How to Do What You Love - The Diigo Meta page

• 09 Jul 19
  

  F T

  career work essay love do like parents teachers graham

• 26 May 18
  

  Petter Hareim

  "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."
  Powerful article by @paulg on how to do what you truly love & avoid being dragged into pre

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• 16 Nov 17
  

  Rita Zerrizuela
  • To do something well you have to like it.
  • Doing what you love is complicated.
    
    The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing.
  • work was pretty much defined as not-fun.
  • 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.
  • my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it.
  • The main reason they all acted 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.
  • If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do. That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from.
  • conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.
    
    What a recipe for alienation. 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.
  • You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."
  • Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.
  • If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring.
  • It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren't identical.
  • The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.
  • If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong.
  • 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.
    
    Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second.
  • the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. 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.
    
    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. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • What there has to be is a test.
    
  • I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: 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.
  • Sirens
    
    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 the opinion of the rest of the world.
  • It's hard to follow, especially when you're young.  [5] 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.
  • 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 especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on.
  • It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task.
  • 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 other big force leading people astray is money.
  • 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.
  • This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kinds of academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect.
  • people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies, and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs.
  • 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.
  • Discipline
    
    With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.
  • 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.
  • 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. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.
    
  • Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.
  • It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations.
  • it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."
  • Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do work they love—that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs. Really?
  • All we can do is encourage people to do unpleasant work, with money and prestige.
    
    If there's something people still won't do, it seems as if society just has to make do without.
  • So while there may be some things someone has to do, there's a good chance anyone saying that about any particular job is mistaken. Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if no one were willing to do them.

  • Two Routes
    
    There's another sense of "not everyone can do work they love" that's all too true, however. 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: 

      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.
  • The organic route is more common. It happens naturally to anyone who does good work.
  • The disadvantage of this route is that it's slow and uncertain.
  • The two-job route has several variants depending on how long you work for money at a time. At one extreme is the "day job," where you work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on what you love in your spare time. At the other extreme you work at something till you make enough not to  have to work for money again.
  • The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. 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.
    
    The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over obstacles.
  • The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music. If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you have more freedom of choice.
  • if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.
    
    Don't decide too soon.
  • 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.
  • When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information.
  • 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.
  • Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. 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.
  • when we make kids do boring work, like arithmetic drills, instead of admitting frankly that it's boring, we try to disguise it with superficial decorations.
  • [4] 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.
  • The reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to impress are not very discerning.
  • [6] This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously.

  61 more annotations...

• 13 Aug 17
  

  jorge grunberg

  discurso

  • To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire
  • 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. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
    

  1 more annotation...

• 11 Jan 17
  

  work jobs passion

  • To do something well you have to like it.
  • Doing what you love is complicated.
  • When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing.
  • And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.
    
  • The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. 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. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.
    
  • Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of them.
  • 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.
  • By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the private jet pilot. But I don't think the bank manager really did.
    
    The main reason they all acted 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.
  • Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do.
  • What a recipe for alienation. 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. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."
  • Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.
  • The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring.  [2] Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house. [3]
  • 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.
    
    If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.
    
  • 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.
  • It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.
    
    But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. 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.
    
    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. 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.
  • I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. 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.
    
    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.
  • So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.
    
  • I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: 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.
  • 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.
  • Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious.
  • Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
  • 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 other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous.
  • That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.)
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.
  • 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. Not necessarily, but probably.
  • 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. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.
  • So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations.
  • Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."
  • Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if no one were willing to do them.

  • There's another sense of "not everyone can do work they love" that's all too true, however. 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: 

      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. 

     The organic route is more common. It happens naturally to anyone who does good work. A young architect has to take whatever work he can get, but if he does well he'll gradually be in a position to pick and choose among projects. The disadvantage of this route is that it's slow and uncertain. Even tenure is not real freedom.
  • The two-job route has several variants depending on how long you work for money at a time. At one extreme is the "day job," where you work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on what you love in your spare time. At the other extreme you work at something till you make enough not to  have to work for money again.
    
