Passion leads to hours of practice, and hours of practice leads to success. While you can't force yourself to be passionate about your current job, if you follow your passions - sincerely - I think that more often than not, it'll lead to a successful existence. I can think of very few passions where people can't at least maintain their existences. Maybe not get rich, I think in general that takes luck, but feed themselves and I think live happier as a result.
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.
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.
As a recent uchicago grad, let me say your advice, while well intentioned, isn't quite sound. Work in finance is not as lucrative as work with finance. I was in finance for about a decade....at gs, bofa etc...the thing is, firms don't let you daytrade, or buy/sell naked calls, or short sell equities, or flout 90 day holding period rules, or trade stocks in the restricted blacklist, or...I could give you an dozen ways ib's ringfence you. Otoh, if you work in the valley and you know your shit, you can pull in 200k and wear shorts and torn tshirts to work, not be subject to any bureaucracy, and get your tradestation account and go nuts. Sell naked calls all day and nobody will bug you.
Certainly! If you want to trade on your _own_, then being in a financial firm - particularly a market maker - is a bad choice.
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.
Ah! In that case, professor, a couple more caveats. Chicago prop shops notoriously underpay. The IB's pay higher, but still less than google/fb/twitter. All of my uchicago classmates are in finance with roughly 50% in chicago, rest in nyc. With graduate degrees they don't pull in 200k...atleast as per the reported stats on the career counsel pages. So cs undergrads pulling in 200k in chicagob while working 9-5 in the finance industry....very unlikely. But if there is such a person out there, he/she is amazingly lucky. 200k goes very far in chicago. You could buy a nice 3 bdrm house with acreage about half hour from the loop and still have money to spare.
Not a prof, sadly - last year of my PhD, though! Thanks for the additional info on your peers.
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.
The small number of passions that most people can't earn enough from to maintain their existences tend to be those which are (i) shared by a lot of people and (ii) those in which success is least easily achieved through sheer willpower. Want to be an actor, a sport star, an author, like many people do? Chances are you'll never be good enough to earn a living at it (unless you count being a salesperson, personal trainer or author of press releases) because everybody else practises, and some of them are better and/or luckier. You can still have that self-actualization with your spare time drama group, sports team or novel that's just waiting for the right publisher, but in the mean time you'll probably need to spend the majority of your waking hours chasing an alternative source of money to put food on the table (sacrificing passion is very rarely about getting rich quick). It probably won't be in finance, because finance firms have exceptionally high standards too and you'd be surprised how many people are passionate about it. Want to be a bookkeeper or a refuse collector? No, neither do I, but someone has to do it and it's probably not their lifelong career aspiration.
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 purpose of life, as best I can tell, is self actualization
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).
To quote Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.:
"Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are 'It might have been.'"
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."
I think it's about being totally comfortable with yourself and your existence, and being able to define your goals and ambitions, and separate them from the distractions.
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.
And how do you find out your passion is a passion?
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.
Therein lies the challenge. And I agree with you that it comes down to dedication. Heck, the stuff I'm most interested in today I didn't even know existed five years ago.
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 think it is easier to do, but harder to muster up the commitment. People will come up with all manner of reasons to remain in a job where they are unhappy.
I feel like this entire article can be boiled down to this quote: "A passion people won't pay you for is hardly the basis for a career. It's a hobby. You can still love your hobbies--just love them in your spare time.
The key as an entrepreneur is to identify a relevant passion."
agree. further, now that i have started and run a business based off one of my passions, i see a lot of opportunities to make a successful businesses based on many of my other passions.
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.
How about the thousands of guys who tried to imitate Penny Arcade's success with their own comic strips? Most webcomics aren't that profitable and gamer oriented comics are probably the most saturated market. It's like acting, some hit it big, most struggle in obscurity for years.
Well said. I'm gonna go ahead and quote me from four years ago. Skip on if you've read this before:
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 was wondering the same myself, but at any rate, neither would pay his rent. However, I am curious because I know a few travel bloggers out there who make a decent amount of money on their blogs, as well as getting lots of trips paid for by companies like Expedia and Orbitz and other travel companies and agencies.
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 :)
I think we just happen to be a group of people who are fortunate enough to have a very unique passion (puzzle and problem solving) that also nets a very healthy margin.
Mostly, yes. I find myself using C and python at home, most of my work has been in C and C++ with various other bits and pieces thrown in.
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.
Anyone who thinks about it critically knows that "Follow Your Passion" just won't work for the vast majority of people. What I have found, though, is that expertise breeds passion. Anything can become enjoyable once you become really, really good at it! Most people do not enjoy the early stages of learning something new.
