I posted it not because I agree with his assertion (I'm not sure I buy everything he's saying) but because I thought it would spark interesting discussion. Since "knowledge worker" is roughly synonymous with "white-collar office worker" (not necessarily programmer) I am inclined to agree with him.
I'm willing to bet many of us, especially here on HN, routinely get admonished for "forgetting" to do menial, time wasting tasks in favor of doing what we love.
Sure, we do. Most programmers and especially most white-collar workers don't. They waste their time instead because it's the more comfortable way of dealing with management, which means they never improve and we have to clean up their messes and deal with their shitty code. It becomes everyone's problem.
I did not mean to direct that at you, but at the author. I agree that there are some interesting points in the article, but the pervading attitude in this article and others on the site is that you can use these methods as a substitute for real passion about what you do. I submit that going through such motions mechanically won't be easy because, after all, it's still "work." If you'd rather be doing email or browsing reddit, a disciplined method of self-study isn't going to help. Only if you're already passionate about what you do will you be able to consistently engage in the "deep thinking" the author talks about.
One thing OP discusses in his self-help literature (which I haven't read, but I've heard it's pretty legit) is that rather than trying to rearrange their lives around finding some "passion", people should try to bring passion to their work. It's a counterbalance against the "do what you love and the money will follow" bullshit that has wrecked thousands, if not millions, of lives.
There's some sense in this. For example, when I was a teenager, I thought being a novelist or poet was what I wanted to do, and I had no idea that I'd ever find things like "machine learning" and "functional programming" interesting because I didn't even know what they were. I realized that the market signals were probably right in steering me along the mathematical direction, because (at least for this point in my life) I'm a better fit for the high-end CS and mathematics than I would be for the literary world.
All that said, there are definite limits to that approach. He's right that people need to be more flexible regarding what to be passionate about, but for a lot of jobs, there just is no way to become passionate without also becoming unemployable and insubordinate. What most self-help writers fail to grasp fully is that most people face inflexible, life-wrecking constraints and limitations that they're powerless to change.
For a lot of jobs, there just is no way to become passionate without also becoming unemployable and insubordinate.
FYI, Cal actually covers this in his book-he has a very specific framework for figuring out if a career has a reasonable possibility of giving you the autonomy, competence, and freedom you need down the line.
I posted it not because I agree with his assertion (I'm not sure I buy everything he's saying) but because I thought it would spark interesting discussion. Since "knowledge worker" is roughly synonymous with "white-collar office worker" (not necessarily programmer) I am inclined to agree with him.
I'm willing to bet many of us, especially here on HN, routinely get admonished for "forgetting" to do menial, time wasting tasks in favor of doing what we love.
Sure, we do. Most programmers and especially most white-collar workers don't. They waste their time instead because it's the more comfortable way of dealing with management, which means they never improve and we have to clean up their messes and deal with their shitty code. It becomes everyone's problem.