What Should You Work On?

https://perell.com/essay/what-should-you-work-on/

by gmays • 4 years ago

111 140 4 years ago

KerrAvon• 4 years ago

My god, Peter Thiel said something potentially interesting for once. I don’t know if it’s actually statistically true, but it makes sense that people on the spectrum might indeed be more inclined to stick with their ideas, because they are less likely to be swayed from what they know is correct (for some value of correct).

houstonn3• 4 years ago

You could be surprised. Read Zero to One or watch his Stanford lecture.

joshdick• 4 years ago

This is partially a collective action problem. It might be socially optimal for people to take more risks working on crazy ideas, but for individuals there's less risk in working for a large corporation on incremental improvements.

igorkraw2• 4 years ago

Which would be fixable with a UBI. Make it feasible for everyone to live a life of failing at high risk endeavours, not just the privileged ones

jahewson9• 4 years ago

UBI is hardly sufficient to fund most high risk endeavours.

mkl95• 4 years ago

Too many of our smartest minds are working on trivial tasks and spending their time in corporations where they feel invisible. The vast majority of my friends who work for big companies say they’re bored, unchallenged, and under-employed. They don’t see the tangible benefits of their hard work.

If you work for a big company you could potentially work on exciting stuff. In my experience the smaller places tend to be risk averse or they just can't afford the bleeding edge stuff. So you'll often be stuck fixing obscure bugs introduced by former employees and dealing with bad infra decisions.

4ndrewl• 4 years ago

"We need more people like Dominic Cummings" - not sure this aged well...

jahewson9• 4 years ago

Actually at this point I think Dominic Cummings has fully redeemed himself.

pjc503• 4 years ago

He's still hugely responsible for Brexit, and indeed for trusting Johnson in the first place. Even if he does write huge intellectual-sounding blog posts, when given the chance to put his ideas into action he's failed spectacularly.

Apocryphon• 4 years ago

oof

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7zkejgYSlg

pjc503• 4 years ago

"We need more people like Dominic Cummings, a senior advisor to Boris Johnson, who is probably the most forward-thinking politician in the world today."

This aged incredibly badly.

edjw• 4 years ago

I’m not sure when this was published. But Johnson has been a well-known politician in the UK for at least 10 years. I’m not sure he’s ever really been thought of as forward-thinking. Maybe, if you’re being charitable, he’s moved the UK centre-right a bit greener.

chasing• 4 years ago

If the United States had universal healthcare and education wasn't brutally expensive then more people could justify being entrepreneurial. You can't have society in which almost all wealth flows upwards and normal people are comfortable taking business risk.

Want start-ups? Raise taxes on the wealthiest of us, increase social services and safety nets and access to education. If people feel safe, they'll take more risks. Make it so people don't have to risk their kids' futures on their idea.

Also maybe put some protections in place so massive incumbents can't just stomp potential competitors and squash innovation...

simonw• 4 years ago

I'm always baffled at people who are both pro-entrepreneurship and anti-universal-healthcare at the same time.

What do they thing is the number one reason most people won't start their own business?

pdonis2• 4 years ago

What do they thing is the number one reason most people won't start their own business?

That's obvious: the number one reason most people won't start their own business is that most new businesses fail. So most people won't try it, since they expect they will fail and don't want to go through trying and failing. Only people who are outliers, often extreme outliers, in their tolerance for failure or their belief that they are exceptional and won't fail (or most likely both) will try it.

tbihl2• 4 years ago

What do they thing is the number one reason most people won't start their own business?

Starting a business is hard and confusing and frustrating in countless ways that a person can simply avoid by taking a salaried position.

gfgfdsgdfg3• 4 years ago

The US is the most "pro-entrepreneurship" country and it doesn't have universal healthcare. European countries have "low levels of entrepreneurship"[1] despite universal healthcare.

[1] https://www.gemconsortium.org/news/Europe%E2%80%99s%20hidden...

rr888• 4 years ago

That is what you think but in the real world it doesn't seem to work. Europe (and other developed countries) have the big social safety net and they're less entrepreneurial.

