Paul Buchheit: The two paths to success
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
I think it's obvious when someone is truly passionate about something versus just doing it because they think it will get them another carrot.
Is it possible, though, to have a functional society where everyone follows his or her passion? I believe it is, but would be curious to hear thoughts.
I remember that when I was a kid, I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. Then I wanted to be a naval architect. (Well, technically I didn't know the names for either of those, I just knew I wanted to design planes and ships.) I played violin and clarinet, I wanted to be in a rock band, I liked computer programming, I fancied myself a novelist (even though I hated writing), I wanted to be a famous theoretical physicist, and I was going to make a few million dollars founding a software startup.
I ended up a computer programmer, because that was the optimal intersection between what I wanted to be and what other people would pay for. Although that software startup may yet happen.
But I continued - and sometimes still continue - the other things quite far along. I made All-State Orchestra in violin, and continued to play throughout college, and still occasionally pick it up. I nearly ended up a physics major; I didn't switch away from it until my last semester. Now that I have no immediate plans to become a writer, writing is kinda fun.
Is this unusual? Do people get "stuck" on one dream and then ignore everything else that they might enjoy?
Often, my greatest anxiety episodes arise from thinking of how I can balance these, and have a social life and do the laundry at the same time.
I find articles like these great, because they get me just that one step closer to learning this how to figure it all out.
I don't see how you could definitively know it's not possible.
At the extreme, probably not. You'd have a population of people who spent most of their waking hours: playing basketball, rapping, shopping for shoes, having sex, watching movies, and doing drugs.
Who is going to be a cashier? Janitors? Work on assembly lines or make clothes? Lots of construction jobs go unfilled. Big swaths of the medical profession disappear. Prisons have 1/100th the correction officers. Dentists are gone.
On the bright side... there's no patent atttorneys.
He uses the example where people used to have live in servants. Now people aren't willing to be butlers so the wealthy just go without.
A similar job would be hangman or executioner. If everyone decided not to do that job, then it wouldn't get done. Is that really so bad?
Janitors are quickly being replaced by passionate iRobot employees. Cashiers at the stores I shop at are replaced by self-checkout robots made by passionate robotics people.
Assembly lines and making clothing...... do I even need to say it?
Construction jobs should go unfilled, it's shitty work, why not leave it unfilled? Who cares? Soon enough those quad-copter construction workers will build stuff anyway.
The medical profession is full of passionate doctors and society will adapt if we truly run out of proctologists. Many dental visits would be unnecessary if people used proper preventative dental hygiene. Society could cut back on the suicidal dentists and be fine.
If a job would truly go unfilled due to lack of passion I doubt this would be a problem.
Also, every single job you listed, I guarantee there are people who thoroughly love those jobs.
Some people are passionate about making money and those people would be passionate about being a highly paid prison guard or executioner or butler. This is, in fact, pretty much what happens. People who love money a lot do become dentists and they do enjoy their job because it affords them their yacht on the weekends.
Passion for money is genuine passion.
And I don't think you can appeal to technology that's not here, and frankly not close. Otherwise you can just begin with the thesis that we have mind reading nanotechnology that can build anything via just thought, including other people. Sure in this dream world everyone can literally just watch TV created by the best staff in the world (which was created by my thoughts).
But that's not going to happen. And quad-copter construction isn't going to build most of what is built today.
But what will happen is that people will do what they're most passionate about versus their alternatives. This is exactly the state of the world today. Every single one of us is doing exactly what we want to do, given the choices in front of us.
I asked a construction worker straight up - if you won a billion dollars, what would you do?
He said he'd go on vacation for a few months and then probably come back to the job site because he loves the culture and the work. He enjoys his job.
This is not unusual. Nerds can't imagine that some people enjoy being janitors, but they exist.
It would not be the end of the world if the only construction workers were the passionate ones. I think the world would be just fine - in fact, I think it would be better. I think we'd have higher quality construction work and a happier society.
1. The current allocation of labour isn't set in stone. Just because we have a certain number of accountants now, doesn't necessarily mean we need all those accountants for society to function in a way that makes us all happiest.
2. Almost everyone is passionate about eating and having a warm place to sleep. An accountant who quits his job to pursue a career as a rock star will likely soon run low on money, and may find renewed passion in accounting, if only as a part-time gig to feed and shelter himself and his family, while he finds greater fulfillment playing music in his spare time.