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.
"Most people do not enjoy the early stages of learning something new."
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.
The flip side of that is, turning a passion into a career is not always a good thing. Before I got into engineering, I thought it would be a great idea to turn my passion for making music into a career. Unfortunately, sometimes when something goes from "I love to do this" to "I have to do this," passion can be lost. I like knowing that whenever I want to make music, I can, but I also like knowing that if I get up tomorrow and don't want to make music, that's ok too.
As an amateur musician trying to push my abilities, I have to agree, but I think there's another factor at work: How often do we see the glamorous side of musical performance and how often do we see the tedious play it over and over and over until it's perfect practice sessions? If anything, even at the higher levels, the repetitive practice doesn't go away, it has to increase to see ever decreasing return on time invested.
That's very true, but at least for me, being an amateur makes the repetitive practice sessions much less boring, and even more importantly, much less stressful, than they would be if I was (still trying to be) a professional. If I hear a song/piece/solo/part that I want to play, I practice it till I get it right because I love it and being able to play it correctly would make me happy. As a professional, you wouldn't (always) have that, you would feel pressured to get it right so you can collect your paycheck at the end of the day.
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.
This is huge. It really annoys me when people say "well I've always loved programming." That's great, but you're the exception, both in that you always loved programming and in that the thing you love is quite lucrative. I know a ton of people who are very intelligent and talented that have had to go through a trial and error process of figuring out how their talents will lead them to a career. Telling them to "follow your passion" is putting the cart before the horse.
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.
I don't think so. Passion, in this context, generally means an intense motivation and desire to engage in some activity because it gives you some kind of enjoyment. Since people usually get much more enjoyment from an activity they've mastered than one that they are very clumsy with, they're likely to become more passionate about it as they become better at it. That isn't a guarantee, though. It's entirely possible to be very good at something but not really enjoy doing it.
Weird little factoid from the cognitive behavior folks -- action comes first, then motivation. So it's impossible to be excited about something that you have not spent some time with. And the more time you spend, the more likely you'll feel excited by it. People think it's the other way around, that you feel motivated and then go do stuff, but it's not.
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.
I think the better point to make is to not build a business doing something that you are absolutely in love with. It clouds your judgement and could drive you to build something people don't want. You can definitely love what you do. I love programming and marketing, and those are my businesses. But I don't let the love cloud my judgement (well, not anymore).
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.
I think this is the most important point (I remember coming to a similar conclusion some years ago), but now I think there are a couple of ways around this caveat (mostly applicable to business, but also of some use in personal relationships).
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.
Great points. Though my post only applied to businesses. Personal relations are still voodoo to me. Its a miracle I got married, more so that I'm happily married. :)
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.
I started my career because I love programming. That was a big mistake for me. Not because it didn't pay well, but because I lost the passion.
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.
I seem to have managed a mental separation between 'programming I have to do' and 'programming I want to do'.
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.
Holy shit do I hate straw-man pseudo-contrarian articles like this.
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.
This article is flawed. The author sees the right problem but draws the wrong conclusions.
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.
I'm not sure who this article is for. I think most reasonable people silently add "that can make money" to "do something you are passionate about." After all, we don't see many businesses trying to make money with the idea "Watch the owner eat delicious chocolate!"
Doing what you love may well be good for your career. However, that doesn't mean the thing you love will BE your career. You could spend your teen years pursuing your passion of music for example. Maybe it leads you to think about how the brain responds to music. Maybe from there, that ends up turning you on to neuroscience. Maybe from there, you end up in a career as a brain surgeon. It happens.
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.
A friend who has risen to the top of his area of expertise in the world, and who does it on the side, recently told me, "there's nothing like doing what you love and not having to rely on it for a pay check."
This guy has some good thoughts, but his main points are way off (from 20+ years in sw engineering). Here's why.
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.
A relative of mine has experience advising hundreds of small business start-ups. She would definitely tell people that they have to be passionate about what they do. It's the passion that keeps you going when things are really tough.
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).
I think where this article falls flat is in it's assumption that there are many hobby passions with which you can't make money. I don't believe this for a second - if you are good enough, you can make money off anything. And being really good at something, in addition to genetics, talent, etc, is a result of being passionate - since you like something you naturally put in a lot of work and get better.
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 percentage of video game players make a living from it? Skateboarders? Gardeners? Musicians? Poker players? Actresses? Hobbies are rarely viable career paths.
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.