I'm not sure why, perhaps its the egalitarian nature means no one wants to be richer than anyone else? Or maybe its lack of desperate workers.

gorjusborg• 4 years ago

My totally off-the-cuff guess is that there is no causal link between social safety nets (like government provided health care) and a lower rate of entrepreneurship.

If there is a correlation, I'm guessing it is that governments that take active responsibility for the wellbeing of their citizens also institute regulations which may make starting businesses more difficult. In other words, active governments are more active in general, not just limited to the safety net.

kaon123• 4 years ago

As a european my answer is that throughout my entire upbringing, I've been taught to aspire to "just landing a job". Only in the second half of my twenties did I discover the "coolness" of being an entrepreneur. I am planning to start my own business soon, but I had to invent the dream myself. My observation is that in American culture, entrepreneurs are much more celebrated as heroes, in contrast to capitalist profiteurs.

pjc503• 4 years ago

I'm not sure this holds up under close examination; SV is kind of unique in how entrepreneurial it is. But there's also the "angel investor" effects; in Europe far too many wealthy people are content to simply be landlords rather than invest in riskier things like actual businesses.

It's also very hard to generalise across Europe, which has a more diverse set of rules and business cultures than the US does.

But given a magic wand to make changes I would definitely introduce "de minimis" clauses in a whole load of business regulations. The rules for megacorps can afford to be complicated, the rules for small businesses cannot.

californical• 4 years ago

Want start-ups? Raise taxes on the wealthiest of us, increase social services and safety nets and access to education. If people feel safe, they'll take more risks. Make it so people don't have to risk their kids' futures on their idea.

Many countries have done this — do you have any examples of one of them becoming more entrepreneurial? Because I don’t think we can just assume it to be true.

Just because people said that was their biggest barrier to starting a business doesn’t make it true. And I say that as someone who generally supports universal healthcare/insurance. People make up tons of reasons for not making a huge change in their life (like founding a company): “if only X then I’d finally do Y”. But if you fix X, they’ll find some new reason that they can’t do it.

hotpotamus• 4 years ago

I don't have a well researched answer, but I think Israel might be a possibility.

tbihl2• 4 years ago

Many countries have done this — do you have any examples of one of them becoming more entrepreneurial? Because I don’t think we can just assume it to be true.

Also needed is a consistent explanation that explains all the other countries doing this which have nonetheless failed to become more entrepreneurial.

houstonn3• 4 years ago

In theory, but you'd need a competent government to make sure they don't create new problems or exacerbate the problem.

Over the last decade, an incredible sum of money has been poured into the homelessness problem. We now have the homeless industrial complex, which feeds the very problem it was supposed to solve. It requires perpetual homelessness in the same way that the military industrial complex requires perpetual war. As a result, we have more homelessness, not less!

Or examine the student loan crisis. Because the government guarantees the loans, loans are made without consideration for whether students will ever be able to repay them. There is no cost benefit analysis or return on investment. It's just take the loan and maybe get a degree, any degree. In addition, the government made it impossible to discharge these loans in bankruptcy. In effect it's a wealth transfer program to college administrators and a big fuck you to taxpayers and vulnerable students. All under the guise of helping people.

malfist2• 4 years ago

Are you really arguing that we shouldn't tax the rich because there's homeless people?

wahnfrieden• 4 years ago

"UBI Helps People Be More Productive And Work More, Study Claims"

https://www.econotimes.com/UBI-Helps-People-Be-More-Producti...

"Universal Basic Income does not Reduce Worker Productivity, Study Finds"

https://www.technology.org/2021/01/19/universal-basic-income...

golergka• 4 years ago

If the United States had universal healthcare and education wasn't brutally expensive then more people could justify being entrepreneurial

Doesn't it strike you as odd then, that US is unique among first-world countries at (1) not having a safety net like universal healthcare and (2) being by far, almost the most entrepreneurial country in the world? (May be behind Israel and/or Singapore, but it's a whole other topic anyway).

I mean, if your assumption was right, then European countries like France or Germany would be homes of Silicon Valley, but it's the other way around.

drewcoo• 4 years ago

Doesn't it strike you as odd then

No.

Conditions were right to get us to here. Changing conditions slightly can get us past here.

