Passion Is Overrated | Hacker News Reader

Passion Is Overrated

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80 pointsakbarnama13 comments

The headline is kind of stupid and clickbaity, but the points he makes are 100% correct. I'm not sure why there's no discussion here yet.

Millions of hungry artists and musicians and philosophy majors can tell you that "do what you love and the money will follow" is utter bullshit, and it doesn't take a genius to see why. So it is weird how so many obviously successful people keep repeating such a pants-on-head stupid platitude. I wonder if they've actually just never considered that there are lives and experiences unlike their own, or if they subconsciously shy away from narratives that don't make them the most awesome person in the room.

Mr. Adams explanation, that the plain and ugly truth would be bad PR and most successful people are not idiots who are oblivious to the costs of said bad PR, seems plausible to me.

I think what they probably mean is just try to have fun in life. So be passionate about who you are, rather than about what you would be willing to achieve in life. Because it's simply impossible for everyone to be CEO of the world.

Bill Gates recently posted some graphics showing where most people live in the world. Needless to say, most were in China and India. If they all wanted to be CEO of the world, we'd have a problem. :-) https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/566375184790462465

Scott Adams is a nobody in other cultures. I don't know why we would need more economists telling the world how the world is supposed to work. Maybe China and India need to be more capitalists or something. :-)

Cheers.

It's only correct if you are following your passion to achieve some other end. If it's means based, then everything this guy says is completely wrong. Under a means based approach, you wouldn't care about great fame/recognition, because, for instance, painting everyday and being a community college arts teacher to support yourself is sufficient to make you happy.

I do agree 100% with what he says about systems vs goals.

When someone asks me for this wisdom one day, I'll tell them I'm just lucky, but lucky in this sense: http://lifehacker.com/5791032/improve-your-luck-by-relaxing-...

That's a great article. Side note: I used to do some amateur track racing when I was younger. I noticed that the more hyper-focused on the "line" I became, the poorer I did from a time perspective. But when I opened up my vision to peripheral information and took in the whole track in addition to the line, I could make better and more appropriate decisions. Long story short: stress can lead to myopia (tunnel vision) and lost opportunities if you're not careful.

1. If you find your work boring, and don't make enough money at it, then quit and find something that either makes you money or stokes your passion.

2. If you find your work boring, but you make plenty of money at it, then find side-passions.

3. If your work stokes your passion, but you mooch off other people to make ends meet, it's not a great way to live.

4. It's easy to be passionate about something. But will you be able to sustain the passion for years? Through the ups and downs, and the late-nights and the disappointments?

5. Here's my list of top resources that helped me understand the importance of habits, long before this excellent slideshare by Scott Adams.

http://tempr.org/54e03ee74f60d.html

Watching an actual talk (as opposed to a slide deck optimized for reading, which is arguably a paradox ;P) is much more fun, especially given that this is much shorter and mostly a teaser of the concept that Scott Adams talks about in more depth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJVxkr9eE9A

that was fantastic, the contents of the talk were really interesting but the presentation itself is among the best I've seen so far.

This is the guy that popularized affirmations, in which he wrote his goal down 15 times every day for months on end:

"I’ve often written about my own experiences with affirmations, the practice of writing your goals 15 times a day. It seems to work much of the time, at least in my experience, but presumably not because of any magic. At least one probable explanation for its perceived effectiveness is that focusing on goals changes the person who is doing the focusing." - http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/the-...

The article you're talking about is written 7 years ago, so it makes a lot of sense that he learned and improved his thinking over that time and now he has sone new (and maybe better) ideas.

I gave up on the idea of following what I thought of as my passion (studying military history) as a profession in high school because of writing anxiety. I picked up programming because it was usually enjoyable, but the only passion I have about it is seething hatred for terrible UIs and poorly-documented nondesigned APIs.

Non-spammy version: http://www.slideshare.net/Scottadams925/goals-are-for-losers...

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