Don’t follow your dreams: A commencement speech for the mediocre

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/22/dear_graduates_dont_follow_your_dreams_commencement_speech_for_the_mediocre/

by acqq • 12 years ago

70 45 12 years ago

eabraham2• 12 years ago

Whenever I read articles like this I am surprised how people without a technical background balance work and fulfillment. I am so happy that I can find a developer position where I can be involved with such creative, fulfilling work and not have to compromise for money. I'm amazed and humbled by pieces like this and acknowledge the difficulty non-developers face when building a career and life.

acqq2• 12 years ago

Have you ever tried to speak to people who aren't software developers? For them, if you're a software developer, you're just a boring guy spending all his wake time doing the most boring thing imaginable, sitting in front of the computer, looking at the screen, typing something completely and utterly uninteresting.

If they imagine doing this for their whole life, they'd say "I'd rather die." And they certainly don't see any trace of possibility of what they consider "creativity" in your job (my other comment here elaborates this claim).

(I work as a software developer myself, but I'm also aware of my biased view of the world. And I've spent enough years doing that that I'm also at the point of "I'd rather do something else... maybe becoming a lion tamer" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMOmB1q8W4Y)

lukasm• 12 years ago

For those who have wrong mental model based on excel or something similar.

eabraham2• 12 years ago

I have spoke with non-developers, they often find their fulfillment in other outside activities. I do get comments like "How do you sit in front of a computer for hours?". They may see it as boring or not interesting but they recognize the value in the skill.

kimdouglasmason• 12 years ago

<sarc>Yeah, writing code all day is so much more fulfilling than being a doctor or a teacher or a plumber or any number of things without which society would fall apart.

And people who don't to technical work all have drudge jobs with no variety or intellectual challenge. </sarc>

I'm not at all surprised at how non-technical people balance work and fulfilment. I am sometimes curious as to how they balance their checkbook considering the decline in real incomes for many critical professions.

In my experience, many programmers grossly over-estimate the actual real impact of their work, especially in echo-chambers like the SF Bay Area where their hubris is reinforced by high wages. In general I don't like the anti-tech sentiment that is developing, but as time goes on I understand more and more where it comes from.

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

I guess I dodged a bullet there. Not graduating meant not having a graduation speech which meant I had nobody to discourage me about what I would/could not achieve.

Sure I got lucky, and timing is everything. Even so, I think that it isn't quite as bleak as this speech makes it out to be. There is a very large number of solutions for the 'success' question, and it all starts off with how you personally define it. By all means, follow your dreams, but keep a balanced view and don't let your dreams mess up your life. At the same time, don't let your life kill your dreams.

tzakrajs• 12 years ago

Schools without graduation would be a better model for encouraging a life of learning. The culture around graduation seems to be that of, "just get it over with so you can get on with your life."

ryukafalz2• 12 years ago

Reading things like this makes me kind of sad, because I feel like it really shouldn't be this way. Hopefully, with the advent of more sophisticated automation, many of our more tedious jobs won't need humans to do them.

I tend to be of the opinion that creating jobs for the sake of creating jobs is a bad thing. If we get to the point where society can persist without everyone having a job, why make people work to survive?

There's an interesting article along these lines here: https://medium.com/career-pathing/463ff6dfec1b

The point here is that this would enable people to follow their dreams if they chose to, and not die of starvation in the process. If you still wanted to work, that's not a problem, and you'd make more money that way - but you wouldn't die if you chose not to do so.

For that matter, we might be able to achieve this now with a basic income system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

Discussion at http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/

plg2• 12 years ago

"many of our more tedious jobs won't need humans to do them"

We live in such a warped society here in North America.

Whatever happened to pride in craftsmanship, pride in an honest day's work, pride in contributing to the community?

I bet there will be (perhaps google will lead with this) driverless taxis soon, because after all "who wants to drive a taxi around all day?". Go to Japan. Get in a Japanese taxi. You will see someone who takes the utmost pride in their appearance, their interaction with the customer, the state of the car, the ride, etc etc. It is an experience, to say the least. I believe there is value in that... both to the community and to the individual.

Somehow in North America we have convinced ourselves that some jobs are "beneath us" (and I'm not just talking about taxi driving here). It's puzzling to me and it doesn't have to be that way.

rosser• 12 years ago

Somehow in North America we have convinced ourselves that some jobs are "beneath us"...

I'm sorry, but there are kinds of labor that are "beneath" human beings. We don't yet live in a world where people don't have to do those things, but that doesn't change one whit the fact that some basic, minimum level of human dignity, and some of the kinds of work humans have to do are fundamentally incompatible.

unicornporn• 12 years ago

Whatever happened to pride in craftsmanship, pride in an honest day's work, pride in contributing to the community?

