A plain wrong advice: Do What You Love | Hacker News Reader

A plain wrong advice: Do What You Love

waqasali.me

5 pointswaqasaday7 comments

I think your problem with this advice is that you're looking at it at the micro-scale. They don't mean the, fairly hedonistic, "only ever do the activities that you love to do", but rather in a grander scheme. Work on the problems that motivate you, the issues that are near and dear to your heart. And yes, that will mean doing things you don't like. But it also means you'll be more likely to succeed in them because you actually care about the end result.

I think there is no micro scale for the advice to be right and wrong. And you're trying to say the same thing in your last lines of the comments, so I am mostly agree with they way you put it.

But I still believe, Do What You Love takes you no where, so it should be replaced by Go Where You Want And Do Anything Positive for That.

People are different in that some people are better at achieving regardless of their feelings towards the goal (good example would be many straight A students), while other people struggle endlessly with a task unless their feelings are in line with the goal (e.g. some high school or university dropouts). I believe every entrepreneur has to be achievement oriented to some degree.

However, being achievement oriented and not working on something you find interesting will always be the more difficult situation for everyone - you'll be constantly fighting upstream to some degree. It's possible, but not the ideal situation.

Align your work in some way with your largest goals and you're bound to be happier and the chance of success is bound to be higher.

Waqasday, the "Do what you love" is just a nice sounding simplification of "Work on the topic you are passionate about" and is one of the best advice imho, generally for life. Although naturally not universal as any other advice. However in case of startups we could add "Develop your passions - learn how to do and enjoy new things (required to succeed)". But that's not as catchy for a slogan.

I think there's a fine balance here. Of course, unless you're extremely lucky you're not going to be on a path of constantly doing things you want to do and succeeding. But doing things you HATE constantly just so you can get an end goal?

To me that seems like you're sacrificing a lot of your values in order to obtain a goal, which by the point you get there may be meaningless after the journey you took to obtain it.

I think you should be aware you might have to do less favorable projects along the way, but if you find yourself hating your work it might be time for a change.

It's a wrong advice but you don't explain why it's wrong. You just state it with a very strong opinion/trust. If it didn't work for you, then it might have worked out for others.

Still I'm convinced to do what you love. I dropped college and I'm a lot better off.

To the author of this post, see: http://danshipper.com/love-is-right-in-front-of-you

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