I think the phrase should be "love what you do". In my experience, professional happiness comes from excelling at something that is valuable to others, and hence you'll be paid well for it. The only way you're going to manage to put in the ten thousand hours to a skill required to get to that level is if you love it
Hmm. Fails the anecdata test for me. I know a lot of people who do things they're passionate about - linguists, filmmakers (including me) and novelists. Nearly all of them struggled for years to get to the point where they're full-time at their passion, taking various other jobs of varying degrees of crappiness. All of them are very happy with what they're doing now, and - crucially - also loved pursuing their passion when it wasn't bringing in the bacon.
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.
>> "If you practice hard, soon you might find you're the best in your group of students,"
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.
The real question is: at what level of abstraction are you passionate about your work?
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.
My gut instinct is that both following one's passion and having one's passion follow oneself could work. There are clearly documented cases of the former - Warren Buffet for instance, as he is fond of repeating. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/warren-buffett-care...
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."
It seems to me the relevant advice buried in this is: most people need to try before they know. So get a job to pay the bills, so you can afford to try out your passions part time and have some professional experience to help you along/fall back on. Then pursue whatever sticks.
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."
I remember one of my co-workers (a developer or engineer or whatever we are called these days) on a particularly frustrating day, smiling broadly and saying "I'm a guitarist. Programming was my HOBBY. I went to school for music. This was supposed to be fun."
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.
I've spent many years developing skills that pay well, that I'm good at, that offer an easy flow and easy productivity. But at the end of the day I don't want this to be what my life is about. I wish I'd started earlier following my passions; I've been dragged to date in golden handcuffs.
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.
There is a subtle line there between what you actually love, and what is practical to be worked on. I am not saying they cannot coincide, but they are rarely so.
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...
Great article. Reassures me that there's nothing wrong with me thinking that, at the beginning of my career in programming, I'm not going to be as "successful" as others out there who claim to "love" it or that it's their "passion". I know I'm good at it (hence why I'm getting paid for it), but I also don't dream in Ruby. Good to see another person saying that passion from work will come with you're good at.
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.
An apt analogy might be arranged marriages. In Western culture, the idea of an arranged marriage seems absurd and backwards, and the common belief is that a good marriage is based on love and mutual attraction. In arranged marriages, however, love grows with time and these types of marriages end up in divorce at a far lower rate.
There's also the aspect that in arranged marriage societies, the purpose and expectations of marriage are different. There, marriage may be an institution for the creation of a stable family for children. If Western love happens between the married couple, then so much the better (this type of love may be catered for by the married people having affairs). But don't presume that marriage has a universal 'love' basis. It can be more like forming a partnership to build a business. Imagine someone from another culture telling you that your startup was a sham because you didn't love your cofounder(s).
This could also be because the social pressure to stay together on people in arranged marriages is immense, and divorce still seen as a mortal sin that would probably result in social ostracism (at the least).
The mistake people make is to work on a TOPIC they love, when what they should do instead is find WORK that they love, regardless of topic. So if you enjoy programming, maybe you can do that writing bank software and still have fun, but if you love chemistry you might not like the day-to-day of a normal chemist.
Fucking nonsense. If you are passionate enough you will apply yourself and master your love until you (and perhaps only you) can figure out how to succeed from it. Contrary to the article, abandoning one's passion is what sucks the fun out of people's lives and careers. Everybody does it. Don't fall for it.
apply this test: Will people pay you for it? Will they pay you a lot for it?
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.
The biggest problem with "follow your passion" is that, in truth, if you're passionate about something, you'll absolutely fucking hate doing it as a subordinate. This means you'll probably never reach the level of autonomy at which work becomes fun, and your "passion" will die.
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.
Self-determination Theory claims there are basically 3 things you need to be happy at work: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The bad news is that at almost any job, you'll lack at least two of these when you start. The good news is that it's fairly easy to gain more of each of these simply by advancing in your career.
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."
Today we've had an interesting discussion at our startup about subordination, and stumbled into a question where do good technical leaders come from.
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.
In the top-down management context, being a manager is almost as bad as being managed. You're still a subordinate in truth, but you are now responsible for motivating other people to do things they don't want to do. You don't get to set priorities, but your career has been bet on the work of other people (your subordinates). So it's the worst of both worlds.
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.
I'm not talking about 'traditional' strict hierarchies, but rather about ~3-storey organically evolved scheme where leadership is quite informal and firing is really not an option: our company is quite young and people are the most valuable asset. Also, some of us would gladly accept firing but will keep working otherwise.
Thus we have no way other than reaching mutually satisfactory state.
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.