programming totally boring, and you may find environmental volunteering very fulfilling. But you're good at programming and it pays well. So take your passion, environmental volunteering, and work hard to get a programming job that is related to environmentalism. Now you're doing something boring, but in service of a cause that is meaningful to you.
> "How to cultivate a “growth” mind-set in the young, future-psychology-experiment subjects of America? If you’re a parent, you can avoid dropping new hobbies as soon as they become difficult. Beyond that, there’s not a clear way to develop a growth mind-set about interests"
...Or, don't tell your kids what they should do, don't prevent them from trying new things, and engage them in different subjects in a way that inspire wonder and instill a sense of possibility and accomplishment.
As soon as I went back to doing what I am innately good at, I became much happier. I instead focused on improving my skills and having a positive impact at my workplace with the people I work with. This has lead to far more fulfillment than when I was "following my passion."
I also would like to add that I think "follow your passion" is largely broken because its hard to know what that even is a lot of the time. And then taking something fleeting and attempting to build a life on top of it is reckless. This week I might enjoy cooking and trying to get better at that. Should I then drop everything and go to culinary school? This week I enjoy carpentry, should I start a carpentry business? Now its gardening, should I become a landscaper? etc...
I think what I'm suggesting is that if you have an idea that your passion might be gardening, you don't have to become a landscaper. You could work for a company that develops non-patented disease-resistant seeds, or a company that grows plants for sale in big box stores, or maybe even a small start-up that tries to connect small farmers that grow unique crops to restaurants that want to provide a unique menu.
Maybe it should be re-worded as "try to combine your skills with your interests".
I'm glad you figured out what works for you, and I agree the mantra of 'follow your passion' is very misleading. But if we're all comfortable being where we're at nobody goes anywhere. And at the same time only following what you wanted also tends to lead nowhere.
Likewise, nobody is passionate about hauling my trash to the dump. (I have kids in diapers so my trash stinks) Nobody is passionate about cleaning septic systems. The jobs have to be done though.
All of the above jobs have something in common: well paid compared the the level of skill required. The people who do them have learned to do their job, and they have learned to find something else in life to enjoy.
I don't know how to get established cities to follow such a program, but Taiwan seems to have figured it out. https://www.wsj.com/articles/taiwan-the-worlds-geniuses-of-g...
The most boring job I ever held was working in an office supply store. The people were boring, the customers were boring (and there weren't that many of them). I even worked in a warehouse on a packing line. That was pretty boring work, but the staff there found ways to amuse themselves and it was always busy. The days went by quickly.
Finding your passion is much better advice than doing what you think people want you to be doing with your life. I honestly think that's all it means. Do something that connects to you. People don't like to think about being all alone in the world, but the hard truth of life is one day we might be. You don't want to stick yourself in a panopticon of memories reminding you of choices you didn't choose independently. It's not the worst thing to happen to a person, but it's very similar to the abstract functionality of PTSD. Trying to escape yourself while finding your own value system can be just as imprisoning, especially if your value system actually winds up aligning with whoever chose whatever for you.
I've made these mistakes in life, so, trying to return to a version of myself where I had my own passion. But it just loops back around, and that's...it sucks. Finding stuff to do that resonates as crystal clear true to you is really, really important. Don't knock it because being respected and valued and admired by others is nice to experience. Here in an instant and gone in a flash. And if those things don't connect to you at core, it's really, really hard rebuilding yourself without going completely insane. It breaks you down and you have to build yourself back up again. Over and over. It seems to come at a cost I can't identify entirely. Sort of thing that makes you want to stare for a thousand miles and just wonder 'why'. And if you can't find anything in your life to be joyful and accepting about, it just leads to a silent variant of rage. Strong arguments, prickly, walled off people. This gets compounded if the only things you seem to enjoy may be a bit on the stigmatized side of things, or simply, not in line with current trends. So this cycle, of being broken and having to rebuild yourself, you don't want it to control you. You want to have control over it.
Finding your passion, accepting it. Very important to being happy and being able to improve lives around you.
I disagree here. Telling our kids what they should do is a good-sized chunk of a parent's job, all the way from "Don't touch that stove" to "Pick a public place to meet strangers from the internet." "Don't major in art history at a $30k/year school unless we win the lottery" is the same class of advice, and you can be sure my kids will hear it from me.
If you put it in precisely those terms, I would wager one of your kids will, of all possible career choices, choose to major in art history for exactly $30k/year.
I think this is a good balance.
