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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

“Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” is another college-counseling standby of unknown provenance.

That is probably the biggest load of crap foisted on pop culture in a while. I love what I do, and I work every day. This morning's task is reviewing a help file for accuracy. Hol-ee shite, that's not why I got into programming computers when I was 12. But it needs to be done, and I'm one of the ones that can knowledgeably review it. I really should write that test plan, but I keep putting it off for obvious reasons. Oh, sure, I get to play Puzzle Solver by shuffling some bits around, and it's what I spend most of my days doing, but it ain't all fun and games.

And that's just Working for The Man(tm). Gonna start a brewpub? Maybe an online SaaS business? Oh, my friend, your crap work has just begun; so much so, you might have to leave the fun stuff to your employees. You will work every day, and hard.

Don't get the wrong idea, I look forward to going to work most days, and I've been doing this for a long while. But there's a reason they call it "work", and there's a reason they pay you. Enjoy the hell out of the enjoyable parts, and when the less enjoyable work comes, remember that you are (if of the average HN demographic) paid handsomely for it.

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I decided, after burning out of Startupville a bit ago, that I was going to take some time off and... wait for it... write a novel. I love writing, I love blogging, so how hard could this be? It's the next natural step, right?

I thought this would be a dream experience, sitting at my computer and creating beautiful prose for hours a day, my creativity flowing like a river.

After about 20,000 words (a debut novel should be between 70-100k words), it turned into hard work. One thousand words a day becomes quite tedious, especially when the initial steam wears off.

Great, so I pushed through for months, putting in the daily grind. Draft complete at 90k words! First round of edits, cutting almost 20,000 words (about a month of work, all for "nothing"). Back at the writing grind again to get the word count and story aligned to be more marketable.

Edit number two complete. Edit number three complete. Beta readers telling me there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This character sucks, this character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc. Just now wrapping up edit number four, and I'm actually quite happy with how it reads.

But now... onto the business end of this deal, querying agents. Agents reject about 99% of the pitches that come into their inbox. The 1% gets a full manuscript request. Of those 1%, about 10% get offers of representation.

An offer of representation often turns into several more rounds of edits before the agent will sell it to a publisher. So if I'm lucky enough to get an agent, it'll be even more editing (my least favorite part of this process so far).

THEN, the agent has to successfully sell the book to a publisher. The odds that this happens also pretty low. And since I'm a first-time writer, I'd be looking at a pretty small five figure advance for what will end up being about two years of work.

Anyways... writing, my favorite form of art, has become a roll-of-the-dice grind. I'm not sure I would go back in time and do this again, but regardless, I've come this far so...

I think chasing a "dream career" whatever that is can be a tough lesson in setting realistic expectations in what it means to make money.

It sounds like you were doing another form of startup. Perhaps some writers bang out the prose and have an editor help to trim the fat rather than trying to wear all of the hats required to launch a new novelist. Also:

> Beta readers telling me there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This character sucks, this character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc.

I think what makes a great story, and novelist for that matter, are some of those rough edges and you should ignore the critics just like an opinionated CEO might be advised to do. Those people may be looking out for you, but you're the artist and can use your vision to create your world with your unique voice!

Thanks - That's a really fun observation, that I'm wearing a lot of hats that a more established novelist/executive wouldn't. I also appreciate the positivity (it has been very easy to be negative about this process so far).

And you're right, it's important to only take beta readers' opinions as just that, opinions. It is super helpful though to get their take, as I've been so close to the project where sometimes I can't see the forest for the trees.

You can also see that when an author becomes too famous and starts to ignore the editor(s), the books become heavy and repetitive. Editors are sharp. Trust them.

Fingers crossed I make it to the point where I have an editor =)

Definitely noticeable though, sometimes authors get too attached to the smell of their own farts to realize their writing is suffering under the weight of their own hubris.

