Do What You Love? Screw That
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And honestly, what's the point of doing anything else? Be someone else's servant, because you want ... money? Recognition? You are going to die one day, and that's it. The purpose of life, as best I can tell, is self actualization.
It's stupid. You want money? Why? So your kids can follow in your footsteps and chase money so that their kids can follow in your footsteps and chase money so their kids can...
And then are you just blaming your children for your lack of ambition and risk taking? Would you say to your kids "I would have figured out what I loved, but then you were born". Would you think it, though?
If you want money, go work in finance. Otherwise you're not sincere in even chasing money, you're just treading water.
more passion = more practice = more skills = more money
Doesn't matter what you do, you can make money at it if you are good. There are professional video gamers ffs.
This (and its converse) are exactly the advice I give to undergrads who, here at the University of Chicago, are heavily recruited by both local and NY finance firms. I like to point out that if you love money, you will be among others who do and will probably enjoy your job and especially the pay. And if you don't, hearing about a trader's addition to his Rolex collection or figuring out "opportunities" in an exchange's rules or implementation will destroy your soul.
BTW, I don't give this advice in a loaded way - my wife and many of my friends work in finance.
But if you just want to work 9-5, pull in your 200k (which goes pretty far in Chicago!), and enjoy your money, it's a pretty risk-free path.
I should caveat that my advice is given to CS undergrads looking to do tech-related work. I have more limited experience with people in other roles who want to be, say, traders on a desk.
I don't know what the undergraduate pay is like for 20-somethings. All of my friends (and wife) are > 30 and were experienced developers before entering the field. Most of them have bases above 200, but _all_ have total comps well over 200.
I'd be surprised if you make more at Google Chicago than at, say, Getco or Citadel as a new college hire developer. I'll ask around.
Certainly, though, if you accept with one of the butcher shops you should not be surprised to be treated like raw meat. The last time my wife was transitioning, she certainly experienced some offers that were just insulting. But these were also places just barely scraping by, so it shouldn't be a big surprise.
Of course, many of the top shops won't even hire new college grads in CS. They don't have or want to build the infrastructure required to take someone from barely pulling together a few thousands of lines of code to writing realtime software.
So, this article may be overly facile (I agree with you that it is) but that doesn't mean he's entirely wrong, even if he's only right accidentally.
There's quite a bit of research into expert performance that shows that passion isn't in-born, but developed, and developed through hard work. The initial steps of most careers (even passion careers) are completely unenjoyable. Yes, maybe you are born with a passion for it, but that's very rare. Most people aren't born with an innate passion, not even most who eventually exhibit expert performance.
Most people come to be passionate about what they do well in, and you can't do well until you've gotten over the vicious first humps. What gets the non-born-passionate over the humps is simple dedication.
You might enjoy the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Or, for lighter reading, Kathy Sierra's blog/conference talks, which are based on a lot of that same research but much more fun to listen to.
The article said:
| "Passion is something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world."
Which I agree with. But then it went on to say
| Then apply this test: Will people pay you for it? Will they pay you a lot for it?
| "Money matters, at least in a relative sense," Newport says. "Money is a neutral indicator of value. Potential customers don't care about your passion. Potential customers care about giving up money."
Which I really disagree with as a first measure, to which I say - go work in finance. Your expected value there is far higher than doing anything else. Even if you'll go on to sell a company for $20 million to Google, you'll probably make more money in finance. Money is a side effect - it's important, but if you're looking for money first, I think that you'll miss the forest for the trees. Self actualization should be everyone's primary passion, I feel. And it's hard.
What I was getting at more was people who make excuses about not trying for that - always external, "I would, but I have kids", "I would, but I'm married", which I think are the worst kind of excuse (blaming your wife for preventing you from even trying to make anything of yourself! Can you imagine?). "I would, but I want more money to pay off more debt I used to buy a middle class car and a middle class house with a garage and a lawn and an iPad and a pool and and a vacation to some curated hotel in some third world country every couple years. So that's why I'm not trying to figure out who I really am."
