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It's often said that you should "Do what you love", but that's mostly bad advice. It encourages people to grind away their lives in pursuit of some mostly unattainable goal, such as being a movie star or a billionaire startup founder. And even if they do make it, often the reality is nothing like they imagined it would be, so they're still unhappy.

Do what you love is in the future. Love what you do is right now. As with the other patterns, it's meant to guide the small decisions that we make every moment of every day. It's less about changing what you do, and more about changing how you do it.

"Do what you love" treats "what you love" as a fixed thing, but it's not. I used to hate running. I would sometimes force myself to run a few miles because it's supposed to be healthy, but I never liked it. Then I read a book that said we are born to run, and that it can be fun. Inspired, I decided to try running just for fun, focus on the quality of every step, and forget about the goal completion aspect of it. Very quickly, I learned to enjoy running, and over time I've transformed my entire relationship with fitness and exercise to be oriented more toward enjoyment.

Naturally, this more intrinsic approach ultimately improves the quality of our efforts, which generally leads to greater extrinsic rewards as well. Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation are best when they are both pointed in the same direction. ...

Real work always seems to involve a certain amount of unpleasant, grinding effort though, and startups often have a lot of it. It's like having a baby. It's 5% cute, adorable moments, and 95% dirty diapers and vomit.

The key to loving these more unpleasant moments is meaning. If we genuinely care about and believe in our mission, then those difficult times begin to take on a more heroic quality.

https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-technology.htm...

Thank you for the quote, I like the part about the "what you love part" being fluid. I think that's why sometimes your career being "what you love" can be tough, because unless you're the boss, it's hard to steer the barge to align the group goals with your personal goals (another commenter had a good take on that aspect.)

For me personally, since I'm not the boss, I do what I can in my work to align the company goals with my goals, and vice versa, but also remember to fallback on what my real passions are on my own time. For me its a helpful way to cope when the goals really diverge and it's out of my hands.

>It's like having a baby. It's 5% cute, adorable moments, and 95% dirty diapers and vomit.

So true lmao, and you have to worry about them for several years until they are strong enough to walk their own path, even then, the worries at the back of your mind never goes away, they’re your kids after all, that’s why I will never have kids.

Job progression up the ladder is mostly inferior to lateral progression to a new company. That's partly why people stay such a short time in a role.

You'll get no loyalty, humanity, or recognition from the company. Give them the minimum to keep them happy and keep your job and focus the rest of your energy on something that will benefit you.

If you are inclined to give your minimum at something you spend time on everyday, it essentially means you shouldn't have started it in the first place.

Unless you are forced to do work you don't enjoy (work is what brings food to the table etc.), you should obviously find better work. Also, even if you are stuck, try to get out of it as soon as possible.

Choosing to do work you don't care about is simply bad decision making due to lack of understanding. In the long run it may even reduce the quality of your life.

I wouldn’t even say in the long run. I mean even at 22 if you hate your job so much that you’re going to the bar every night (been there), that isn’t a long term detriment, it’s an immediate one. Maybe you can excuse it and avoid thinking about it at that age because “everyone does it”, but that is exactly the kind of thinking that gets you into trouble with pretty much anything.

You can take pride in your work, you can do a good job, you can even enjoy it (I don't usually). But when it's quitting time, unless it's an emergency, you're done. And if I overwork some days because of deadlines or emergencies, I will underwork when the dust settles. That's fair.

I'll spend my time after work contracting or working on my own projects. Both of which benefit me more than over achieving in my day job.

And this is if you're working for someone else. If you have a stake - if it's something you are an equal partner with your collaborators on, something you believe in and stand to draw immensely from and have true decision-making ability - then of course it's reasonable to push more. You've already placed your stake, you want to be able to hold onto it.

But if you've been broughton to a project and you're not offerd that kind of stake, if you're there just for your labor, it's unreasonable to be asked for more than what was initially agreed upon, and it's also unreasonable for that initial offer to have included some kind of expectation of open-ended practice when compensation was defined and finite.

Exactly. I work 50-60 hours a week if I get paid by the hour. More if it's my own company. If it's a standard 40 hour week, then that's all I work. That's the deal we agreed to. The company doesn't give me anything for going that extra mile, so I just do regular hours and I save my energy for me.

