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Comment by inmygarage | Hacker News Reader

My favorite story from the Quora discussion on Chua's article (http://www.quora.com/Parenting/Is-Amy-Chua-right-when-she-ex...) was this one: "At one point, I attended a "piano camp" with other equally talented white students, and what struck me is that those students actually practiced for hours because they loved music, and genuinely practiced for hour after exhausting hour because they couldn't get enough of the emotional expression that piano afforded them. Piano held none of that for me."

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.

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Yes, I believe that you can have a functional society where everyone follows his or her passion, but to see it, you have to realize two things:

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.

It's an interesting supply and demand question. If everyone suddenly started valuing "passion" more and "money" less, then as you said, given the current pay scales then maybe lots of accountants would switch to being rockstars.

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.

Is it possible, though, to have a functional society where everyone follows his or her passion?

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.

I like Paul Graham's essay where he points out that society can adapt to not have these things.

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.

I'd argue that where you end is the world we live in today. People are passionate to do what they're doing versus the alternative. You say its passion for money. Others will say the passion to please their parents. Or impress the Jones's or put food in their babies mouth.

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 personally know people who are passionate for construction work.

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.

Reminds me of the apocryphal story when Marx was asked during a lecture "In communism who will clean the streets?", to which he replied "You will."

I think a more convincing answer would have been "I will". But "you will" is more correct, and that is (one of the reasons) why communism won't happen.

There are still many professions though that very very few people are going to be passionate about. Problem is though if you automate these everyone can follow their passion but then you have the job supply problem.

Making everyone pursue his passion is a bit hard i think , but framed differently , this becomes the question : can everyone have a job he mostly enjoys ?

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.

As long as by "follow your passion" you don't mean "follow your passion to the exclusion of everything else", then it seems very possible. It seems unlikely that someone will have a passion for emptying my bins, but that's not to say that the person emptying my bins can't be following their passion when they're not collecting garbage.

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.

Impossible. The supply is already far, far higher than demand for certain professions - acting and basketball, for instance.

You incorrectly assume those are the only activities that those people could possibly enjoy doing. Part of the trick is finding the overlap between enjoyable and productive.

I think what he meant is that there are many more people for whom basketball is their passion than can actually make a living with basketball. Therefore, it's impossible to have a society where everyone truly follows their passion.

They can find a different passion. Basketball didn't even exist a few hundred years ago. People have the potential to enjoy more than one thing. Having the mindset of finding ways to enjoy things is the key, not mindlessly pursing the first "passion" you encounter.

Having such a mindset is a great thing. For most, firing up a new passion is easier said than done.

I'm curious - how many people have only one passion?

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?

Your story is very similar to mine. Except instead of music I was interested in film and comedy.

I have different goals/passions that don't seem to relate: programming, fitness, speaking different languages.

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.

There are lots of ways to make a living if basketball is your passion beyond playing it professionally. For instance, you could do a sports-based startup (http://fanvibe.com) or coach middle schoolers or open a sports memorabilia store.

I don't see how you could definitively know it's not possible.

I was actually editing my message to say that I didn't necessarily agree with this, as I have uncles and cousins who are kid's basketball coaches. I do see where he's coming from, though.

Does _everyone_ in society really need to be working. It seems that as technology advances the number of labor hours required per person would decrease. Maybe only a small percentage of people need to be following a productive passion.

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