No one is claiming we should be just like strawman country FOO, which is business-hostile.

tristor• 4 years ago

All of that sounds good in theory and I support these policies, but empirically these policies don't lead to the results you believe that they do. The US is massively more entrepreneurial than any other country, and it has none of these things. The countries that do, are not only significantly less entrepreneurial, but when people are entrepreneurial there are often confounded by those systems.

What seems to empirically be true is that easy access to capital is the primary driver for entrepreneurship, and easy access to capital is mostly enabled by a combination of fiscal policy and wealthy individuals and institutions without better investment opportunities. Easy access to capital is the primary driving force behind entrepreneurship in the West, and particularly in the US, and it seems being the wealthiest country in the world is a huge driver on its own for this.

sinenomine• 4 years ago

I agree with the take on capital access as the foundation of entrepreneurship, especially its modern, VC-backed incarnation (poor bootstrapped startups, with cards stacked against them - and even if they win - no serious media coverage) ... yet to play a bit of devil's advocate, are wealthy individuals as important in providing the capital?

Surely, by the sheer monetary volume, the fiscal policy component you mention will overshadow any private initiative, and it is this component which makes the US an outstanding location?

If this is true, progressive tax system wouldn't interfere with the entrepreneurship much, while the QE-driven investment continues to work as intended.

Melatonic• 4 years ago

The US is really a unique case even now - so many factors to consider. If I had to guess I would say that the US leads the entrepreneurial space for many reasons other than healthcare but that does not mean universal healthcare would make it even more entrepreneurial. More than anything, however, I think those social safety nets would encourage people to consider career changes more (like if they are very dissatisfied with their current one) and job movement between existing businesses.

nonethewiser• 4 years ago

There is a much bigger startup culture in the US than Europe though.

gfgfdsgdfg3• 4 years ago

This is flawed because Europe has done this and they aren't anywhere close America's entrepreneurs.

sharadov• 4 years ago

If that was the case Europe would have led the world in entrepreneurship, not the US.

jeffreyrogers• 4 years ago

We don’t need a 17th bottled water brand at CVS or a 28th CliffBar competitor at Walgreens. We need our best and brightest people working on important problems that wouldn’t be solved otherwise.

This is a fairly common take, but it is wrong in my opinion. I've worked on some fairly difficult engineering problems (related to signal processing) and one of the remarkable things is that multiple people in the room usually have a workable idea about how to approach it. And if you think about the really productive periods of science the number of scientists was very limited. There's no shortage of smart people who want to work on interesting problems.

What there is a shortage of are people with the organizational, and other, less tangible, skills that are needed to bring complex projects to fruition. At a high level, we know things that work for most of the list that Perell provided (energy, education, housing, healthcare, and transportation) and even assuming zero technological progress they could be hugely improved with existing technology, but someone has to figure out how to break the status quo and reach a new equilibrium.

Definitely those are important problems, but just being smart won't solve them. They already attract lots of smart people. You need to bring something else to the table to make progress.

jahewson9• 4 years ago

What there is a shortage of are people with the organizational, and other, less tangible, skills that are needed to bring complex projects to fruition.

I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, I think we have more capable people than ever before. The problem is that we deny almost everybody such opportunities. Companies are structured too hierarchically.

ethanbond5• 4 years ago

You’re arguing for GP’s point, not against it. Companies don’t just wind up being too hierarchically structured to be impactful (assuming that’s a problem). People who lack organizational skills create companies that are too hierarchically structured to be impactful.

malfist2• 4 years ago

Or put succinctly, "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything."

kretaceous• 4 years ago

In the spirit of the article, https://80000hours.org/

whattoworkon65• 4 years ago

Thank you! I deleted my other comment just made, because this is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to fish for in a reply to my now-deleted comment.

It is in the spirit of the article and a good follow-up for people (like me) who might be looking for a career change to something a more positively impactful and less detrimental.

wnolens4• 4 years ago

Too many of our smartest minds are working on trivial tasks

I find this a bit condescending.

Too many people act like entrepreneurship is something everyone has the stomach/personality/capacity for.

Too many people write blog articles about how if you're not building the next big thing, you're not contributing to society.

Most people I've met in my professional and personal life are supporting their families, trying to raise kids well, making time/$ for their passions, or just generally trying to live a decent life despite the difficult circumstances that life throws at you.

polishdude20• 4 years ago

Especially this first quote:

"People aren’t deliberate enough about choosing what to work on."