I've never got a raise or a promotion, except by changing jobs. I got a bonus once. I've also been let go with 0 days notice the day before my birthday, without so much as a thank you. Companies treat you as an expendable cog, and that's what I give them in exchange. It's fair.

The grass is greener where you water it.

> Give them the minimum to keep them happy and keep your job and focus the rest of your energy on something that will benefit you.

In my experience this is the type of person in your team that - instead of consulting colleagues to arrange holidays cooperatively and ensure there's cover available, and that parents do ok given the extra encumbrances they're subject to etc. etc. - goes ahead and books out a whole year's leave at the earliest opportunity to maximise their own benefit.

Some of the least pleasant people I've had to work with were the ones that saw it as an inconvenience.

You may think they are unpleasant, but they may be happier for it. Perhaps they prioritize their time with friends and family above their relationships at work. They're turning other people's loyalty to the company and solidarity with colleagues to their advantage. It's not an irrational strategy if it maximizes happiness.

Have you worked in HR or management where these career paths are created?

Why doesn't it make sense to keep really good employees? If you know they are really good? Why does it make more sense to let that person go and pay some "maybe good" person up front much more?

Conventional wisdom, plus a few studies, has shown that if you want to get 15% or more of a raise, you need to jump somewhere else. Since they're hiring from the market, they have to offer (decent) market rates, while your current job is going to keep paying you at whatever rate you agreed to.

After a while it becomes a self-fulling prophecy -- they know you're jumping in 2-3 years, so they're not even going to try to keep you.

The talent pool isn't shrinking, either, so there will be more devs, and more IT guys -- be they in Seattle, or India -- as things more forward. This means they can probably find someone to replace you, and while it may be a loss of productivity, the lower salary (relative to increasing yours) may offset the costs.

Plus inside threats are big -- a senior dev-ops guy who has been there for 8 years knows how to break things just right, skim things off the top, or just take a "agent fee" from some vendors to push for their product to be rolled out. Keep em under a 3-4 years and they can't get their roots in enough to damage things.

That didn't answer my question at all. You said "if you want to get a 15% or more raise, you need to jump somewhere else". That's just coming out of thin air or based on "other companies do it". If you do work in HR or as a manager, what's the rational basis deciding just that number?

> spend the other 8-10 hours a day doing things you actually like to do

How many hours are in your day? I don't even have kids and I don't even have 4 hours in a workday doing things I actually like to do.

Sounds like you might have some hours tied up in a commute? If so, listen to the things you like to do in the form of podcasts during that time.

In addition to the third of your day you work and the third of your day you sleep, you also need time for chores, hygiene, food consumption, etc.

Very few people have 8 hours to do things they enjoy in a day.

I'm coming from the 8 hours sleep, 8 hours of work, 8 hours of other stuff. There will obviously be things like chores and eating in there, but I think there is meaning and purpose derived from those things as well.

Transportation and meals come from that "other stuff" bucket, at least for 90% of jobs out there. You work for 8 hours and hopefully sleep for the full 8 hours. The edge cases all get taken out of your "free time" and what is left over is the time you get to spend on you. Which is way, way less than 8 hours.

I would say it's closer to 4 hours max. With kids, zero. It's hard to find meaning in those 4 hours when life is so complex. I would even argue that you need a dedicated entertainment bucket just to stay sane which further limits this other stuff bucket to merely a large handful of minutes. This handful of minutes is where you live your real life and it's really not enough.

The other stuff column goes far too fast.

It takes me two hours from waking up to walking into work, so now we are at 6 hours. Then it takes me an hour to get home, down to 5. After prepping, cooking, eating, and cleaning dinner, as well as making lunch for the next day (usually just packaging leftovers), I lose another hour at least, 4 hours left. Getting ready for bed is a whole process, and the average human takes 14 minutes to fall asleep, so call it a half hour there, and throw in a half hour for just misc. waste time throughout the whole day for good measure, and you are left with three hours, or 12.5% of your day, that is truly yours. If you need to run an errand after work or do some chores, that time evaporates.