I will check both of those out, thanks for the recommendations.
I basically agree with you. But, do you have a definition or explanation of "self actualization"? I know Maslow talks about this (so maybe I should go read him).
And Tennyson/M: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield"
And Bruce Lee: "If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
We're all vain creatures, selfish, we have vices, we get offended, we seek acceptance, we hurt other people, we make excuses, we disappoint, and we never know what we want. We're often not fully present, distracted by dozens of things in the back of ones mind but not doing anything about it other than worrying, and pulled in many directions, unsure of how to proceed, left with high speed but low velocity. So I think that self actualization is being fully in control of yourself.
It's hard to describe. I was on a long bike ride in the country when I first experienced a glimpse of this. I'd biked maybe 80 miles, alone, winding road, no cars, empty mind, wind, time becomes irrelevant or just another dimension, and a singular purpose for that moment.
I agree with your general point that focusing your attention on what earns the most money is likely to be a recipe for dissatisfaction, unless money offers you everything you want. But the article seems to be making - somewhat fluffily - the perfectly reasonable point that successfully solving others' problems barely related to your interests will usually satisfy (and earn) more than consistently failing to interest the world in personal projects the market doesn't care for, especially if that's because you simply don't have the aptitude to complete the project.
The number of years spent on the job. The more experience you have the more likely you are to love your work.
Or it could be that people that don't like what they do change jobs...
The key as an entrepreneur is to identify a relevant passion."
Not saying much.
Get good at doing something and making money from it, and you will become passionate about it.
Programming.
Then apply this test: Will people pay you for it? Will they pay you a lot for it?
YES.
Okay, perhaps this post is not for me, but the post comes across as highly anecdotal. E.g:
That advice has probably resulted in more failed businesses than all the recessions combined...
I hate to ask it, but source?
And it pays the bills just fine.
In his book "How to Get Rich" he related his hint to pioneer PC-magazines publishing to his interest in early PC-games.
This seems to be the case PG wrote recently in his latest essay - when someone is experiencing a new thing purely as a user, not developer, and feeling and thinking about what's still missing that could be useful to others like him.
Not all passions monetize.
At the moment, I'm passionate about rock climbing, travel, surfing and computer programming. If it weren't for that 4th one, I'd be screwed.
I currently run maybe the 3rd most popular Travel Blogging site out there. It's had a good 5 years of passion poured in now, off and on, and if I were to slap ads on it today I'd pull in a buck thirtyfive a day.
I also run a little service that processes the draconian logfiles that Amazon provides for its webservices and spits out pretty analytics. It's a subject that no human being could ever be passionate about and it pays my rent.
Sometimes it's better to monetize something boring that people are willing to pay for.
I enjoyed programming when I knew nothing about it, and I still enjoy it and do it in my spare time now that I'm over a decade into a software career.
Does it qualify as a passion? I'm not sure. But a hobby I've always enjoyed and a career that pays me well, yup.
--edit-- This is not to say every day at work is an unmitigated pleasure! But I am lucky enough that I get to enjoy what I do for a living from time to time :)
At work it's about getting the job done in a stable and quality way, and the language is not usually my choice. After 12(ish) years I'm mostly asked to work on things I already have experience in.
At home it's about achieving whatever I'm trying to achieve in the fastest way possible, which usually means I stick to languages I know inside out from using them at work. I suppose this isn't a pure passion for programming as an artform, it's more that I get great pleasure from making the machines do what I want them to.
My advice: pick something you find reasonably interesting, is potentially profitable, and that you have a good aptitude for, then aggressively pursue mastery of it.
I guess it all comes down to mindset, but I don't tend to _excessively_ push myself when I'm just playing for myself. Yes, that probably means I'm not reaching my full potential, ability-wise, but it also means that I can continue to enjoy playing and making music.