Writing is a discipline. I'd expect it (like almost any other discipline) to take around five years to reach journeyman status. I think a lot of people assume that writing is a lot easier and simpler than it actually is. The folk knowledge says that you should expect to write around a million words before you find your voice.

I think the secret to all of this is that the energy and enthusiasm of passion is ultimately overcome by pain. And pain slows us down, makes us retreat.

But if you find your work fundamentally painless, you can put any amount of passion in on top: you're still getting it done on your lowest days, and on your good ones you will cruise into exceptional output.

As such you can derive the well-known market preference for "bandaids over vitamins" from the sum total of all individuals looking for a way to take more of the pain out of their work. But the biggest optimization you can make is simply in choosing which work to do.

Pain is more nuanced. People run away from pain. But pain is like brakes on a car, you need it to go faster.

There’s a reason why people take pride in being “a professional” or “tough”. You need to suck it up and push through sometimes.

“Find your passion” is trope, but it’s also true, because that obsessive passion that people have about the ordinary is what allows them to create the extraordinary.

To make it easier, go back in time, choose different parents and become the 'first coder that be became POTUS', then write your novel.

Or go up to the top of a mountaintop at just the right time for the sky god to make an appearance and hand you the third testament.

Or, go back in time again, choose different parents and become a record scoring footballer. By adopting this strategy you would have the slight challenge of creating a time machine but you will also not have to write those 90000 words, a ghostwriter would be able to just magic out of thin air whatever you bark out loud. They would sort out the plot holes and the movie deal too.

Or you could go back to startupsville again and scratch this itch. It should be possible to crowd-source decent novels in a way that is not so humiliating and nigh on impossible. I know this has been attempted before but the nearest we have to it at the moment it self publishing on Amazon where people do reviews and people buy on the basis of those reviews. There have been success stories with this. But we know those reviews are bought and everything is corrupt.

Joking aside I do think that there is another way of getting published - write the book that needs to be written. Not a rehash of ideas, something new. A new story that does not fit into the existing pantheon of beginnings/middles and endings. Something that people must read and must get their friends to read, no publicity needed. You could make this free and entirely web based, no ISBN number or dead trees. Much like how musicians do stuff for free on YouTube and then a publisher courts them to do something for money. However, even this is not strictly easy and the stories you hear of this often involve a musician who happens to have chosen the right parents, e.g. Lily Allen and how she started on Youtube, only later do we learn of the famous and well connected dad.

Writing a book that has to be written might not be passion though. If you discovered some unjustice going on and were compelled to write then that would not be passion, more of a moral question of not staying silent.

Anyway, regarding the original article, why is it that 87% of people in the workplace are clock watchers, as if serving an eight hour school detention on a daily basis? Clearly they are not following their passion. But, of the 13% that don't clock watch and do have some passion for what they do, these people can be in any department, office or factory. They are not necessarily writing novels, making music, teaching yoga or directing films. Passion is more of a transferable skill that should be taught.

You may want to consider self-publishing, depending on the book. It's pretty easy these days and there's no particular "vanity press" stigma on Amazon.

I once self published a book. Biggest mistake I made was writing it before i had an audience to sell to. I would take small snipets of your book and distribute for free to places where your target audience hangs out. Then publish more free bits on your site for email address. Maybe some complete short stories. Then once you have an audience that likes your shit promote a book to them, and leverage those sales as social proof to go more broad.

I will teach you to be rich does this really well. I don't have a good analogy for fiction but I'm sure they exist.

Well, you can't be satisfied all the time. That's not how brain chemistry works in healthy individuals.

You can enjoy what you do most of the time though. Thanks to your brain also. I find it harder when working for somebody because money is not necessarily a good enough motivator. But when working on my own project and faced with a tedious task (writing tests, fighting dependencies or whatever it is that you despise), I think why do I want to do it (e.g. I want my project to succeed it and it needs it). You can try to achieve your goal without the thing that you don't like. If you think that this is not possible, then wanting your project to succeed and wanting to do this task are the same thing. They are connected.