Another way to look at it is from a "theory of change" [1] mindset. I discovered this idea a few weeks ago, from a HN comment, I believe. You envision some type of change that you want to bring about in the world, and then you work backwards in concrete steps in order to figure out how to make it happen. What's cool about this is that it gives you a clear purpose for going outside of your comfort zone and learning new skills. E.g. maybe you're a programmer, and you want to get the US on renewable energy. You're good at programming, but through your analysis you realize that persuading people (politics) is the most likely path to your goal. So you start improving your interpersonal skills.
[1]: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/theoryofchange
As far as growth mindset, it's strange that the article said "Beyond that, there's not a clear way to develop a growth mindset about interests." The canonical book on the topic [2] offers many more ideas on how to cultivate growth mindset.
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Carol-S-Dweck/dp/0...
Personally, I feel like people who take "find your passion" literally are just using the advice to rationalize their own entitlement.
A sample:
But not everyone has the potential to be Steve Jobs. Not just because most people are rather more ordinary, but because there are a limited number of jobs that are really fun, greatly admired, and fairly well remunerated, which is what most people want.
The problem is, the people who give these sorts of speeches are the outliers: the folks who have made a name for themselves in some very challenging, competitive, and high-status field. No one ever brings in the regional sales manager for a medical supplies firm to say, "Yeah, I didn't get to be CEO. But I wake up happy most mornings, my kids are great, and my golf game gets better every year."
That's most people. But what does Steve Jobs have to tell them?
Even when you're doing exactly what you want to do, it's still going to be tedious a lot of the time. And even if you're in the lucky position of being able to hand grunt work over to other people, admin, management, planning, and other distractions are never going to go away.
Interestingly, top CEOs rarely talk about their inner lives, so we have no idea how happy or fulfilled they truly are.
Musk is depressed so I guess it is not always sunshine and rainbows.
This is somewhat a negative view of the world as a zero sum game.
But it's true. Reality for many people is that their job is something they tolerate, not something they love.
The reality for most people is they will not have a fulfilling or meaningful career. Most people do mostly worthless work for a paycheck they can enjoy elsewhere. This is oddly MORE true in tech than in many other jobs like trade. If you’re a plumber and you fix a pipe at least you know somone used it. You can spend decades in tech working on things that go nowhere, never get released or idle and then collapse and make good money doing it.
But that’s the system we have. You are paid whatever you can convince society that it owes you and the correlation to your actual contribution is increasingly more and more loose.
I think for the vast majority of Americans their passion is simply making money. Some are better at it than others.
I haven't got around to reading it yet, but I'd be interested to know if anyone here found it useful.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/034941...
But he installs a powerful mental framework for thinking about careers and gives you a new way of looking at the world. You may not see "results" immediately, but it really helps you focus on how to determine what work traits are meaningful for you and the types of career moves you should make to match.
Deep Work is an excellent follow up on the tactics / daily practice, and also a must read for knowledge workers.
In particular, I used the advice in the book to help me stay motivated when working on code bases that old, large, occasionally crufty, and once in a while downright nasty. Over time, I've grown to actually enjoy this kind of work.
And as it turns out, it's pretty useful to enjoy the 'dirty jobs' of programming. Companies don't run big old code because they're on love with it. They do it because the code is making them money. And because it's making them money, and they know it, they're not afraid to pay to improve it. And the neat thing is that when working on this kind of code, you often get to work with fun newer bits of tech, too. For example, there's no reason you can't use React to spice up an old ASP.NET Web Forms site, as long as using React is the best/fastest way to deliver value for the task you're trying to accomplish.
I'm not sure if any of that it useful, but at least it's one bit of data indicating that the book motivated someone to push through the pain and become good at (and enjoy) something that wasn't a passion at the start.
One of the bigger points he makes is putting in the hard work and eventually you'll get to a place where that thing develops into your passion and affords you lots of free time, flexibility, autonomy, respect, etc...
A different way to say it is that, people who make big impacts on the world are obsessed with the right problem at the right place, and the right time.
We all know the crank who has been obsessed with some problem or some technology forever, but was just at the wrong place and wrong time to be successful with it.
The VR field has many of these people floating around all pissed off that Palmer Luckey got the glory.
Both people followed their passions, being "successful" just happened to line up for one of them instead of the others.
The reason "follow your passion" is awful advice is because there is no way for an individual to really predict what is going to be a sustainable way to live and most "obsessives" end up only marginally contributing to whatever their field is because the timing is wrong. This pattern seems to hold everywhere, sports, comedy, physics, economics etc...
However I can't think of one example of someone who was wildly successful who was not obsessed or "passionate" about what they were doing. Whether or not you accidentally find it or deliberately seems to be irrelevant.
I for one would like someone to describe how you know if you're passionate/obsessed with something - cause I know for myself I can get obsessed about many different things.
This is a very promising development.