  • The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. 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. If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.
  • When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work. When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information. Even in college you get little idea what various types of work are like. At best you may have a couple internships, but not all jobs offer internships, and those that do don't teach you much more about the work than being a batboy teaches you about playing baseball.
    
  • 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.
  • Most people would say, I'd take that problem. Give me a million dollars and I'll figure out what to do. But it's harder than it looks. 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. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.
  • Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. 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.
  • The reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to impress are not very discerning.

  44 more annotations...

• 24 Oct 16
  

  Celia Emmelhainz
• 07 Oct 16
  

  jacques martin
  • 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.
  • to try to do things that would make your friends say wow.
  • It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task.
  • The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it
  • always produce
  • The reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to impress are not very discerning.

  4 more annotations...

• 27 Sep 16
  

  Adrien Joly

  How to Do What You Love via Instapaper http://ift.tt/xRWx4J

  IFTTT Instapaper

• 02 Jul 16
  

  ronansandford

  work job life education inspiration

• 10 Jan 16
  

  greatboywlk
  • To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire
  • Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious.
  • 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 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. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
  • One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it
  • Another test you can use is: always produce
  • So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.

  5 more annotations...

• 24 Nov 15
  

  Lee Dryburgh

  "But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. 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."

  career

• 22 Oct 15
  

  cmbarker
  • Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do?
  • conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things
  • Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."
  • A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house
  • The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • spare time
  • But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.
  • When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know?
  • It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.
  • 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.
  • It's hard to find work you love
  • if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial
  • 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.
  • One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it
  • always produce
  • But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."
  • 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.
  • When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information.
  • 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.

  20 more annotations...

• 03 Oct 15
  

  elina_ulrich
  • 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.
• 06 Sep 15
  

  leinar
  • Doing what you love is complicated.
  • Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing.
  • The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work
  • the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff late
  • three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.
  • A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.
  • The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve
  • 
    How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching
  • 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
  • As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure
  • 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 try to do things that would make your friends say wow.
  • You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.
  • 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.
  • Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind
  • Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious
  • The other big force leading people astray is money.
  • The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine
  • 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 mone
  • as parents, they share risks more than rewards
  • 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
  • Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness
  • One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it
  • Another test you can use is: always produce
  • you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible
  • 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.
  • The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice
  • there are walls of varying heights between different kinds of work.
  • Don't decide too soon.
  • When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information
  • In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media
  • 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
  • Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties
  • 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.

  34 more annotations...

• 

  pavneet9
  • actly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.
    
• 19 Aug 15
  

  Peter Bienek

  lifehacks work inspiration career

• 11 Aug 15
  

  sdlenker
  • The main reason they all acted 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.
  • Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do. That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from. Just as houses all over America are full of  chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.
    
    What a recipe for alienation. 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. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."
  • If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.
  • If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.
  • If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.
  • 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.
  • The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring.  [2] Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.
  • It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on.
  • 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.
    
    Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.
    
    It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.
    
    But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. 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.
    
    Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach.

  7 more annotations...

• 03 Apr 15
  

  mattcolliver

  vault values purpose

  • 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
  • Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.
  • One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it.
  • Another test you can use is: always produce.

  2 more annotations...

• 14 Jan 15
  

  kimblevins12

  work inspiration advice essay

• 08 Jan 15
  

  Aden AC

  do what you love manifesto

• 07 Jan 15
  
  • Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.
  • But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. 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.
  • 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. 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.
    
    I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. 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.
    
    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.
  • 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. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
  • Most good mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobs as math professors, whereas in the departments at the other end of the spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver: people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies, and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs. Math would happen without math departments
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

  • There's another sense of "not everyone can do work they love" that's all too true, however. 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: 

      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. 

     The organic route is more common. It happens naturally to anyone who does good work. A young architect has to take whatever work he can get, but if he does well he'll gradually be in a position to pick and choose among projects. The disadvantage of this route is that it's slow and uncertain. Even tenure is not real freedom.

  7 more annotations...