Once you realize this it makes things much more simple. Most of suffering seems to come from some semi-conscious story in your brain: I want A but without doing B. Either it's possible to do that or it's not. If it's not then it's just wishful thinking that is only bringing you misery.

The way you think and wire your brain really matters. Instead of "I must do X even though I don't want it". Think "If I want A then X comes with it - do I still want A?". Or find a way to A without X.

For me at least, having that stated explicitly in my mind alters my perception of X. Because it really is hard to hold two logically inconsistent beliefs in your mind when you bring them both into focus. Your brain quick fix is usually some "but..". That's where you need to eliminate wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is imagining reality in some other way than it really is and only leads to frustration.

Accepting things that already are should come pretty naturally though. You may want to change something. But you can't change the past.

I agree, but you're not going to counter bumper sticker phrases with multi-paragraph quasi-Buddhist philosophy. :-) So I just stick with "what a load of crap".

But you're coming at it from a different angle, I feel. Instead of "finding your passion", I hear you advising a different way of looking at it such that one can find fulfillment (for lack of better phrasing) in whatever job by matching the story in one's head to reality. I'm on board. Hell, I've been happy doing janitorial work. Was it my passion? Well, no. But it needed to be done, and I could do it, they're paying me, and in the end there's something satisfying about a clean floor. That was enough for me at the time.

You guys are both right. You're saying "crap work" and "load of crap" figuratively, by my wife deals with it literally! She has a masters degree in marketing but rather run her own business than work for a boss. It's a dog kennel and three times a day she walks around the property poop-scooping. Her business is her passion, but it comes with some crap work. She's very happy.

Ray Lewis (NFL linebacker) said something along the lines of "I get paid for Monday through Saturday, Sunday I do for free".

I feel like that with coding a lot of the time. I get paid to deal with all the crap work, but those times I get to code something novel or unique are times I would still want even if I didn't have to work.

> Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life

corollary that should be equally well-known: "because nobody is hiring in that field"

My passion is audio but my job is writing software.

I have a lot of friends in the audio field, and something I've noticed is that doing your passion for a living can take the fun out of it.

For instance, my friends in the audio world don't sit around listening to new loudspeakers, or designing new loudspeakers. They mostly spend their time marketing products and filling orders. Working in audio isn't a whole lot different than working in any other retail field.

But when I work on audio projects? I can do whatever I please, because I'm not doing it to pay my mortgage.

> doing your passion for a living can take the fun out of it

I think this is really a corrupt idea that floats around, and many times influences younger people away from trying to find a career and instead landing themselves in crappy jobs.

For example, some people like to work on cars, but they don't get a job in that because their dumb uncle said this to them, so they spend their time grinding away at a fast food joint and going nowhere in life. Maybe they can poke at their 15 year old car once in a while, but overall their quality of life is not very good, and they basically never get to work on cars. If they had instead gone into professional car service, they would have a decent paying job and be able to reach a comparatively higher standard.

Does that mean that it's not work? Of course not. You will always have to do work and it's not always pleasant, but at least you can leverage your interests and strengths. If you get bored or annoyed at working on something you used to think was fun, then take a vacation or find something else do to over the weekends to get your mind off it. If you are annoyed that it's not fun anymore, then -- welcome to adulthood.

That is truly the difference between having a job and setting yourself up for a successful career.

In my opinion, you have to balance that position with the realities of the work force: what is in demand, what the compensation is, etc.

To give an example, two of my passions can be said to be writing code and playing music. Of the later passion, it is really difficult to make a career out of it that is anywhere comparable to any coding job, and (knowing what it's like in a local band) it's actually more work than a coding job in most cases; the best bands execute a lot on the sales / marketing / promotion side in any case, a side that I'm personally weak at. So music has becomes the "hobby passion", while the "code passion" pays the bills.