I also believe that nothing truly great gets done without there being a huge amount of passion behind it. Look at any great project you know and you'll see it there in the core people. They wouldn't want to be doing anything else. The world would be much better if everyone followed their passion. I think most of us are just too scared to let go of the security of making the safe, easy, predictable choices.
But as well as the running out of cash problem for the new rockstars, the remaining accountants would presumably be able to charge the rockstars a fortune to do their tax returns (fewer accountants = less competition), which might persuade some of the rockstars that accounting isn't that bad overall.
This does break down in the extreme case where people don't value money at all, but that doesn't seem like a very likely scenario. Sure, I have a passion for being a rockstar, but if being an accountant for 3 years could give me enough money to pay for my rockstar career for the rest of my life then I might develop a passion for accounting.
Many people in the western world could probably work far fewer hours, own fewer material things and therefore have much more time to pursue things that they love.
I can think of a few ideas that might help: 1. giving people the ability , at work (drivers, assembly line etc..) to have conversations with interesting people, cheaply. 2. a music/audio player that can measure when someone is in a state of flow , an can give the person the optimal mix of music , audio(podcasts/text-to-speech) audio speed , volumes , pauses , content types , etc to achieve maximal flow times. 3. job demands some attention , and that decreases the flow state when you talk/listen to something. there's some research that the brain can do 2 things at the same time , allocating each side to some task. maybe there are ways of achieving multitasking and flow ? 4. Use game theory to make boring jobs more interesting. 5. Gallup strength model give an interesting abstract way to query people's strength(passions). view at this abstract way , a person can adapt to more jobs(instead of programming as a passion, solving complex problems is a passions and then you have many more opportunities). 6. This gallup way of thinking can give you better ways to interview ,assign jobs , and design jobs. 7. find ways of using augmented reality to make the job less boring.
I know 30 year olds who can't put a month of work together. I also know 30 year olds who have no idea why they became bankers and they ask their mom permission to switch jobs. Each one is depressing and there is a balance.
I was more responding to the "there is a balance" comment, which I took to mean that uuilly thinks it's better on the whole if children are given some amount of freedom but are still forced to do certain things. That's the idea I was really trying to challenge, though that's admittedly not what I wrote in my first sentence. My comment was too hasty.
I on the other hand, was a dreamer who seldom knew which day it was and frequently left for school 30 minutes late with only one shoe on. I hesitate to think where I'd be without my parent's prodding.
If the kid doesn't need prodding, then life just got easier for you. But to allow a kid to rot in the hope that one day he'll sprout wings is bad parenting. From my experience, kids who require no prodding are outliers.
I agree different things work for different people, and there's probably a spectrum of how "naturally" disciplined people are.
That said, I think people are naturally curious and don't, at least at the beginning of their lives, gravitate towards sitting around and doing nothing. Toddlers are naturally motivated to learn to walk and talk and are almost endlessly inquisitive.
Over time, this curiosity seems to diminish. I think formal schooling, which emphasizes external motivation over internal motivation, is largely to blame.
I might be more naturally disciplined than most, but I think a big part of that comes from not having the first decades of my life mapped out for me.
I really don't think it does. But I think what is valued becomes more narrow. Being curious about listening to different music bands at age 16 isn't valued as much as being curious about math. Being curious about girls isn't valued as much as being curious about programming. Being curious about knowing the stats of every baseball player isn't valued as much as being curious about Shakeaspeare.
People who are curious about certain things are valued, while people are curious about other things are valued less (or rather their curiosity is valued less).
If you let a kid do what he wants, he'll eat coco-puffs, watch TV and eventually turn to drugs and booze.
In particular, I am rather disappointed with generalization of the art of parenting done by Amy in her article. Sometimes, some things become instant hits by being controversial.
Whoever wrote this must not be very good at what they do (assuming they agree with the opinion). Programming was an enormous amount of fun for me, I would have never gotten good at it if it weren't. In fact, everything I ever got good at was tremendous fun. Sometimes it was work and pure misery, but for the most part it was fun. Perhaps others tick differently from me, but based on conversations I had with people that are very good at what they do, I doubt it.
That's especially true of sports and other zero-sum competitive activities: it's really boring when winning is the only goal, and you know you're going to win.