• 01 Jan 15
  

  Gary Schmidt
• 16 Dec 14
  

  Hae-in Lim

  life career advice education happiness

  • A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.
  • 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.
  • If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.
  • 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.
  • If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.
  • I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: 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, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.
  • 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.
  • Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on.
  • It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
  • When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living."
  • The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine.
  • 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. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
  • This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kinds of academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect. Most good mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobs as math professors
  • the other end of the spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver: people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies, and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs.
  • The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money.
  • 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?
  • 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?
  • "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.
  • domestic servants. For millennia that was the canonical example of a job "someone had to do." And yet in the mid twentieth century servants practically disappeared in rich countries, and the rich have just had to do without.
  • One has to make a living, and it's hard to get paid for doing work you love.
  • The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. 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.
  • If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you have more freedom of choice.
  • If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.

  35 more annotations...

• 07 Dec 14
  

  Wisdom's Hammer

  Career

• 06 Dec 14
  

  Jordan Goldman

  To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated. The very idea is foreign to what most ...

  misc. start-up tips

• 29 Oct 14
  

  martinu

  potential plus route programme glp

  • he 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.
  • 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. If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.
  • 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.

  4 more annotations...

• 20 Oct 14
  

  abhishek007
  • my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it.
  • The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.
  • 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.
  • to try to do things that would make your friends say wow.

  2 more annotations...

• 23 Aug 14
  

  mineofnuggets
  • houses all over America are full of  chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings
  • conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things
• 16 Aug 14
  

  zzanghwi
  • To do something well you have to like it.
  • "Do what you love."
  • my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it
  • I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing.

  2 more annotations...

• 13 Aug 14
  

  ceravis

  work career inspiration advice lifehacks

• 31 Jul 14
  

  George Kao

• 18 Jul 14
  

  Tadeusz Szewczyk (Tad Chef)

  work howto entrepreneurship self-improvement analysis advice

• 13 Jul 14
  

  Gary Schreiner
• 05 Jul 14
  

  Ewan McIntosh

  IFTTT Delicious entrepreneurship business inspiration creativity

• 22 Jun 14
  

  carlosgonzalezsf
  • To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.
• 20 Jun 14
  

  Gianluca Ciccarelli
  • 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.
  • there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work
  • 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 the opinion of the rest of the world.
  • That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But 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; you have to like making up elaborate lies.
  • If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious
  • The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine.
  • 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.

  5 more annotations...

• 10 Jun 14
  

  jane cooper
• 28 May 14
  

  johan snyman

  read

• 21 May 14
  

  Stephanie Teltz
  • conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.
  • the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living
  • The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.
  • How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching.
  • Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second
  • As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure.
  • If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems with procrastination.
  • To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire.
  • What there has to be is a test.
  • You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.
  • 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 the opinion of the rest of the world.
  • 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.
  • Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious.
  • So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.
  • Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious.
  • It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
  • Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other.
  • The other big force leading people astray is money.
  • "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.)
  • The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it
  • This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kinds of academic work
  • 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
  • Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain.
  • 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.
  • finding work you love does usually require discipline.
  • More often people who do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball.
  • Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness.
  • Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest?
  • Another test you can use is: always produce.
  • "Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love.
  • Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.
  • It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them.
  • And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."
  • The organic route:
  • The two-job route:
  • The organic route is more common
  • The disadvantage of this route is that it's slow and uncertain.
  • "day job,"
  • Worse still, anything you work on changes you.
  • And the best paying jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.
  • The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over obstacles.
  • The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music.
  • In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media.
  • 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
  • Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties.
  • Whichever route you take, expect a struggle.
  • Donald Hall said young would-be poets were mistaken to be so obsessed with being published. But you can imagine what it would do for a 24 year old to get a poem published in The New Yorker. Now to people he meets at parties he's a real poet. Actually he's no better or worse than he was before, but to a clueless audience like that, the approval of an official authority makes all the difference. So it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. The reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to impress are not very discerning.

  48 more annotations...