I guess you can strive to make productive use of those 180 minutes, but after a whole day it's hard to work remotely efficiently. A quick peek on HN turns into a 30 minute stint. I love playing guitar and reading books, both make me quite happy, but I find sometimes there just isn't enough time to engage in these hobbies, which makes me depressed. Sometimes I indulge on the dopamine hit of playing guitar for an hour or two, which makes me very happy, but at the cost of sleep, which ruins productivity and energy the next day, I get less done, and fall to a new low.

Sometimes I wonder how older generations of my family coped with full time factory work half a century ago, then I remember all of the raging alcoholics and realized that no, they didn't really cope well with this post industrial revolution work week construct either.

I have a different take on this. "do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life" isn't a dangerous cliche, it is in fact true (note that many cliches are cliches because they are obvious truisms). The problem is that it has a number of caveats. One of which is that it is impossible to "do what you love" while taking direction from other people unless their goals and ideals are 100% aligned with your own, which is pretty much never the case. It doesn't matter who those people are, they could be the vulture capitalists mentioned in the post or they could just be your manager. It doesn't matter if you're able to have a beer with them at the end of the day if you have different motivations for doing the work that you're doing.

The other environments mentioned, a tech giant and a high growth unicorn, are obviously composed of people playing the same pathological game. They're all publicly working towards whatever goals the company has set while privately pursuing their own. I think most of this is inescapable with the way we currently structure corporations. Even when you purposefully try to avoid this outcome it still happens.

I think groups of people are able to achieve and maintain a sort of synchrony that allows them to "do what they love" together. You hear about it and sometimes are lucky enough to be there for it when different places, communities, or companies have that "golden age" where things are lined up perfectly, people are building on each other's work, and every day just seems to flow naturally. Often after the fact it gets derided as drinking the kool-aid or a reality distortion field but something happens when everyone buys in to the dream. I think we've lost a lot of that, we're too cynical and have convinced ourselves that it's not real and that's pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy since it leads to a permanent state of disillusionment. That's where we wind up just clocking in and out, doing an honest days work and narrowing our lives down to whatever is left over. You sell half your life to buy the other. In my mind that's much more dangerous than chasing your dreams.

This is a really thoughtful take, thank you. I completely agree about how the group dynamic and generally being aligned in goals makes the world of difference.

I feel this way in some of my social groups outside of work, for hobby or semi-professional endeavors I have. They're a lot of work but the people I do it with are all rowing in the same direction. In some ways, having those experiences makes the less-than-rosy realities of the day job more tolerable.

Cliches, expectations, passion

Steps, you say, the snake asked... without understanding...

um Terms like 'goal' or 'front' even unintentionally used may lead to a want in terms of an ethical norm. 'People are driven by goals and success' and that maybe lead to the conclusion 'peopleshould be striving' and even to the thought 'people have to work and therefore to laze didn't meet the character of humans ethically' (sry, for my bad english) ^^

I don’t agree that a meme like “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” means as much as you do.

I think watching people exist in the same literal loop of agency for 50 years is vastly more important than an arbitrary set of sounds. If the sound is a key to a cognitive idea, and the idea is “climb ladder for 50 years” literally?

The sounds and idea is mapped to a literal behavior. Focus on climbing a ladder. Why? Because that’s what we focus our agency on. Ladder to where? Up.

What?

Nobody should be set on an objective like climbing ladders to nowhere.

Do what you love. Be prepared to give it up and learn to love something new, and you’ll learn to love to learn and not get anxious about climbing ladders to nowhere, thus burning out.

People with a lot of money are able to make a lot of money and make it look easy. Climbing the ladder to where you can add two big numbers to get a bigger number based on a sense for generating new emotional objects but utility that’s more of the same is asinine and unfair.

You’re all building the analytics engines they’re using to push you to discover. IMO until a hardware revolution comes, software is hitting endgame for the masses.

My data set isn’t so large I can’t analyze it with anything more than an Nvidia card.

Why do we need the cloud when iPhone SE has an AI chip?

There’s novelty to consider for consumers. User experience sucks. Maybe some graphical toolkits for home users to leverage their graphics cards more easily?

Stop thinking “technology = cloud” which is a meme driving their business not your creativity and satisfaction.

The days of wanking DSLs are coming to an end as automation makes stamping out websites trivial. We know what UIs people will use well enough for business. It’ll happen. It’s all just text, after all.

Don’t get hung up on corporates demands for tech that looks like X.

Make tech.