All Annotations of How to Do What You Love[Preview]

saved by14 people, first byChris Booth on 2006-07-28, last byYuhwei Ling on 2008-06-17

• How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you
  know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most
  people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too
  early.
• To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only
  enjoy, but admire.
• I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things
  that would make your friends say wow.
• 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.
• A friend of mine 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.
• Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most
  people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who
  win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want
  financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it,
  but those who like what they do.
• Bounds
  
  How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you
  know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most
  people, 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.
• I'm not saying friends should be the only audience for your
  work. The more people you can help, the better. But friends should
  be your compass.
• Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you
  would like to do most this second.
• Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired
  of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do
  something.
• As a 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.
• But you don't regard this time as the
  prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn
  it.
• To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only
  enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow,
  that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something.
  If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language
  fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least,
  wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.
• 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.
• 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.
• It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don't
  underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded
  yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented,
  you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If
  you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you
  find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves.
• 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.
• 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.
• "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.
• you have to make a conscious
  effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated
  by what seems possible.
• Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do
  work they love—that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs.
• Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If you work too
  long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. And the best paying
  jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.
• Which route should you take? That depends on how sure you are of
  what you want to do, how good you are at taking orders, how much
  risk you can stand, and the odds that anyone will pay (in your
  lifetime) for what you want to do.
• In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you
  get better results if you use flexible media. So unless you're
  fairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose a
  type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job
  career.
• 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.
• Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most
  people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who
  win lotteries or inherit money.
• Much as everyone thinks they want
  financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it,
  but those who like what they do.
• If you know you can love work, you're in
  the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're
  practically there.

• on 2007-01-27 Dajbelshaw
  Long article on how to choose jobs, etc.