Don’t follow your dreams: A commencement speech for the mediocre
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I tend to be of the opinion that creating jobs for the sake of creating jobs is a bad thing. If we get to the point where society can persist without everyone having a job, why make people work to survive?
There's an interesting article along these lines here: https://medium.com/career-pathing/463ff6dfec1b
The point here is that this would enable people to follow their dreams if they chose to, and not die of starvation in the process. If you still wanted to work, that's not a problem, and you'd make more money that way - but you wouldn't die if you chose not to do so.
For that matter, we might be able to achieve this now with a basic income system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Discussion at http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/
We live in such a warped society here in North America.
Whatever happened to pride in craftsmanship, pride in an honest day's work, pride in contributing to the community?
I bet there will be (perhaps google will lead with this) driverless taxis soon, because after all "who wants to drive a taxi around all day?". Go to Japan. Get in a Japanese taxi. You will see someone who takes the utmost pride in their appearance, their interaction with the customer, the state of the car, the ride, etc etc. It is an experience, to say the least. I believe there is value in that... both to the community and to the individual.
Somehow in North America we have convinced ourselves that some jobs are "beneath us" (and I'm not just talking about taxi driving here). It's puzzling to me and it doesn't have to be that way.
It's called progress. If you want to do these things you absolutely can. People today hunt for sport, should we destroy all farms because hunting is "an honest day's work"? No. If people in the future want to drive taxis for enjoyment, great. But that doesn't mean that we should try to halt progress, so taxi drivers feel better about the objective usefulness of their work.
Some jobs are beneath humans. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to take pride in your work, but when your company does their best to make you function like a robot, taking pride in your work is difficult. Think about it this way:
I run my own burger shop I get up every day and think: "Today I'm going to make the best hamburger that every was!" I proceed to make the best hamburger I can, and I take pride in my work.
Now imagine I work at McDonald's/Wendy's/Burger King. I wake up thinking the same thing but then I remember: "Oh yeah my job isn't to make the best damn hamburger that every was. My job is to make the exact same hamburger as every other employee at every other store in the country with no creative input whatsoever."
The problem is that in many modern jobs the goal is for the employee to function like a robot. No creativity or autonomy allowed. These kind of jobs are inherently unfulfilling. Humans need creative outlets and autonomy to be happy.
I work in online advertising, hardly the most glamorous market, I'm not exactly sequencing genomes to cure diseases - but my work is meaningful to me because we have so much control over how we work, and how we treat our employees.
Once you get past the initial rush of using the tools and understanding the theory of Bioinformatics, the work is eerily similar to data mining for marketing profiles and writing copies for unnecessary consumer products.
People and work environment trumps what you actually do.
I definitely agree, and you raise a good point - I'm idealizing a given task merely because it sounds more socially minded.
I'd say there's often better ways to contribute to a community than by selling something. Help your sick neighbor walk the dog or start a study circle and learn how to grow vegetables and take care hens.
I'd like to see a society where we pursue our dreams, even if the dream life isn't an accelerating career.
Since 1930 productivity in my home country Sweden has increased fivefold, mainly due to technical achievements. Does that mean that we work 20% of the time we did then? No it does not. Wealth has increased of course since the 1930s, and perhaps we want a higher material standard.
But also consider than since the 1970s productivity in Sweden has doubled. Does that mean we work 4 hour days instead of 8 hour days now? No, of course not. Instead, since the 1970s we work 100 hours more each year.
As a society i feel that we should be using the technical achievements to give us more time for the things and the people that we love. Is that too much to ask for?
I'm sorry, but there are kinds of labor that are "beneath" human beings. We don't yet live in a world where people don't have to do those things, but that doesn't change one whit the fact that some basic, minimum level of human dignity, and some of the kinds of work humans have to do are fundamentally incompatible.
Factory workers may be replaced by robots, but service jobs? I'm not so sure.
Let's also consider that Japan has for all intents and purposes, no immigration, while the US has massive amounts of immigration. This lack of immigration, combined with normal customs surrounding Japanese culture, eg: work ethic, honor, etc, all contribute to the experience.
No, what you will see is someone who faces extreme social and economic pressure to conform to the image of taking the utmost pride in his appearance, his car's cleanliness, good customer service, etc. I have almost no doubts that he never wanted to be a taxi-driver when he was growing up.
It's not for nothing that Japan is one of the world's capitals of clinical depression: the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
People can be passionate about work that seems menial or degrading, he might not have dreamed of being a taxi driver as a child but he's capable of appreciating his current employment as a taxi driver.
I wanted to be a scientist when I was growing up, a biochemist. I'm not, but a few friends are, and they all sing from the same song-sheet - "There's so few science jobs in our country, and they're all underpaid, and academia is not much fun either".