Serious question.
I feel most people do, but than fail to proceed all the way and actually finish and master something. They'll start new things indefinitely over and over.
That's where the discipline comes in. When the excitement of the New abates, sometimes you just gotta buckle down and get it done.
In my experience people find their passion by working hard at something with reasonable potential. If you work hard at something it may not turn out to be the thing you love but it will expose you to other people who value your work, as well as their own and you can find ways to pivot.
So everything you've ever gotten excited about started off with you not being very interested at all, but giving something a shot, whether it was a book, a lecture, a website, or so forth.
Its like when we fall in love for the first time with a new person. They are perfect in our eyes, There is no way anything they do is seen as negative. But little by little, as time passes, we start seeing the real person and not the fantasy. Sometimes that makes the love grow stronger, and sometimes it drives us to break the relationship. Same with business. What you need to realize that the reason business failures hurt so much is because we fall in love with it. And then get our heart broken when it doesn't work. Don't fall in love with it.
So, the problem with loving your work passionately you stop caring about what other people think of it, what is its (monetary) value to them.
First way: use your love as a hook to which all youd business is tied. E.g. you are eventually aiming at completing some big thing, and in reaching it you could make use of such-and-such services which a lot of people also would pay for.
Second way (now I think it's just a variation of the above one): use your career as a carrier that carries you to your goal. E.g. use your job to accumulate wealth to finance your work later and as a learning experience (you don't want to fail your beloved project, better fail 'with the cats' and be prepared).
Frankly, I have some experience strictly following these advice in personal relationships, the result is weird (unfinished story yet), so use at your own risk :) But in getting satisfaction from work, they do work.
Too bad it does not apply to me :P
In fact, during my childhood everyone tried to convince me to do stuff that I did NOT loved, because what I loved (making games) was "useless."
Here I am now being CTO of a game company. ;)
It's not for me. Programming has been a passion of mine all my life. I practically learnt Python all by myself, in my own time.
Thing was, people have been telling me that I shouldn't do this, that nobody values tech skills, that I should focus on my 'soft' skills, that programmers in my country are doomed to be lowly-paid wage slaves.
Turns out, they were right.
The professions they wanted me to take still pay 3, 4 times what I am getting.
That is, not counting lawyers (that is also a profession much suggested to me), then the multiplier is up to 20x or something like that.
But I can pay my bills (barely... but I can).
When I spend 8 hours a day programming, I don't want to do it at home. It's probably because I don't want to sit in front of a computer all day, or I am lacking social interaction at work. That's why I am currently trying to change my position. While I still love IT and everything tech-related, I want programming to become a hobby again.
I admire everyone who is programming after work, tinkering around, building stuff. I promised my nephew to build a quadrocopter with him, but I haven't done so, just because I am already programming and doing techy things each day again and again.
The latter category only happens sporadically because, like you, I don't often have the energy to code all evening when I've coded all day. But I do find some time for it. Social interaction definitely takes precedence though.
Nobody who says "do what you love" means "do what you love without consideration for your needing food and a roof over your head". Nobody.
Everybody I know who is really good at what they do is doing something they loved. I have never met a great developer who said, "Yeah, I just went into this because it paid well." They loved something about it and made a career out of it. And thinking about my various successful friends, it's true about all of them, no matter the career.
I agree that great passions rarely make great businesses. Doing what you love is absolutely not a guaranteed path to profit. But I feel the answer offered is to work hard and the passion will follow with the success. Except it doesn't. Not always. There are some things you can have complete mastery of and still not enjoy. (The best contract negotiator I've ever met in my life came to me for personal advice. He hates negotiating. But he's mastered it, so everyone asks him to do it.)
To make sure you'll enjoy your work, don't focus on the end product at all--focus on exactly what you'll be doing in the day to day to create it. For example, you may love food, but a catering business is much more about customer service, management, and logistics. Do you love that? Do you love making the trains run on time? Then you'll enjoy a successful catering business--even if you don't love food.
