How to Do What You Love (2006)

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

by nebula • 17 years ago

59 35 17 years ago

paulgraham.com

geebee2• 17 years ago

This is an old(ish) essay, but I enjoyed reading it again.

A couple thoughts...

" A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house. [3]"

I wish it were a choice between loving my work and an expensive house. Then I could just live in a more modest house and not worry so much about money. The problem is, just living modestly with a family in places like San Francisco, New York, or London takes everything you got and then some. I suppose I don't strictly have to live in SF...

"[3]... Parents move to suburbs to raise their kids in a safe environment, but suburbs are so dull and artificial that by the time they're fifteen the kids are convinced the whole world is boring."

Or worse, they look for trouble to make their lives more exciting. I grew up in SF, and while there was still plenty of risk-seeking behavior (of the bad kind) in high school (inevitably), there was so much that was interesting to get into that other things, like a meth addiction, seemed less interesting. Just anecdotal, but I actually think that moving to a boring suburb won't just convince your kids that the world is safe and boring, it may backfire and give your kids a world that is boring unless they find a way to make it unsafe...

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Seconded, heavily - and also the repost, for being just what I needed to read this morning.

araneae3• 17 years ago

I am the classic example of a boring suburban upbringing resulting in a penchant for the unsafe (I don't really consider myself self-destructive, but everyone else does ;P) But kids are fairly rebellious no matter how they're raised. This is mostly a problem because parents hang on to their kids far longer than they should. When puberty hits, kids get rebellious because -wait for it- they're adults! They have a biological imperative to get out into the world and mate!

nopassrecover5• 17 years ago

It's for the best that they are prevented as much as possible from succeeding at this biological imperative (pregnancy) before they have the necessary means and capabilities.

scotch_drinker• 17 years ago

Yes, all kids who grow up in suburbs turn to drugs and wild women because they are convinced the whole world is boring. I really enjoyed the essay but making sweeping generalizations about kids raised in the suburbs is ridiculous. Also, it's not as if the suburbs don't have things like computers or theater or whatever else it is about large, urban cities that make them so much more interesting.

Whenever you see someone writing sweeping generalizations about rural or suburban life, you can bet that person is parroting things they heard or assume to be true from their wonderfully urbane life.

psyklic• 17 years ago

My experience has been that the suburbs were dull, allowing me to get really great at programming.

But even better, when I had the opportunity to move to big cities, they were even more fantastic and exciting because I was from suburbs. I can't imagine growing up in a city and getting bored with it, before I'm even old enough to take full advantage of life there!

msluyter• 17 years ago

There's another option: you can learn to love what you do, or at least like it more. A typically western mindset is that if you're at point X and you want to be at point Y, the route to happiness is moving from X to Y. Simple enough, in theory, and this essay provides a lot of insight on how to achieve that, where Y = a career you love.

On the other hand, though the idea may be foreign to a lot of us, you can learn to want X. It requires something of a massive paradigm shift and requires plenty of work that resembles various eastern practices such as Buddhism/Yoga. There's an excellent book on the subject by Timothy Ray Miller called "How to Want What You Have:"

http://www.amazon.com/How-Want-What-You-Have/dp/0380726823

edited to add: I should note that these approaches aren't neccessarily in conflict. You can work to do what you love, or if for whatever reason you can't, you can work to alter your mindset to make what you do more interesting.

CamperBob4• 17 years ago

The problem with that is, like much Eastern spiritual thought, it doesn't scale. Sure, we could all be Zen practitioners, but we'd have no fast computers, cool phones, or footprints on the Moon to show for it.

IMO Paul's essay is well-crafted because it shows that Protestantism isn't a requirement for a Protestant work ethic. He comes close to the truth, but never actually comes out and states it: as long as you're competing with people who love what they do, you don't stand a chance of succeeding unless you share that passion. And unless your job is to pick up garbage, you're always competing with people who love what they do. Faking it, as the Zen school of thought advocates, isn't going to cut it.

dan00• 17 years ago

First of all, I'm not denying the positive effect of technological advance.

Are we really feeling better because of these modern comforts?

Faking it, as the Zen school of thought advocates, isn't going to cut it.

Ok, there're different ways to feel better. But which one is a fake? Is there any fake? Or is it just cultural habit?

geebee2• 17 years ago

Have you ever read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?" You have to embrace the (slightly hilarious) seventies-ness of it to really enjoy the book, but I believe that computer programs are specifically mentioned as a place to "find the buddha."

papersmith• 17 years ago

"The problem with that is, like much Eastern spiritual thought, it doesn't scale. Sure, we could all be Zen practitioners, but we'd have no fast computers, cool phones, or footprints on the Moon to show for it."

I think what Buddhism preaches is more along the lines of functional minimalism rather that forgoing material production altogether. The idea is to develop a clear mind that can better distinguish between the means and the ends in everyday decision-making.

CamperBob4• 17 years ago

Great piece of work. I could've written every word of it myself... if I had the time. :)

_cbsz• 17 years ago

I believe it's customary to tag old articles with the year (e.g., "(2006)").

wglb• 17 years ago

I enjoy rereading this. I am forever getting into trouble (since high school, at least) telling people that i think "it is a moral imperative to do what you love". And if you don't know what this means in your life, the first thing is to figure out what that means for you.

amohr• 17 years ago

I think there is one glaring flaw in the paper wherein pg assumes that nobody would write academic papers if there were no structure of competition necessitating such papers. I have two problems with this:

1) I know several people who do indeed love writing these dry analyses - what they dislike is the academic format. Given freedom of style, I think there are very few topics that you would never find anyone willing to write about. For illustrative purposes, here's a google blog search with the same parameters as his academic search http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&#...

2) I think it's blatantly fallacious to assume that there is nobody in the world that wants to do a particular job. There are certainly garbage men who enjoy their work. Of course, this number doesn't really live up to our need for garbage men. But that's why different jobs pay different amounts. This is why corporate lawyers get paid as much as they do - there's a supply shortage of people who really want to do the job.

nx• 17 years ago

He also implies nobody would write a foreword if it wasn't for the prestige. I would be honored to write a foreword for people I admire, I'd do it even if my name wasn't on the book.

cesare• 17 years ago

These are really valuable advices.

What is left out, in my opinion, is how specialization (even in the things you do just for yourself) inherently leads to stress and lack of happiness. And being a generalist makes earning a living in our society nearly impossible (for most of us).

Of course you have to love what you do to be good at it. But you can love many things at once.

Ardit20• 17 years ago

Nice article. I find it strange however that although he considers school to be boring and a preparation for work, he goes on to say that work can be fun.

I am not so sure that school was boring for the architect, or the lawyer, doctor, teacher, the academic, and pg himself. I believe that the opposite of prestige happens in school, whereby school is seen as tedious when it isn't really because we all got to talk and have fun and then do the maths questions really quickly.

I think school is interesting if you let it be, hearing about past history, or biology like how the immune system works, or reading a literary story, not to mention the conversation and laughter with your friends. So to I think most jobs are interesting if you let them, especially the ones requiring our use of brain power as you get to continually learn something and also contribute to this world in whatever little way. So, maybe not many corporate lawyers would do their job for free, that is because they want that holiday to Maldives and that nice new car, but perhaps if they were asked whether they would rather work on something else they would say no. See, writing a novel is something spontaneous, but even J.K Rowling might perhaps want to be an archaeologist rather than write.

And it seems that this is where pg's essay seems to be heading, namely that there are a lot of interesting works so the chances are you will end up in doing them one day if you are true to yourself and keep in mind that work does not have to be boring.

How to Do What You Love (2006)

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