Hold up. What is this based on? Is it based on a feeling of the author's inflated sense of worth compared to others? Or is this really some objective and measurable metric?

Is it possible the author doesn't actually know or has taken the effort to deliberate on this statement themselves? Playing devil's advocate with your own ideas is probably the greatest service you can do for yourself but it seems that's not practised here. I can come up with many examples of how people ARE very deliberate in what they work on. Like you said, raising a family, enjoying time outside of work, just straight up trying to survive. These all seem pretty deliberate.

lelandfe• 4 years ago

Is it possible the author doesn't actually know

It’s a very HN mindset to reject articles not backed up by objective facts.

This is an inherently subjective post, pointing out the lack of hard data shouldn’t be an indictment of the author’s thesis.

altdataseller• 4 years ago

He is projecting himself. Everything he is saying is a reflection of himself

diob• 4 years ago

It's also a Maslow's hierarchy of needs sort of thing.

I'm about 33 and finally I feel secure enough to think about things beyond survival.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

Author might be a bit off in the reason but there's a lot of people not working where they'd like because the job market is weird and at one point you need money.

TekMol• 4 years ago

This kind of thinking leads to a dystopian future where all of us are slaves to one giant almighty company. We already got surprisingly close to it with the power Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon have. Imagine the founders of these companies would have thought like this. How big would Microsoft be today?

Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters?

wnolens4• 4 years ago

Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together?

Because most people are not capable of that, or they would not want to.

Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters?

Because only they have sufficient capital and expectation of return and intimate knowledge of the space to scratch their own itch.

lezojeda2• 4 years ago

Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters?

Some of us are not interested in having our own business, we just want to enjoy life in other ways such as raising a family, hobbies, relaxing, etc.

ahtihn• 4 years ago

Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together?

How do you achieve anything that requires multiple people to collaborate?

jerojero• 4 years ago

What's the ultimate goal of these companies? Of any company?

I find that it's very difficult to know, truly, what these mega corporations want. What does apple want? For everyone to use apple? Probably not, if this was the case they would be releasing much cheaper products.

So I think companies have a market segment they want to dominate, and of course there are some areas of conflict. Say, twitch is owned by Amazon and Google with YouTube also feels part of that space is owned to them. In this sense, they are no different to another form of social organisation we are fairly acquainted with: empires.

Now, why couldn't everyone just form their own society back in the day and live chill and not submit themselves to the rule of the empire? Well, the answer to that is that if the empire felt you belonged to them then they would simply swallow you.

So, to answer your question, people are building their own businesses but as soon as these become threatening in any way to the empires that rule these lands then these businesses are squashed. But that's exactly what is supposed to happen, if you can't take on the pressure then such is life.

I guess the sad news is that, even today, we still have empires ruling over us. But I would argue that quality of life, inequality, social liberties have all gotten better with every passing empire. What does the future of business look like? I'm not sure.

BlargMcLarg2• 4 years ago

Is it really condescending on it's own? It's not exactly a big secret many of us choose to work on relatively boring and useless things for the sake of comfort. That's more on society for aligning the benefits that way.

toomuchtodo2• 4 years ago

Instead of blog posts, people who are advocating for others to work on "more important work" should be spending their time improving various systems to enable people to work on more important work. Universal healthcare, improved child care accessibility, affordable housing, anything you can think of that is an enabler of talent to do more than survive vs thrive (in some quantified effectiveness to cost sequencing). People are just trying to get by because there is no alternative considering resourcing.

Otherwise, these come off as "your risk appetite and budget is too low try harder." The cost of failure is simply too damn high unless you're young and have zero responsibility and obligations or wealthy family/connections to fall back on [1].

(imho it is condescending on its own; treat the root cause, not the symptom, but that's hard and takes years to accomplish with little payoff to the person pontificating, so it's easier to complain on social/public media instead)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 (credit to u/notacoward)

nivenkos2• 4 years ago

I find this a bit condescending.

Is it?

I moved from ML and Physics research to optimising the sale of imaginary currencies in mobile games, because the pay and stability is so much better.

It's a great shame that academia is terribly paid and an unstable career path in the West.