An example, my brother has a chemistry degree, the only job he could find with it was processing film badge dosimeters - which involved taking the film out of a box, putting it in a machine, and writing down the batch number. It could've been easily automated, except it was cheaper to hire two science grads to do it.
Shows what an eight year old knows about career paths.
People are children at age 18 now?
I find interesting the dichotomy between how we treat 17-year-old "children" and how we treat 19-year-old "adults". The 17-year-old gets told: work hard for your dreams, and never be ashamed. The 19-year-old gets told: shut the fuck up and get back to work if you want to make rent this month.
What separates them? Two years.
What I'm saying is that you can have different goals at different parts of your life, and those goals rarely match up perfectly with what will actually make you happy. Being young is the state of having less experience living your own life, and by definition you have less information to use when trying to match up your 'conscious goals' (I want to do X sometime in the next Y years) with things that actually make you happy.
Specific to the taxi driver example - children are not allowed to drive taxis, they don't know whether they'll enjoy being a taxi driver or whether they're capable of being passionate about driving a taxi and they probably don't know someone who is both psychologically similar to them and has also been or is a taxi driver - whatever judgement they make about taxi driving is probably based on how the culture they grew up in treats taxi drivers, in general, and not on any analysis of whether they themselves would or could be happy driving a taxi for a living.
EDIT: you also live in a country where the analysis you gave for the distinction between 17 and 19 year olds doesn't hold, most Israeli kids are coddled until they finish their mandatory service and often until they finish university - most of the undergrads at the technion (and most universities) don't work 'for a living' but rather depend on their parents or the state to a large degree to provide for them, they cannot get to the state of being homeless or starving and they are definitely phased into adulthood over almost a decade between high school and working.
> Being young is the state of having less experience living your own life, and by definition you have less information to use when trying to match up your 'conscious goals' (I want to do X sometime in the next Y years) with things that actually make you happy.
Yes, this is true.
> This is about as far from the point as you can get.
Ok, but now we're both far from the point, which is that plenty of people are just not going to be happy driving cabs, and instead of telling them to suck it up (or worse, claiming that if they really knew what's good for them like we obviously do, they would enjoy driving cabs) we really ought to be thinking about how society could accommodate their justified desire to do something else with themselves.
Well, yes, but with society norms as they are now (ie. where money dominates all) those humans wont be needed anymore either. The will be homeless, living in slums, getting by on whatever they manage to find, etc.
(And no, new, less tedious, etc jobs are not automatically and as if by magic made available, and when they are, they don't take as many people as the manual jobs before. In fact, even the services industry -- the traditional way to create non-essential jobs to employ people when the core industry jobs didn't need them anymore -- has been getting automated).
For automation to have a positive impact we will also have to rethink how people get employed and paid.
You're right, automation will tend to put people out of work. If they can find more skilled work that hasn't been automated yet, they're fine, but if not... we'll start to have a problem. Unless, of course, we rethink the idea that people need to work to survive.
Because honestly, if we don't need everyone to work for society to function, I don't see the value in forcing them to do so.
(And maybe, in the long run, capitalism isn't the best choice for how we ultimately run our society. That kind of change isn't happening anytime soon, however. A basic income, on the other hand, might just have a chance.)
But hey, I absolutely love what I am doing,and I always wanted to do it. So should I just shut up and not complain about the money? Probably. But I am just saying this here,that even with a software engineering degree, fantastic grades and full portfolio, if you follow your passion you might end up making less than you would like to.
Sure I got lucky, and timing is everything. Even so, I think that it isn't quite as bleak as this speech makes it out to be. There is a very large number of solutions for the 'success' question, and it all starts off with how you personally define it. By all means, follow your dreams, but keep a balanced view and don't let your dreams mess up your life. At the same time, don't let your life kill your dreams.
If they imagine doing this for their whole life, they'd say "I'd rather die." And they certainly don't see any trace of possibility of what they consider "creativity" in your job (my other comment here elaborates this claim).
(I work as a software developer myself, but I'm also aware of my biased view of the world. And I've spent enough years doing that that I'm also at the point of "I'd rather do something else... maybe becoming a lion tamer" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMOmB1q8W4Y)
And don't think the people who claim that are stupid. A quote from Richard Feynman himself, describing events in 1940-ties:
"Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.
After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.
Absolutely useless. We had tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing."
http://benjaminjcousins.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/richard-fey...
(Of course, finding a best way to calculate arc-tangent on a given platform is a serious task. We know that. Somebody has to do that too. Naive approach will get a lot of errors, and also be to slow compared to the good investigated approach. That, it can be said, is an engineering problem, not a problem for a "developer." But still, we're just moving towards the "only" effective and correct way. But if we consider it "fun", well, poor we).