(Granted, in some cases it is actually possible to combine the two and do even better. DSP engineers for instance are in pretty high demand as far as I know.)

That pretty much describes my situation. Thankfully I enjoy both, and doing the one that pays well allows me to buy better instruments than I could as a working musician. Yup, I'm the guy in the corner with the multi-thousand dollar axe that can't play for shit. But, hey, mandolin makers gotta eat, too. And if it weren't for us "more money than skill" players, a lot more makers would go hungry. </shrug>

> take a vacation or find something else do to over the weekends to get your mind off it. If you are annoyed that it's not fun anymore, then -- welcome to adulthood.

I drew another consequence and quit the field instead and in turn rescued my passion from fizzling out. And while I'm only passingly interested in what I'm doing now, for me, it was worth taking my hobby back.

It's not an entirely hollow phrase, but something to consider at least and maybe one should ask themselves if they're ready to be passionate about something for 8+ hours a day.

It depends on the passion as well. Not all passions are equal and can be easily transferred into a successful career. Assuming you have multiple passions, my personal advice would be to maximize money/time ratio for your career that corroborate with one of your passions to have some job satisfaction as well as pursuing your other passions.

For example, if you have a passion for say writing and computer science, I would recommend to get a job in CS, since money/time ratio is usually higher there.

Yes, this. And also to keep in mind what the article says - that passions can be developed.

> For example, some people like to work on cars, but they don't get a job in that because their dumb uncle said this to them, so they spend their time grinding away at a fast food joint and going nowhere in life

I think the dumb uncle is correct. Although, if you like something well enough, then you usually become good at it, which in some cases means that someone will pay you for it.

It's up to you if you want to extract the fun and convert it into cash. It may be worth it, or it may be not.

I don't know or have heard of anyone who had a passion for a well paid/achievable career and decided to do retail instead because they believed the career might hamper their enjoyment of hobbies.

From what I've seen, the truth is more like, "Following a passion of yours for a living is likely to take some amount of fun out of it, but the hit's usually pretty small; just realize that doing something as a profession tends to have some fundamental differences from doing it purely for fun / fulfillment."

Or perhaps the size of the hit varies - for some people / passions it's small or zero, for others it's big, with the peak of the curve being "some but not too much"?

The best piece of advice I ever got is do what I like. Save my love for hobbies, but make sure I enjoy what I do.

The way I look at this is everything becomes a job if you have to do it enough. Ask a game tester what playing games can be like.

That's funny, I've been following my passions and now I'm a data scientist.

I can split my friends into two groups: those that followed their passions and are happy, and those that did not and have loans for silly things, egos that depend on their career, and a consistent need for validation by society.

Following your passion isn't about instant gratification, perhaps people are disappointed by this.

I think your division is only looking at the effect, not the cause.

Would it be more fair to divide your peers into people who searched for their passion, and those who just went with the flow?

When people say "find your passion", I think they mean to say "stumble upon your passion". "Find" is too passive a word, perhaps "search" is better.

Reminds me of how an excellent engineering manager I know calls such tasks like "review help file for accuracy" as Chimney Sweep—work that needs to be done, but is utterly mundane. And rotate such tasks across the team to ensure that no one person is stuck with too much "chimney sweeping".

My favorite euphemism for those tasks is "shaving the yak".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving

shaving the yak refers to tasks that don't really need to be done. The parent was talking about mundane tasks that really do need to be done by someone, so you put up with it as just part of the job.

Really? The linked definition is:

"Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem."

That sounds like necessary mundane tasks to me. Definitely mostly hear it used that way.

There are subtleties in how the term "yak shaving" is used that aren't quite captured by that definition.

I wouldn't call it yak shaving to review a help file for accuracy.