- The guy who invented Gmail and founded FriendFeed
In all seriousness, this article hit home for me. I went through high school bored and came out with well above average, but not stellar, grades. I was accepted into a good enough college (where I'm currently enrolled) and have plenty of time to pursue my own interests, one of which is launching a startup. Which I'm doing.
It's often said that people become entrepreneurs because they can't handle a regular job. Perhaps these people are simply too "defective" to fit into any mold, or maybe they lack the extrinsic motivation necessary to care about bosses, performance reviews, and other things which are so important for success in the corporate environment.
Also, if you're interested in this stuff, check out John Holt. He explored the ideas Paul talks about and advocated a type of homeschooling called unschooling, which is student-led and based largely on intrinsic motivation.
As a guy who went to Case when Paul did (and only vaguely recalls interacting with him), I know that being on the right side of that 10% translated into $50K+ in scholarships given CWRU's by-the-numbers merit-based aid system.
Edit: I'm just commenting on the significance of Paul's statement. A huge percentage of Case students would not have attended had it not been for the liberal disbursement of 75% off coupons without regard to financial need.
With that said, being able to name two is better than most. Ask your average developer who famous (in CS circles) went to Yale, Columbia, Princeton, UIUC, etc... It's pretty rare that there is any association at all. Off the top of my head I don't know if I can name two of equal prominence from any of those schools (although I'm sure if I searched I could find some).
The fact that most people cite, at best, Knuth and Paul says little about CWRU since most people can't cite anyone from virtually any other school.
And BTW, UIUC was probably the biggest gimme... although I'm surprised you didn't go with Andreesen and Ozzie. Those are the names I most typically hear thrown out.
(Hi Adam!)
But it can be really hard to find a job that lets you do this. If you do, the first step is to realize you're in a rare position and take advantage of it.
I'm lucky to have a work environment (go ahead and ask) and a home environment that lets me follow this path to the extent possible.
Luckily not everyone follows his passion but brings food on the table.
When I read her article, I shared it with my husband and my mom. My mom was shocked and saddened by it. My husband understood that she was essentially saying that she believed that her child could do it - like a coach who constantly pushes you because she believes in you even if you don't believe in yourself.
I personally could not do this someone.
However, it comes how to you convince someone that is worth the effort. There is an excellent book "Influencer: The Power to Change Anything" with great examples like curbing HIV transmission and eliminating guinea worm parasite. The bottom-line is the person who needs to do the change has to answer 2 questions essentially: Is this worth it? and am I really capable of doing it?
For Amy's children she is answering question 2 for her children.
like a coach who constantly pushes you
On the other hand in the child / parent relationship described in that article, the kid doesn't have a choice. He cannot change coaches, he cannot pick another sport. Some children endure and in fact may turn out better. But others become depressed adults.
And if there's one thing I know: I'm not a father that wants his boy growing up to be miserable. So I'll try pushing him when he lacks purpose, but whatever he likes doing I'll encourage him.
Her reasons were that she showing that she believed in her children when they did not believe in themselves.
Now I definitely have to read the book. I just read her wsj post.
When I was young I did as I was told. It was easiest way for people to leave me alone so I would have time to do the things I wanted.
Later I always wondered why I was never competing for prizes or honed a specific skill; I was having too much fun doing things that others could care less about. It was a great way of learning about being comfortable with myself.
What great blog post. So well written, I am envious.
Meanwhile, my friends who had the freedom to explore and learn what they're passionate about are much happier today.
(Yeah, I know, plural of anecdote is not data, etc, etc. But my sample of kids who were allowed to do whatever they want is slightly larger than the norm here because I was unschooled my whole life and so I'm in the position of knowing a lot of 20-something unschoolers, in addition to my peers who went to public/private school.)
year 1 - learn to do this new position
year 2 - actually do it correctly
year 3 - now that you can do it correctly, can you improve it? Do you enjoy it and want to stay doing it?
The french call it mobilité forcée, and some of the consequences were exposed for example at France Telecom. It is a manipulative oppression method of working people by killing them existentially along with their family (i.e. your kid will have to change school every 2 years, along with all the friends). This could only work if it is voluntary (you don't loose your job and outlook if you don't play along), but then again the goal of puppeteers is completely the opposite.
It is all about making sure cogwheels are replaceable by ensuring they are actually replaced on schedule.