I'd much rather be working on Fusion research or genetic engineering, but that won't pay the mortgage.

lezojeda2• 4 years ago

It's a great shame that academia is terribly paid and an unstable career path in the West.

Is it better in the East? No loaded question, I genuinely want to know your answer

rhacker• 4 years ago

I can't imagine ML research getting paid less than fake currencies in mobile games... I mean unless you're making more than $400k?

petra• 4 years ago

If you really seek to contribute can be comforted by knowing that many people would prefer you contributing to bullshit than to advancing the automation that will take their job.

rnd0• 4 years ago

> I find this a bit condescending.
Is it?

Yes, actually. It is.

Personally, I've been reading for 25 years about how "why are people wasting their time on $NICHE instead of contributing to $MAJORPROJECT" -specifically in the open source world. It becomes more and more grating and offensive every year.

If you have the ability to choose what you want to work on, then that is what you ought to work on. If you (generic "you") don't have a choice, then you have to do what you have to do and your limitations ought to not limit those who aren't limited or aren't in your situation.

marginalia_nu• 4 years ago

I wish I had the ability to work on something that was the slightest bit meaningful. I know I could if I just had the opportunity. But I don't.

If I'd been overcome a compulsion to become a deadbeat when I was 20 years old and my professional career was erased from history, I don't think that reality would be worse than one in which my career existed, not even by the tiniest amount. My entire working life has basically been building nonsense to enable rich people to get even richer with less inconvenience.

It's frustrating because everyone knows it's pointless bullshit. I know it's pointless bullshit. My coworkers know it's pointless bullshit. My boss knows it's pointless bullshit. Everyone is just kinda going through the whole charade because it keeps the paychecks coming.

nuancebydefault2• 4 years ago

I feel you. The good news is, if you look for it hard enough there are opportunities to make a living while NOT producing pointless/meaningless output. It took me 20+ years to accomplish that, but the reason is somewhat like the author of the post describes (even if this might be projection of his own situation upon others) : we don't try hard enough to use our knowledge, skills and talent productively -- towards improving housing, healthcare, education, charity, energy,... stuff that really matters.

stocknoob• 4 years ago

Condescending doesn’t mean inaccurate.

w0m• 4 years ago

Agreed. People don't have to define themselves and/or their worth by their day job.

WJW• 4 years ago

It would make the article at least 10x better if it included a section where the author describes why he isn't following his own advice and writes a weekly newsletter instead.

mattferderer• 4 years ago

Strong vibes - https://youtube.com/shorts/2rYV681lSGg?feature=share (Charlie Munger - People on TV selling Books) and all the people selling courses about how to sell courses.

cptcobalt• 4 years ago

Too many people act like entrepreneurship is something everyone has the stomach/personality/capacity for.

Entrepreneurship and making things do not need to be intrinsically linked. It's ok to work on things for the sake of making things. If you release yourself from the impulse of thinking you need to make cash from something, you can often feel more comfortable doing your best work on bigger, harder problems.

This, of course, doesn't work for everybody.

nuancebydefault2• 4 years ago

Also, if everyone would be an entrepreneur, no-one would work together on the same thing, right? So working on _stuff that matters_ does not have to imply being an entrepreneur. It is perfectly fine to leave that to the people who are talented with or have a strong passion for entrepreneurship.

hinkley2• 4 years ago

if you're not building the next big thing, you're not contributing to society.

I think we can all agree that any book written about the Fall of Google is going to focus pretty strongly on their lack of a maintenance culture. Building bridges is great, but if the opening of the bridge was a major event for a town, the subsequent closure of said bridge will be an even bigger event.

When work is going smoothly, the story I'm working on this week is often of a lower priority than the one I worked on two months ago. The major exception being when the current story was blocked by dependencies. A lot of invention comes down to people noticing that ideas have been unblocked. But while the new gadget or surgery can have life altering effects, so can the collapse of infrastructure for food, water, and shelter. Those always need minders or society would unravel.

cam0• 4 years ago

Especially when you look at the majority of startups getting funded or posting in "Who's Hiring" and the descriptions of what they do boils down to.. trying to solve some trivial problem.

wyre2• 4 years ago

Was this supposed to be inspiring? It seems the author is just complaining about how this countries best and brightest go on to work in finance or management instead of using their talents to start a business. Which is true obv, but it doesn’t offer any real solutions or answers.