My characteristic example of yak shaving would be, "I want to add a radio button (mutually exclusive pick-one option) to this form, but the framework's docs don't say how, so I'll implement it with the checkbox list and require only one to be checked, so I look up how to enforce input validation, but that requires installing an extra module in the build, which then installs a different version of one dependency we're already using, which the framework doesn't like, so I need to install another extension that lets you use two different versions of the same library in the build, but has an occasional bug..."

Those steps are necessary in the sense that the current system forces you to do them, but (like technical debt), they're completely artificial steps that shouldn't be necessary (in that sense) to begin with.

Fair! Good example.

right, and I thought the implication is that at some point in that process we really should be unwinding the stack and fixing/resetting some assumption that will let us move ahead in a more efficient manner. So in that sense I've always thought of it as being in an undesirable state (like a code smell), not a necessary one.

Or at least it's a rigamarole. For a folk etymology, I like to imagine that I'm making a costume for a costume party, and I need a fake mustache or something, and I can't find one anywhere so I look up how they're made, and it turns out most fake facial hair appliances are made from yak hair, but I can't find a supplier for yak hair anywhere, which is why my quest to dress up as Fu Manchu or Mr. Spock for Halloween has led me to a yak ranch 90 minutes out of town patiently explaining to a bemused yak rancher why I'm standing around his pasture with a straight razor.

"I need to shave a yak," I explain. "That's the only way I can get yak hair."

I'm in a deeply absurd situation, purely as a consequence of perfectly normal and understandable desires that just got completely out of control. I take in a deep breath, the smells of fresh air and yak manure and whatever the hell they feed yaks, gazing upon miles upon miles of gently rolling hills before rugged mountain peaks in the distance, awkwardly shaking my can of shaving cream. The rancher squints at me. I imagine him as an old man, his face weathered and wrinked, wearing suspenders and a red flannel shirt. "Why do you need yak hair?", he asks. I sigh. "It's a long story."

"Yak shaving" is for things that seem ridiculous at first glance but turn out to be necessary or optimal due to unexpected constraints and requirement -- washing your car requires you to shave a yak to get the wool to build a sponge.

"Tying your shoes" is for mundane but necessary tasks. "Sharpening your saw" is for tangential work that indirectly makes your output better.

hmm, I've understood the term used to describe situations where people wind up wasting time doing things that seem important at the time (ie shaving the yak to get the wool to make the sponge to wash the car), but are really unnecessary - you should have just bought a sponge at the store and got on with washing the car...

Yes, preceisly what allanienhuis says above. The Chimney Sweep taks are important, but mundane. E.g. some (a lot of) people dislike bug triage, but it's damn important. I like triaging (and fixing) bugs. To a decent extent, a bug report means something is bothering a real user. Fixing that is more rewarding (than writing features that might be useful for someone).

Edit: Just noticed SilasX below has a fuller example of 'yak shaving'. Thanks.

Excellent summary, I have run my own business for 7 years and there are plenty of days that I don't enjoy. Fortunately there are enough fun bits and good moments that in the main I like what I do - I would not do it for free though, even if I didn't need the salary ... I'd probably go mountain biking instead.

There are a lot of things that people enjoy as a hobby on their own terms that they'd probably find a lot less fun if they had to do it every day on someone else's terms.

I was very into photography as a hobby at one point (still am to some degree) and I even toyed with the idea that maybe this is something I could do professionally. But the reality is that I would have unlikely become a staff photographer for Life or National Geographic and would much more likely have ended up as the photographer for the college news service--who was actually quite good but mostly took photos of rich alums shaking hands with the president.

Everyone differs of course. But, in general, one good strategy is to do something that you like well enough most of the time, you're good at, pays well and use your spare time and money to pursue things you like as hobbies.

I was a professional photographer for about ten years, and it definitely had a big negative impact on enjoying it as a hobby. The biggest factor contributing to that without question were the problem customers that came along. I enjoy creating. I do not enjoy the customer service or mundane business aspects.

I love the Brewpub example.

Your passion is drinking beer, so you are going to open a pub...