And people who don't to technical work all have drudge jobs with no variety or intellectual challenge. </sarc>
I'm not at all surprised at how non-technical people balance work and fulfilment. I am sometimes curious as to how they balance their checkbook considering the decline in real incomes for many critical professions.
In my experience, many programmers grossly over-estimate the actual real impact of their work, especially in echo-chambers like the SF Bay Area where their hubris is reinforced by high wages. In general I don't like the anti-tech sentiment that is developing, but as time goes on I understand more and more where it comes from.
> [My girlfriend] made me accountable.
> I think there is an underlying metaphor that we can examine between values and passion. I'm not sure I can go a day without hearing or reading the advice about "finding a passion." I used to be a purveyor of this piece of advice as well. Until I figured out it's basically pointless. The belief that everybody has a particular passion waiting for them somewhere in the world and it just needs to be uncovered like a treasure under a rock is not helpful. Therefore, the dominant activity when trying to uncover or find this passion seems to be flitting from activity to activity, from rock to rock, looking for that elusive passion that will fix all your ills. There's a driving force that if you don't like your situation then you just haven't found your passion yet. I've since decided that this line of thinking is mostly fallacious and that "finding" is the wrong verb to use when describing passion. Instead, we should talk about "developing" passion. The focus is on action and practice. I feel the same way about values. The traditional way of thinking about value places little emphasis on actual action, just like the quest for finding a specific passion. Values shouldn't be discovered but developed over time, like passion. Both of these constructs need a radical overhaul.
It's worth a read: http://samspurlin.com/blog/2012/2/12/values-dont-make-your-l...
- good point about the selection bias of graduation speakers and now they probably downplay the role of luck
- what makes people even think they know what their dream job is? After working for an interesting company for a few years their perception might change dramatically
- is it the job that is the dream, or is it the fame, esteem and wealth? Jobs like being an author or a musician or an artist are probably less pleasant than working in a nice office with a team you like
- most of your heroes... Did they learn to be great in their field by studying it in college?
- on the other hand, advice to follow your dream might be good as long as you give yourself a healthy dose of optionality/convexity
- my advice to people would be don't settle for a job that bores or distresses you, but prepare to be surprised just how fulfilling certain jobs can be
I was like this for a while, working in restaurants and the sort before going back to school, and in these jobs you find a lot of people who are afraid to place a bet on a career so they can focus on some wholly non-unique set of "interests". I noticed that few of these people actually pursue these supposed passions to any real extent, and most of these interests were strictly of the creative, non-pragmatic category.
I figured that such jobs offered flexibility from the rigid 9-5, and would allow one to pursue these "interests" more freely. This is not the case. Working a developer job you have mental stimulation from learning new things and getting things done. This is normalized of course, and so it's important to remind that working odd jobs while you "write your novel" is entirely devoid of such stimulation, and I believe, actually and actively kills brain cells. And this is the path the author suggests many of our "undecided" college graduates will go? Say it ain't so! If you want to write a novel or learn to paint, and if these are genuine passions, you will make time after work and on the weekends.
It's less about "finding your passion" than it is developing a discipline to work on big projects that is completely absent from high school and non-STEM college education. Take your average "undecided" and finance them for a year to follow their passion. A few will make something of their time. Harper Lee did, writing To Kill a Mockingbird uninterrupted for a year thanks to donations from friends. But most will not for the same reason many of us developers (mundane corporate drones) struggle with our own interests and side projects--- because we all lack the discipline. Bukowski summarizes this "myth of creativity" well: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/04/charles-bu...
It feels good to solve hard problems and challenge yourself. Doing so at work acts as a momentum towards your other goals and interests, and with persistence, lead to a discipline of continued creativity.
In case you have not read PG's high school graduation talk, I highly recommend it. Very relevant: http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
Hmm. I'm a developer now because I had a brain-numbing government employee job - I had developed an interest in programming as a young child, but it never went anywhere, and I'd largely forgotten about it.
Fast forward, I'm stuck in an underpaid overworked dead-end job which I'm resigned to because I have a wife and child to support, and I'm borrrrred. I then stumble across a website discussing how fun and accessible Python can be for newbies, and I give it a crack, and I'm hooked.
I get a new government job, better pay, less work, still boring. But the boredom at work gives me a huge amount of mental capacity for my learning at home. My sleep admittedly suffered because of my programming, but my work didn't. In my downtime at work, I'd write programs. I spent a lot of time learning JS because it was available to me for hacking on in my locked down work environment.
After five years of government schlepping by day, and programming by night, I met a man who could overlook my lack of qualification and who would give me a chance to prove myself. And all that boredom finally paid off.
Now that I'm a developer, my work is so intellectually challenging and interesting that I could not replicate the same learning that I did in my duller days. I just don't have enough mental capacity left at the end of the day, these days.
In summary - my boring day job gave me the capacity and impetus to learn to code.