• 16 May 14
  

  dreaming in the void
• 23 Apr 14
  

  Nollind Whachell
• 27 Mar 14
  

  Jennifer Culp

  career employment work

• 21 Mar 14
  

  reader just
  • The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to
  • conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.
  • School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty.
  • And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."
  • idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on.
  • The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.
  • If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong.
  • 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.
  • Here's an 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.
  • Unproductive pleasures pall eventually.
  • 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. 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
  • 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.
  • 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 the opinion of the rest of the world
  • When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know?
  • restige 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.
  • If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious.
  • So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.
  • 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 other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous.
  • The danger is when money is combined with prestige
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • "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. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.
  • require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."

  • 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: 

      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.
  • The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer
  • anything you work on changes you.
  • And the best paying jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.
  • If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you have more freedom of choice.
  • . But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.
  • When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work. When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information.
  • 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.

  38 more annotations...

• 18 Feb 14
  

  Moriah McCracken

  work career inspiration advice essay

  • Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do?
  • School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty.
  • A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house. [3]
  • The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

  6 more annotations...

• 29 Jan 14
  

  Corinne Weisgerber

  advice

• 

  Anirudh Shrinivas

  How to Do What You Love http://t.co/f9JUVLyhSN

• 14 Jan 14
  

  conniekliu
  • A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.
  • 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.
  • But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. 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.
    
    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.
  • 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 the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know?
  • Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
  • 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 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. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
  • With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.
  • If you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably.
  • 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. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they were on railroad tracks. But this seems the exception. 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

  12 more annotations...

• 03 Jan 14
  

  Jennifer Carroll

  On doing what you love. Lots of good stuff in this blog.

  inspiration work

• 29 Dec 13
  

  smitty333
• 27 Dec 13
  

  Terry Elliott

  ifttt delicious diigo daily

• 28 Oct 13
  

  Shelley K.

  Paul Graham

  career inspiration

• 24 Oct 13
  

  stuza1 .

  Sage

• 13 Sep 13
  

  Daniel Martinez Paz
• 22 Aug 13
  

  Tim McCormick

  I appreciated this: "how to do what you love". http://t.co/uUCbJmhaXU -"It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task".

  #twitterfav

• 19 Aug 13
  

  serenitybolt

  happiness inspiration work advice essay toread

• 04 Aug 13
  

  rgoldste
  • 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.
  • What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
• 15 Jul 13
  

  Stephanie L

  How to do what You Love

• 13 Jun 13
  

  Joeri Bruyninckx

  work inspiration career essay

• 09 Jun 13
  

  zettel klotz
  • It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren't identical.
  • How much are you supposed to like what you do?
  • Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second.
  • he 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.
  • 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. 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.
  • 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.
  • merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.
    
  • It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
  • 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 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
  • 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. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do
  • 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.

  10 more annotations...

• 29 May 13
  

  La Ligne
• 28 Apr 13
  

  milind srikantamurthy

  work career inspiration advice

• 22 Apr 13
  

  ihuston

  work career inspiration advice essay

• 15 Apr 13
  

  nesrien hamid

  jobs passion dreams work

  • 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.
  • But 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; you have to like making up elaborate lies.
  • 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 danger is when money is combined with prestige
  • 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.
  • How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
  • 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.
  • 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
  • you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.
  • it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."
  • All we can do is encourage people to do unpleasant work, with money and prestige.
  • The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. 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.
  • Don't decide too soon.
  • When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work. When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information.
  • 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. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.

  15 more annotations...

• 08 Apr 13
  

  sylviagab
• 07 Apr 13
  

  Kellie Spicer

  career work inspiration education

• 04 Apr 13
  

  health

• 01 Apr 13
  

  geekybaiyi
• 28 Mar 13
  

  Dionne Bunsha

  Self Help

• 27 Mar 13
  

  kelsey_153
• 05 Mar 13
  

  Dorit Hansen
• 14 Feb 13
  

  Cash Durrett

  career work inspiration advice essay education lifehacks toread

• 08 Feb 13
  

  Brad S
  • If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.
  • I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. 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.
  • I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow.

  1 more annotation...

• 28 Jan 13
  

  To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated. The very idea is foreign to what most ...