I hope your passion extends to cleaning vomit from hard to reach places, and the smell or beer mildew early the morning.

Lol or become a beer reviewer, small brewery, heck even a person in sales.

I once warned a friend of mine who was buying a business that he was actually buying a job. That turned out to be more correct than either one of us expected.

Finding your passion is just a way of saying Don't do what you despise for a living. There are a lot of people caught up in horrible jobs that they hate but can't leave due to obligations: family, bills, sometimes identity. Doesn't necessarily mean fun but manageable pain, with a little friction and opportunity to grow as a human being.

Working a "whatever" job also isn't finding a passion, yet it's a perfectly serviceable way of funding your life as you pursue things outside of your employment hours. As long as it isn't destructively draining you, and isn't assaulting your psyche, it can just be plain work.

> I love what I do, and I work every day.

I think the upshot of the quote is supposed to be something like this:

Figure out the set of interests which pique your curiosity. Know the difference between that set and the set of interests that society irrationally deems respectable through peer-pressure, propaganda, and other FUD. Pick something from the first set (possibly intersecting the 2nd set) and you are unlikely to feel like every day is filled with a sense of dread and drudgery.

But here-- as in the original quote-- there is a hidden premise that the audience already has interests in the first set. I think there's also a premise that the audience also has the tools to investigate a particular topic and grow in knowledge, skills, and self-awareness.

That last part is key. If nobody in an audience has the will or ability to investigate the world around them, it doesn't matter what platitude you feed them.

This is so true! After founding my own company I quickly learned that the price for having these joyful moments is also having to deal with stuff likes taxes, hiring, etc.

But then again, this can also become a highly enjoyable thing. I hated it for the first months but after a year, I actually enjoy the business side as well. It challenges me as an engineering person to leave my comfort zone, and provides for a chance to learn something new.

To find what you love is a good thing, always. The path taken may sometimes be unpleasant but in the end it will be rewarding if you stick to your goals.

There is so much truth in the Nike claim :-) "Just do it."

To play devil's advocate: it sounds like you let your 12-year-old self pick your career, not knowing what it would entail, and now you're trying to rationalize it. You say you love your work, except what you have to do this morning, and you're putting off another task that needs doing ("for obvious reasons"?). That's not exactly the behavior I associate with love.

It's called "work" because it needs doing, not because it's inherently unpleasant. Your boss won't make a penny more just because you don't happen to like doing it.

(I see the same thing with relationships. There are people I'd be miserable to be with, but that certainly doesn't mean everyone would. Likewise, many people pick a mate in high school and then discover 10 or 20 years later that their teenage self wasn't such a great decision-maker, or simply that they've changed as they've grown.)

I switched careers recently, after many years in software, and now I adore going to work -- every day, every task. I cannot believe they pay me for this. How would you know if all other jobs would also be "crap work" for you if you haven't tried any of them yourself?

EDIT: I'm glad I used a throwaway for this comment! Are people so offended by the concept of needing to try something to discover if it's pleasant or not? Or that another job might be a better fit for them?

Agreed that something being called "work" doesn't mean that it has to be unpleasant, but like you said, it's called "work" because it needs to be done, and in most cases ALL of it needs to be done, even the parts that a given individual might not enjoy. It also might be true that even though a person doesn't like some aspects of their work, they still get a lot of fulfillment from other aspects of their work, and are also compensated well financially, so as to make it worth the tradeoff to sometimes have to do tasks they don't enjoy. And really are there people that truly take great delight from reviewing a help file? Somebody has to get it done. As long as that kind of work doesn't become the only type of work you are doing, what's the problem?

Which career did you switch to?

That sounds sad, but it doesnt have to be THIS hard.

Don't take it so literally.

People can be passionate about something and it doesn't necessarily mean that the passion is a positive thing. You can be passionately angry, or passionately annoyed and upset. This is why it's useful to reframe passion as something that is not purely positive.

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