The Danger of Following Your Dreams | Hacker News Reader

The Danger of Following Your Dreams

lifehacker.com

34 pointsjbail21 comments

"When you dive deeper into Ryan's story, for example, you discover that he grew up around farms and went to Cornell to study fruit and vegetable horticulture in their world class ag school."

That's great, he knew what he wanted to do, worked very hard to be prepared for it, and then when the time came he worked very hard at it.

But I don't think most people know exactly what they want to do when they're deciding what major/school to apply for at 17-18 years old. So encouragement to leave the comfortable pay-the-bills type job is helpful for a lot of people.

The only good career advice I've ever had is this:

"If you're considering a job as a mechanic, don't ask yourself whether you like cars. Ask yourself whether you like lying on your back undoing bolts."

Or, to quote PG: "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." (http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html)

The real trick is to find a job, who's work you enjoy.

Or as Heinlein puts it:

Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. And another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible results.

Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.

Source: Jubal Harshaw in To Sail Beyond the Sunset

Another Heinlein quote (from Starship Troopers): "Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that. Nothing More."

Those sound like the words of someone who hasn't been getting nearly enough sleep recently.

Along the same lines: http://blog.figuringshitout.com/nov-5th-day-23-three-types-o...

Another great quote by PG:

When you can do whatever you want, you get a variant of the terror induced by the proverbial blank page. There are a lot of people who think the thing stopping them from writing that great novel they plan to write is the fact that their job takes up all their time. In fact what's stopping 99% of them is that writing novels is hard. When the job goes away, they see how hard.

From "What would you do with FU money" thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511104

It's nice imagery, but it's totally unfair to that profession, and it's about as accurate as saying that software people have to like precise finger movements.

As a tangent, give the mechanic some credit. The first things I took apart to see how they work (eventually leading me to choose technology as a profession) were lawnmowers, chainsaws and the like. A mechanic's work (the good part at least) is a cycle of experimenting with and mastering a complex system that uses almost identical thought processes to debugging.

I posted this in the other thread about this article (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1844725)

This surely applies to 'dream entrepreneurship' as well.

> The more you're bombarded with messages promoting the [entrepreneurship] path to happiness, the more likely you are to ossify your view of the working world into normal boring jobs vs. [entrepreneurship]. Once you've made this division, you're much less likely to start investing the hard, unsexy, ongterm work into your current career needed to grow it into something deeply fulfilling.

I understand how out of place this sentiment seems in what is essentially a forum for entrepreneurship, but is it possible we've over-romanticized that lifestyle?

It amazes me that there are people who enjoy programming, yet settle for less interesting / boring jobs that they complain about and dislike. You are amongst the very lucky few where you can make a living doing what you enjoy, why do you use the "it's just a job" excuse? The software engineering job market is extremely fluid: there's not even a need to start your own business to do what you love.

Sometimes it's easy to overlook the benefits of simply working in a great organization for a while rather than pursuing your 'dream' such as teaching surfing or doing your startup full time.

The author makes a great point that being a mechanic is not about loving cars. It's about unscrewing stubborn stripped bolts while lying on your back.

Similarly, teaching surfing is not the same as having a fun surf session with your mates! As a former snowboarding instuctor (my 'dream' job at the time when I was 19 ((now 30)) I can personally attest to the 'dream' being different from the reality.

If you can find creative ways to gain rare, scarce knowledge and generate a large network of contacts while benefiting from the resources available through employment at a large company (administrative and operational support) then you'll have a larger base of potential customers from which to draw on when you start your startup.

For instance, if you build a strong network of 500 contacts, and each of those people has 3 people in their network who might want what your startup sells, you suddenly have 1,500 people who you can easily reach out to.

In this case, your 'day job' that initially seemed so terrible is actually an excellent platform from which to 'build' your startup.

Of course, some of you will want to go full time into your startup, and all the power to you if that's what you choose.

Coming off a recent startup failure I need money, and the prospect of having some support and access to resources is sounding pretty good right now.

It's always possible to build the startup at night and on weekends if it's meant to be, and that's my plan going forward.

Apologies for the verboseness - I didn't have time to trim this down.

I think this article applies to people who have dream jobs which are drastically different from their 9 to 5. I think most people here build technology products for a living and aspire to build even bigger, better, more fulfilling products as their dream job.

Overall, I feel my ventures in tech entrepreneurship grant me unique experiences that are infinitely more valuable to my career than sitting at my desk completing bug fixes and and ad hoc features.

The grass is always greener on the other side.

Of course "quitting your terrible cubicle job to start a business" is dangerous. It's a drastic, life-altering decision that could affect the people around you and/or your dependents. You also need to accept that you may not be happy chasing your dream of starting a company because there will certainly be more disappointments and more challenges along the way.

Find out what's important to you. For me, it's working on problems that I'm interested in and learning more than I could at my current job rather than a steady paycheck. I'm not willing to live with any regrets for not even attempting to do what I want to.

"I was struck by the normalcy of the respondent's jobs"

What job wouldn't be normal? If you're going to sample the general population, you're going to get normal jobs. Was he expecting everyone to be a CEO?

I recently quit my job to dedicate my time to building things I want to build and find out if the grass really is greener on the other side. I have a plan and a backup plan. I'll be satisfied knowing that I tried, and I'll learn a lot from it.

>> "I was struck by the normalcy of the respondent's jobs"

> What job wouldn't be normal? If you're going to sample the general population, you're going to get normal jobs. Was he expecting everyone to be a CEO?

You missed the point. The point wasn't that there are people with normal jobs. The point is that there are people that described themselves as "loving what they do" with normal jobs. In other words, it didn't take a so-called dream job for these people to find total satisfaction with their work life.

You're right. I have a tendency to rush through the loads of articles I loaded from HN's front page.

you're going to die sometime, so i think following your dream while you're alive is a worthwhile pursuit.

"In other words, the reason why some people see their work as a calling might have little to do with the work itself, and a lot to do with how the person approaches the work. "

For all of my working life I've had the tremendous benefit of changing jobs completely every two years or so while staying employed by the same organization.

I've had jobs that I've loved, and jobs that I've hated. I approach most jobs with the same positive attitude (at least to start). The jobs I've loved have related to what I'd consider my calling. If I could do those jobs or similar for the rest of my life I'd be very happy.

So I'd suggest trying to find those kind of jobs that make you feel like that and stick with it.

I'm always surprised when I meet programmers or writers who just consider it a job. I've always thought that both were callings.

The best definition I've heard of a calling is "work you'd do for love even if nobody paid you."

I liked one of the comments, there :

"Now shut up and get back in your cubicle."

No, thanks. I'll keep dreaming.

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