Starting a business is hard; find an unsolved problem and then work your ass off until it’s solved and the solution can be marketed. It takes a certain type of person to be able to succeed in this endeavor, while the rest are going to be better off in their cushy office job where they can have something of a work-life balance.

It takes a lot of money and experience to build something meaningful in the industries the author mentioned. Healthcare, energy, housing, education, and transportation. It must take a lot of insider knowledge to be able to identify the unsolved problems in these industries. A Harvard MBA won’t know how to fix the healthcare industry, but I bet a nurse that’s working 60 hours this week has some ideas. The former might have the connections and capital to build the change but they lack the experience and motivation, while the latter could have the solution, but lacks the connections, time, and money to build the solution.

zelphirkalt• 4 years ago

The best and brightest do not work in finance or management. They become mathematicians, physicists, astrophysicists, chemists maybe also computer science and other areas of research. They are more interested in discovery, than rising through the ranks of management or possession of great wealth. They research in their area of expertise with a passion.

Of course they are not all business starters or entrepreneurs. The things society and competition, and law put you through when starting a business could well mean, that these people would never even consider starting a business, because it would take away way too much of their time, which they spend on working on the fringes of human knowledge. They simply don't have the time for such mundane things.

wyre2• 4 years ago

I totally agree with you. I never said that the best and brightest go on to do finance and management, but that’s what the author was alluding too.

jahewson9• 4 years ago

Those who would work in government but choose not to say there’s too much red tape and the pay isn’t high enough

Whoa there tiger. Maybe some people do, but there’s plenty of people who simple never, ever want to work for politicians. Why on earth would I want to work for those lamentable grifters? Most of them are not solving anything.

Even when it works it fails. Any attempt at long-termism leads to short-term pain that opens up a weakness that the opposing party uses to grab power and undo it.

And why should it work? With an electorate that skews towards retirement age the system is delivering exactly the result one would expect - enriching retirees at the expense of future generations. For my generation: no housing, no healthcare, no pension, no climate. For retirees: no taxes.

It feels like we need a fundamental change to enfranchisement. Perhaps parents should be able to cast votes for their children?

ethanbond5• 4 years ago

The only fundamental change that’s both required and possible is young people with good ideas stepping up to the plate instead of throwing up their hands and declaring the whole system bankrupt.

jahewson9• 4 years ago

Hard disagree. The system showers rewards on the older generations in exchange for votes. It offers young people almost nothing.

Retirees also have nothing better to do than sit around watching and reading conservative propaganda which is close to impossible to compete with.

fatbird• 4 years ago

Counterpoint: the flight of smart people to less regulated, entrepeneurial segments of the economy has drained intelligence and conscientiousness out of the more staid sectors of society, leaving them to the petty, the vicious, the stupid. It’s a good thing that many Harvard grads go into boring careers because those keep the vast majority of the machinery of our world running. If more people said “I’m not going to work on a startup making a moonshot, I’m going to be the best, most effective health insurance executive I can be,” the world would be a better place.

The fact that it’s hard to succeed and less rewarding in incumbent industries tells you where the real challenges are, and where the best of us are most needed. Escaping to startupland is dodging your reponsibility to give back. It’s taking the easy way out.

xwowsersx2• 4 years ago

I'm torn on whether to provide the following feedback/critique since it doesn't really respond to the substance of the points put forward in this post, but I feel it can't be ignored: there is something ironic, off-putting and hypocritical about a person whose primary occupation is writing, podcasting and running a writing school penning an article about how most people are working on piddling matters and that everyone should be focused on energy, education, housing, healthcare, and transportation. Does the claim that everyone is working on trivial matters apply to the author as well? If it doesn't, then apparently it is not the case that most people are working on trivial matters...in which case one core assertion of the article is undermined, no?

To be sure, my critique is mostly directed at form and tact. It is one thing to say: "we have really stagnated on energy, education, housing, healthcare, and transportation and need to double down on it. How can we incentivize more people to focus on these problems?" and quite another to say "Most people are working on trivial matters and/or pretending to be busy."