Meanwhile, if you love building products, but pick something that requires a bunch of contract negotiations with a ton of suppliers, you'll likely not enjoy your work, even when it results in a successful product. Maybe the reason you love building things is because you feel control over the process. Perhaps it's better to pick something you can create in a very hands on environment with a small team.
So chasing your passion can lead you to a very good place in the world so long as your keeping your eyes and mind open while doing so. Pursuing or NOT pursuing your dreams with a closed mind will probably not get you far regardless.
Passion might follow mastery sometimes, but usually it is the other way around. My advice is to figure out what you're passionate about-then figure out if there is a way to monetize that passion that makes sense for the lifestyle you want.
He has a good description when he says "Roughly speaking, work can be broken down into a job, a career, or a calling. A job pays the bills; a career is a path towards increasingly better work; a calling is work that is an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.". Then he adds"(Clearly most people want their work to be a calling.)". Nope. There are lots of people for whom their work is not even in their top two priorities. There's nothing wrong with them or the folks for whom their work is a calling.
However, food for thought...as a founder in the tech business, do you really want to hire anyone in a tech or marketing position who's work is not their calling?
That said, people who's work is their calling are rare, and they tend to be very good, which makes them expensive. However, I don't think that 10 bad devs are not better than one really good one - so the old saying 'you get what you pay for holds true', they're worth it.
In short...find your calling, and follow it - just realize it might not be your work.
If you're working as part of a larger company, maybe passion doesn't matter as much, but personally if I were doing a job I didn't love or feel passionate about then I'd leave that job and try something different (and I have done just that in the past).
RS
I challenge someone to come up with any hobby you can't make money from if you're good at it. Even the most ridiculous ones, playing video games, watching movies, etc. all have associated careers in which you can make plenty of money if you are good and put in work. And if you aren't putting in work or don't think you can be good enough, it's probably not a passion.
Then on top of that is the whole part where making money is just not as important to you when you're doing something you enjoy for most of your waking hours. How much money is your happiness for ~40 hours a week worth? For me, it would be pretty steep.
What separates SOME hobbies (computer programming, for instance) is that they're still relatively obscure. Out of 1,000 random people, maybe 3 can program, and all of them likely suck. So if you're passionate about programming, it's not difficult to make a career out of it.
This article doesn't seem to be targeted at STEM-type careers. It's more targeted at the lofty ideas. Roughly 6 degree programs account for over 50% of the Bachelor degrees earned these days. These students are creating an extremely competitive environment for themselves by chasing their very popular ideal careers.
If you're able to get a good-paying job doing what you enjoyed as a hobby, you're lucky. Not everyone has such obscure hobbies as you and I.
The hobby? Collecting and watching laserdiscs. Check out http://www.lddb.com/ and http://forum.lddb.com/ for a look into the hobby and community surrounding it, respectively.
Also, I don't think any of the LDDB shop owners are making a living off of LD sales alone.
There's a good idea here - "If you're passionate about something, consider doing something else that pays better to bring money in, at least whilst you're getting good at your passion" - but the "if you want to do something that is hard to achieve full-time status in, abandon it and do something easier" message is, from my experience, a massive overreach.
I strongly disagree.
When I was young I wanted to became a great guitarist. I've practiced a lot, but when I was near 18 I understood a simple thing: "I will never be Freep, Clapton or Hendrix, no matter how I will try harder".
I put aside my guitar for years. I'd thought that time: "I will never became great musician, but I can be a good engineer".
My wife was amazed that I can play guitar after two years of our marriage.
Hard work is not definitive factor in all cases. Sometimes you just must have inherent ability to do the work.
For example: everybody could be trained to run marathon. But it's not possible to be trained as good marathon runner. One must have genetic ability for this.
If you're passionate about writing great software that people love, the world is your oyster and there are lots of ways to make money.
