How to do what you love — Notes!

There is this brilliant essay of Paul Graham on “How to do what you love” that is a must read for anyone. Actually, you should read anything he writes.

How to Do What You Love

As usual, here are some notes from me on that.

Since I prefer to re-read several portions, this is a sort of TLDrR (Too Long, Dint Re-read) for myself but you may find something useful too in here.

Quote attributed to Wayne W Dyer

Some thoughts before we get in there: Like many, I have also run behind this ‘purpose of life’ / ‘search what you love’ blah blah for a while but have not been hugely successful in those endeavors. Thankfully, I did not spend much time in those and try to enjoy what I do. Well, it is a journey in any case.

Nonetheless, this article by Paul Graham is worth a read. Even if not to dramatically change your life, it gives a lot of perspectives for you and if you happening to be mentoring someone (say your cousins/nephews/nieces/children), this is very useful.

Now to the notes from the article.

Lies to children

• Children have been misled about the meaning of work: They have been taught that ‘work’ is not equal to ‘fun’. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn’t, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing.
• Instead, 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.
• By the time they reach an age to think about what they’d like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one’s work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork.
• The main reason adults act as if they enjoyed their work was presumably 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

Definition of work

• The definition of work should be “how to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve”. It should break free from the idea of “making a living”.
• Idea of work should not include a large component of pain. If you think something’s supposed to hurt, you’re less likely to notice if you’re doing it wrong

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.
• A friend of Paul Graham, who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell “Don’t do it!” (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way — including, unfortunately, not liking it.
• Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.

Upper & Lower Bounds

• How much to like your work? If you underestimate it, you’ll tend to stop searching too early. You’ll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige — or sheer inertia.
• Upper bound: Do what you love doesn’t mean, do what you would like to do most this second. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It 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. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of “spare time” seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else — even something mindless. But you don’t regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you’ll have terrible problems with procrastination. You’ll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.

Prestige & other sirens

• Best test is: to try to do things that would make your friends say “wow”. But it probably wouldn’t start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven’t had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.
• What you should not do is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.
• 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. Liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you’re going to be good at it;
• The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn’t thought much about what they really 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.
• Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what’s admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.
• The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. The kids think their parents are “materialistic.” Not necessarily. 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.

Discipline: Always produce.

• More often people who do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A, drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after taking it up on the side.
• Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it’s a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can’t tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they’re trying to find their niche.
• Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? 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. Perhaps more importantly, you’ll get into the habit of doing things well.
• Another test you can use is: always produce.
• For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you’re actually writing.
• “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.
• “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

One has to make a living, and it’s hard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes to that destination:

1. 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.
2. The two-job route: to work at things you don’t like to get money to work on things you do.

Now, go & produce something.

Update: Very related to this topic, I found a quote from Marc Andreessen in an interview — At work, seek to contribute. Find the hottest, most vibrant part of the economy you can and figure out how you can contribute best and most. Make yourself of value to the people around you, to your customers and coworkers, and try to increase that value every day.