FlyingSnake• 4 years ago

The term you’re looking for is “skin in the game”. I would prefer if the advice comes from the man in the arena, not the one sitting in the gallery.

xwowsersx2• 4 years ago

Yes, well said.

Stamp01• 4 years ago

You are not defined by your work. Anyone who looks at you and only sees your most recent accomplishment is not worth your time. It's okay to not be productive sometimes. It's okay to do nothing sometimes. Everyone needs to hear that.

I'm just as guilty as anyone. I've been sold the lie that because I'm a programmer, I'm soon to be rich. I just have to work a little harder. When I'm not working for a paycheck, that time is supposed to be for me to be working towards my dreams and striking it rich and making the world a better place.

Don't fall for it. It's okay if you need to spend that third of your day not spent sleeping or working for the man to recover.

AndrewKemendo• 4 years ago

There is plenty of space between "Grindcore Gary Vaynerchuck" and "Fart around Kurt Vonnegut"

Find out what sustains your passions and figure out how to contribute that in a pro-social, community focused way

Does it need to be full time? No!

badpun4• 4 years ago

Let's start one step before that: do you want to work at all?

praptak• 4 years ago

So you want young people to start working on some interesting ideas which have potential to help humanity?

Well, my top priority at that age was not to be poor. The optimal strategy was to work in the boring parts of IT and hopping to a better job whenever an opportunity arose. (This worked for me, thank you)

So, sorry but the deal where I work on some crazy idea and become poor if it fails was just unattractive to me (and probably isn't to a lot of people who are not born rich).

hinkley2• 4 years ago

Well, my top priority at that age was not to be poor.

There's a weird case of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs where the bubble you live in during college has a lot of people worried about self actualization because their support group (or loans) is helping take care of things like food and shelter. Historically, the moment you graduated you were responsible for all of that stuff, but that's been blurred by people moving back in with their parents. I don't know if that's enough to change the equation but certainly for a lot of previous generations we were trying to get our own oxygen masks in place before helping others.

The problem is that your ideals become immediately in conflict with logistics and you end up having to compromise. Even mentorship is fraught because mentors are human and some of their non-negotiables may be wrong. If you refuse you may be entirely on your own. All of a sudden you're 30 and the asshole in the mirror is someone you hardly recognize. That's probably a better demographic to target for such things, both because they're more interested and they have practical knowledge that increases the likelihood of your efforts to be described as "effective" instead of the dreaded, "well-meaning".

steele• 4 years ago

Thielthink is a red flag

elliekelly• 4 years ago

Are you going to keep submitting links to this crappy “blog” that’s just a funnel for the author’s (presumably equally crappy) writing course all morning?

BMc2020• 4 years ago

I’m on a mission to teach thousands of people to write online, share their ideas, and build an online audience. In order to do that, I teach an online course called Write of Passage. In five weeks of intense instruction, I give hundreds of students the tools to publish their ideas, build an online audience, and accelerate their career. The essence of the course is described in my essay, The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online. Students also leave with a network of friends who share their curiosity for learning.

Yes, David, please teach me how to write great OC that Arianna Huffingon can steal.

gumby• 4 years ago

Richard Hamming gave a famous talk on this back in 86 (and repeated many times -- I heard him give it in '88 and it affected me greatly. His essay on the subject has circulated widely: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Actually this talk is on the topic of the title of this blog post. The blog post itself seems mainly a complaint about current circumstances.

mfuzzey• 4 years ago

I think a big part of the "problem" is that the skill set required to be an "innovator" in some field (coming up with an idea and making it work) is generally very different to that of being an "entrepreneur" (building a sucessful business around it).

It's quite rare to find the two in a single person and very often the best on one side are the worse on the other.

blacksmithgu• 4 years ago

No, we don't need more "smart" people working on important problems in transportation, health, education, and so on. We already have plenty of smart people with good ideas, they just have no institutional power to affect anything.

These fields need zealous reformers and activists with the time and money to push through mountains of entrenched interests, complacency, and politics. The work sucks, and people capable of doing it will always be in short supply.

afpx• 4 years ago

Fix search, first. Then, we can all find what we want to work on.

What Should You Work On?

Related Stories