Signs You've Found Your Life's Work | Hacker News Reader

Signs You've Found Your Life's Work

fastcompany.com

25 pointsrblion17 comments

"This month marks the nine-month anniversary of the most natural and obvious, most joyful and energizing decision of my life: to fully commit 100% to my life's work."

Nine month? This article lost me at the beginning of the first sentence. How can you take someone serious who has been working hardcore for nine month and now believes he can go on working like this? Let's see how she/he does in a year, or ten, or 50.

> 3. You are willing to suffer.

> 8. You fall asleep exhausted, fulfilled, and ready for tomorrow.

Most articles like this are trying to convince me I should be excited to work 12+ hours in a day. I like my offline time. I like seeing my family and the world. I don't need to work 60 hours in a week to be a great developer.

5. You make room for living. Your work provides you the ability to live fully and enjoy life. Though you feel captivated and enthralled by your work, you make room for healthy routines like fitness, connection, spontaniety, and play. These activities re-energize and enable you to live a holistically fulfilling life.

Considering that they use the singular term "life's work", I don't think they intend for their signs to apply to people with more than one goal in their lives.

Also, isn't it obvious when you are happy with what you are doing? What we really need are the signs that you are looking at your life's work's job listing.

By these standards, practically no historical figure counts as having "found [their] life's work". Maybe Gandhi. Certainly not, say, van Gogh.

Life is pain, anyone who says differently is selling something.

You are projecting.

1. He's quoting, actually.

2. The article agrees with him.

I know he agrees with the quote.

He's not quoting the article; he's quoting The Princess Bride (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/quotes).

He's not quoting the article. He's mis-quoting the film The Princess Bride:

Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

1. It doesn't feel like work.
2. You are aligned with your core values.
3. You are willing to suffer.
4. You experience frequent flow.
5. You make room for living.
6. Commitment is an honor.
7. The people who matter notice.

8. You fall asleep exhausted, fulfilled, and ready for tomorrow. 

_______

= Dating/Marriage/relationship advice

IMHO, "your life's work," is the work you do... while you're alive. Sometimes you are miserable. There's a group therapy session we all go to... it's the bar. Get used to it.

"Passion comes from the latin word 'pati,' which means 'to suffer.' Your life's work is less about following a passion and more about your willingness to suffer along the way."

I found this to be an interesting way to think about things you are passionate about. Having a passion doesn't mean you enjoy every aspect of it. It means that the painful moments are "worth it" because you value the reward above the pain.

As good of a model that this is in explaining the experience of finding "your life's work" it's useless in terms of how to get there. The best algorithm would be "keep looking until you find it, unless you stumble upon it by accident" Cal Newport has a slightly more actionable algorithm based on Self-Determination Theory. He has a detailed post on it. http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/04/09/corrupted-callings-the...

I think I can check off all the points in the article but still feel that I have my job because I happened to be born into (and managed to stay in) an almost absurdly privileged situation.

One sign that you're lying to yourself: you're actualizing a vision.

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