  IFTTT Pocket readitlater article

• 27 Jan 13
  

  Peter Sullivan

  "January 2006
  To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated."

  RhLC resource ForLearners inspiration education passoion ****

• 25 Jan 13
  

  joanongchoco
  • "Do what you love."
  • Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing
  • School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.
  • The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. 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. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.
  • 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.
  • 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 the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know?
  • 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.
  • Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other
  • 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
  • Most good mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobs as math professors, whereas in the departments at the other end of the spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver: people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies, and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs. Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does  that  kind of thing for fun.
  • 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
  • Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain
  • 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. Not necessarily, but probably.
  • One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it.
  • 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 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.
  • 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.
  • Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. 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.

  19 more annotations...

• 23 Jan 13
  

  Xie Yanbo

  lifehacks advice

• 15 Jan 13
  

  Kiran Kulkarni
  • A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.
  • A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house
• 14 Jan 13
  

  George Julian

  career work inspiration advice lifehacks love paulgraham

• 13 Jan 13
  

  Ed Fry

  passion employable

• 07 Jan 13
  

  Bjarte Bakke

  purpose

• 

  Julian D

  work career success happiness

• 03 Jan 13
  

  Richard Wild
  • conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.
  • What there has to be is a test.
  • You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.
  • I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow.
  • 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
  • But 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; you have to like making up elaborate lies
  • It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.

  5 more annotations...

• 02 Jan 13
  

  talbronstien
  • 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.
  • Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love.
• 31 Dec 12
  

  Jeff Lail

  Another love letter to self. This is an old read but one I check out this time each year http://t.co/MxtUIq3U Keeps me real and hungry.
  – Kenn Elmore (DeanElmore) http://twitter.com/DeanElmore/status/285731061219090433

• 

  Rana Chakrabarti

  inspiration paul graham

  • 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
  • f you want to stay happy, you have to do something.
  • You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up.
  • 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.
  • You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.
  • to try to do things that would make your friends say wow.
  • Constraints give your life shape.

  7 more annotations...

• 30 Dec 12
  

  Paula Wood

  writing inspiration

• 17 Dec 12
  

  mascurioso

  paul graham life advice inspiration work career education Y Combinator

• 13 Dec 12
  

  carlos puentes

  "To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.
  "

  doing what you love career work inspiration essay advice toread education lifehacks

• 

  Neil Bourgeois

  " novels when you have enough money, what happens when you quit and then discover that you don't actually like writing novels?"

  career work inspiration

• 04 Dec 12
  

  radost78

  Things in life

  • 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.
  • 
    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.
  • You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool.
  • 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 the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.
  • Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. 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.

  6 more annotations...

• 30 Nov 12
  

  Alexandra Miller

  career work inspiration passion life jobs

• 22 Nov 12
  

  Roberto Suarez
  • lower bo
  • To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire.
• 21 Nov 12
  

  Justin Fabian

  Inspiration career work advice lifehacks

• 19 Nov 12
  

  smcmackn

  career inspiration education

• 09 Nov 12
  

  gingenhagen

  advice

• 28 Oct 12
  

  Alison McDermott

  Article I came to from browsing Brain Pickings about working for a living doing something you love.

  class class-article career

• 26 Oct 12
  

  Ralf Pfau
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • But 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; you have to like making up elaborate lies.
  • 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.

  3 more annotations...

• 10 Oct 12
  

  Lainy Von Bank
• 

  Hilary Cross

  Personal growth work career inspiration lifehacks

• 21 Sep 12
  

  monica strina

  creativity writing

Page Comments

• 
  James on 2006-06-26
  "Always produce" is more than just a test of earnestness though. It's 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
• 
  Andrew Demack on 2006-08-21
  by Paul Graham
• 
  Lindsay Donaghe on 2006-08-23
  An interesting, if long winded, article on how we're brought up to not believe we can or should enjoy our work and some general advice on how to change that mindset.
• 
  Karl Guevara on 2009-11-15
  "Prestige… causes you to work on… what you’d like to like."

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