But if you insist on writing software that solves problems you are passionate about, you're going to have a much harder time. Because problems that programmers are passionate about are exactly the problems that programmers solve for free with open-source.
To take another example, don't open a coffee shop because you're passionate about coffee. That's a very small part of what you'll actually be doing. Open a coffee shop because you're passionate about building a great local business.
On the other hand there's the Koch brothers who simply carried on with their father's rather mundane raw materials business and made it into a mega-empire. When asked about that I remember one of them saying in an interview "That's just the hand we were dealt."
Because expecting people to be able to accurately weigh which of their passions is the "relevant" one, before they have any experience at anything is going to fail just as much as telling them to pick a passion at random.
Unless you're just saying "relevant" as code for "pick a white collar career path that -- if you squint real hard -- looks kinda/sorta like your passion."
What made the comment even funnier is that we all know he loves his work as a developer / engineer. Its almost all he talks about. He followed one passion (music), but the other, more lucrative passion (development) is the one that caught him as a career. As frustrating as that day was, the funny part is that we live for the kinds of problem solving we were facing.
This is the advice I'd give to myself ten years ago: If you know what you want to do, what you want your life to be about, and you believe you can develop the talents to do it, pursue that goal aggressively and immediately, don't waste time.
What one can try to achieve is a transition from one to another. That's why hackers are in big advantage these days. They can build stuff which can make money to fund the stuff they love doing... Struggling is always bad, but struggling on stuff you love would make it even worse. Don't let that happen...
p(able-to-make-money-at-passion | general-public) = x p(able-to-make-money-at-passion | hn-reading public) = y
y is probably greater than x, so that might color the general conclusion of people reading the article, on this board anyway.
In other words, "In my experience, having a lifelong passion of hacking/programming computers to do valuable functional things, this article is wrong!" might be based on a faulty premise.
There was a far lower attrition with slave labor as well.
I answered "yes." I'm off to be happily self employed doing what I love....great article, btw, but the logic needs some work and the wetware could use a tuneup.
Occasionally you're lucky and fall into a mentor/protege relationship where you don't feel like a subordinate, but that's not common. You shouldn't count on that, especially in the "cool" careers that are spam-clogged with incompetent wannabes and in which it's hard to distinguish oneself.
Our CTO's thesis was that no sane technical person wants to be a boss; rather, he'd be doing "real interesting stuff", real science and technology, but someone needs to take responsibility for the project, and it also pays well.
My answer to this was that yes, being chief is not much fun, but if you really care about "real interesting stuff", you'll want to do it in the best possible way, and you quickly realize that you could make use of some subordinates, then teach some engineers... Eventually you find yourself in director's seat.
To which our CTO replied, this was his case ^)
Additionally, managers in a top-down world are constantly struggling to establish themselves as legitimate leaders of the group (without resorting to, "Fuck you, I can fire you.") They're puppet leaders picked from above, and often not the leaders the group would pick. This often creates a lot of tension.
There's good and bad in management. The good aspect is mentoring others, coordinating efforts, building teams, and solving large-scale problems. The bad is the extortionate kind, which is the "if I don't like you, no one here does" idiocy (seen in high-stakes performance review games) that causes so many people to hate management. But when the boss has a bad boss there are no other options for him.
Thus we have no way other than reaching mutually satisfactory state.
Note that different people need different levels of Autonomy/Competence/Relatedness to be happy. I have no problem following orders, but I would go crazy at a place that expected me to be in the office from 9-6 every day. For others, freedom might mean starting their own business and not taking orders from anybody.
In general though, it helps to figure out what the right levels of autonomy/competence/relatedness are for you, and how you can achieve them in the next few years. "Expect to feel 'meh' about your job for a few years before you build up career capital" is much more accurate than "follow your passion and you'll be happy."
Finding ultimate grail that works for everyone, good luck on that.
But deeeem, the opinions, I have dem!