Now that you have turned 22 can I please give you some advice...

I wrote a longish essay called "How to get your Professors’ Attention — along with Coaching or Mentoring" in response to the ways I've responded to students and previous professors have responded to me: http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors%E2... . A chunk of the essay concerns the importance of reading and how people use reading to test your seriousness. I think it's much better advice than not to "read."

Endeavor to do things that you enjoy doing, and do them with feeling and quality. Chasing success, money, competition, or customer whims will not lead to happiness. Instead do things that you enjoy and do them in your own way that no one else can compete with. This will sidestep competition and lead to customers, money, and success. Think Apple.

Don't just absorb knowledge (reading, advice), but understand it from the author's point of view. His last point was to not blindly take advice, but to understand it and apply it to your own situation. To ignore and marginalize his advice as you have done is to ignore one of his most important points.

To grant him some benefit, in his last point he did say, to take his advice too with a "pinch of salt".

I played basketball for years and even the drills never felt like work.

I guess it's the difference between work and play.

I don't know what the psychological underpinnings are for the subjective qualitative difference, but I think this may relate to the "effortlessness" of Taoism vs. the "effort" of Buddhism. Just hypothesizing.

I can read for hours and research subjects of interest and it's never "work".

I can practice something on the piano that I like, which is difficult to play, and it's not "work"; but doing contrived exercises with the same finger-movements feels like work.

I not only find it totally believable that playing guitar was subjectively NOT work to Jimi Hendrix, but I would go further and say he NEVER would have gotten to where he got if it DID seem like work.

If you only love the glory, and not the process, how will you even persist long enough to get there?

A few further examples -- Kobe Bryant LOVES basketball. There are a lot of talents who go into the NBA for the paycheck and then underachieve; it's just a job to them. Kobe isn't the best athlete in the NBA -- many can jump higher or run faster. But he is the most skilled, and the best seemingly-impossible shot maker in the history of the game. Kobe, 13, joins the Sonny Hill summer league in Philadelphia, where a counselor scolds him for listing the NBA as his future career. "The guy said NBA players are one in a million," Kobe says. "I said, 'Man, look, I'm going to be that one in a million.' "

Lance Armstrong LOVES riding his bike. It was his route to personal freedom in football-loving Texas, and he would go for a ride any time he needed to think.

Adam Lambert LOVES performing. He was always performing and singing since he was a child. He would drive his little brother crazy by always singing and dancing to things on the radio and making up his own versions of songs.

And these are just people with a high level of COMMERCIAL success. All of them would have had their own success of some sort, by doing what they loved, even if they didn't become millionaires.

So it kind of depends on what you mean by "amount to anything". By whose standards?

I remember some story, which was a true story, possibly from Outliers, I don't quite remember; it was about parents making their kids do something that the parents wanted. Something like: A surgeon had wanted to be a dancer but he was forced to be a doctor; he received some prestigious award that all his fellow surgeons coveted, but he was miserable. "But you've been recognized by all your peers as being the best surgeon!" "Yes," he responded dejectedly, "but I'm the worst dancer!"

A further example was of two parents who had been forced into respectable professions; the mother had wanted to be a pianist instead. So she decided that wouldn't happen to HER daughter; she hired private music tutors. Except the daughter had no interest in piano... she was being forced into it!

Even if you get what you want, you have to have the capacity to enjoy it, or it won't mean anything to you. Depending on the state of your hormones and neurotransmitters, this can vary drastically even over the course of a single day.

The biggest dichotomy I see now is between Creators and Consumers. Most of our socialization has the effect of turning us into the latter. How many stories have we seen of people making a million dollars off something that ANY of us COULD do, but they actually went and DID it?

Unlike the school and work system, which reward conformity, there is a huge amount of real-world success from being DIFFERENT. If you get really good at ANYTHING, you can probably make a living from it. Even just being weird.

Society serves a very useful purpose, though, because the more it turns everyone into consumers, the less you have to CREATE in order to make a living. Just look at Mob Wars or Reddit.

So whichever angle you approach it from, personal satisfaction or commercial success, it seems the way to go is to do whatever is subjectively RIGHT for you.

Jimmy Hendrix might have loved to play the guitar but his gimmick was playing it competently with his teeth and I guarantee you that's something he had to work hard to be able to do right.

Einstein did say Imagination is more important than Knowledge but he also said...

knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continually threatened with burial by the shifting sand. The hands of service must ever be at work, in order that the marble continue to lastingly shine in the sun. To these serving hands mine shall also belong.

So clearly he thought it important to "read what is written" too.

effort comes first, effortlessness comes later.

"Create your own demand. People are always on the lookout for the good. People seek out winners. Therefore be a winner all the time."

Now if I were giving advice on this sort of thing I'd say just the opposite. Here would be my advice.

"It's not enough to be good at what you do. George Washington was turned down when he requested a commission in the British army. Abraham Lincoln lost 2 elections before becoming President. Einstein was 40 before anyone recognized him as a leading scientist. So it is not enough to be a winner you must also work to get people to notice how good you are and that can take time."

Now if I'm right than his advice is irresponsible because he's setting people up for disappointment. People taking his advice will expect the world to form a line to their door. When that line doesn't form they'll have to assume they just aren't good enough and that's not the desired result.

Not that I would pretend to know what that means!

"no pain, no pain" :)