I'd say there's often better ways to contribute to a community than by selling something. Help your sick neighbor walk the dog or start a study circle and learn how to grow vegetables and take care hens.

I'd like to see a society where we pursue our dreams, even if the dream life isn't an accelerating career.

Since 1930 productivity in my home country Sweden has increased fivefold, mainly due to technical achievements. Does that mean that we work 20% of the time we did then? No it does not. Wealth has increased of course since the 1930s, and perhaps we want a higher material standard.

But also consider than since the 1970s productivity in Sweden has doubled. Does that mean we work 4 hour days instead of 8 hour days now? No, of course not. Instead, since the 1970s we work 100 hours more each year.

As a society i feel that we should be using the technical achievements to give us more time for the things and the people that we love. Is that too much to ask for?

eli_gottlieb3• 12 years ago

Go to Japan. Get in a Japanese taxi. You will see someone who takes the utmost pride in their appearance, their interaction with the customer, the state of the car, the ride, etc etc.

No, what you will see is someone who faces extreme social and economic pressure to conform to the image of taking the utmost pride in his appearance, his car's cleanliness, good customer service, etc. I have almost no doubts that he never wanted to be a taxi-driver when he was growing up.

It's not for nothing that Japan is one of the world's capitals of clinical depression: the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

dlp211• 12 years ago

But you can't just compare Japanese taxi drivers to say NYC taxi drivers. Not without justifying the comparison. Now I have never taken a taxi in either city, so I can't even compare the experience myself, but, what does it take to be a taxi driver in NYC vs Japan? What do the companies that hire said taxi drivers pay in comparison to purchasing power? What is the difference in the city layouts that the drivers are working in, not just the physical roads, but congestion, road work, etc?

Let's also consider that Japan has for all intents and purposes, no immigration, while the US has massive amounts of immigration. This lack of immigration, combined with normal customs surrounding Japanese culture, eg: work ethic, honor, etc, all contribute to the experience.

coderzach• 12 years ago

I bet there will be farms and domesticated animals soon, because after all "who wants to hunt and forage all day?". Go to any small tribe. Follow a hunting party. You will see someone who takes the utmost pride in their hunting skill, their ability to track animals, the sharpness of their spear, etc etc. It is an experience, to say the least. I believe there is value in that... both to the community and to the individual.

It's called progress. If you want to do these things you absolutely can. People today hunt for sport, should we destroy all farms because hunting is "an honest day's work"? No. If people in the future want to drive taxis for enjoyment, great. But that doesn't mean that we should try to halt progress, so taxi drivers feel better about the objective usefulness of their work.

learc83• 12 years ago

Somehow in North America we have convinced ourselves that some jobs are "beneath us" (and I'm not just talking about taxi driving here). It's puzzling to me and it doesn't have to be that way.

Some jobs are beneath humans. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to take pride in your work, but when your company does their best to make you function like a robot, taking pride in your work is difficult. Think about it this way:

I run my own burger shop I get up every day and think: "Today I'm going to make the best hamburger that every was!" I proceed to make the best hamburger I can, and I take pride in my work.

Now imagine I work at McDonald's/Wendy's/Burger King. I wake up thinking the same thing but then I remember: "Oh yeah my job isn't to make the best damn hamburger that every was. My job is to make the exact same hamburger as every other employee at every other store in the country with no creative input whatsoever."

The problem is that in many modern jobs the goal is for the employee to function like a robot. No creativity or autonomy allowed. These kind of jobs are inherently unfulfilling. Humans need creative outlets and autonomy to be happy.

sciguy772• 12 years ago

To add to your (very good) point, a friend in Copenhagen told me about a German restaurant without waiters (possibly this one: http://www.flixxy.com/high-tech-restaurant.htm). Food is ordered on iPads and served through some sort of automated rail system. The owner anticipated starting a chain, but was surprised to find that business wasn't doing as well as anticipated. It turns out people like interacting with waiters, perhaps in the way people in Japan get like the taxi experience there.

Factory workers may be replaced by robots, but service jobs? I'm not so sure.

platz• 12 years ago

Some of us have realized that the puritan heritage has not always been the most beneficial in the modern world.

_random_2• 12 years ago

Who cares about taxi drivers' pride, when the journey could be much cheaper and safer? I bet robo-taxi would stop for pedestrians to cross as well. And of course it will be a while before robots could rape or rob someone. Also they don't strike.

coldtea• 12 years ago

Reading things like this makes me kind of sad, because I feel like it really shouldn't be this way. Hopefully, with the advent of more sophisticated automation, many of our more tedious jobs won't need humans to do them.

Well, yes, but with society norms as they are now (ie. where money dominates all) those humans wont be needed anymore either. The will be homeless, living in slums, getting by on whatever they manage to find, etc.

(And no, new, less tedious, etc jobs are not automatically and as if by magic made available, and when they are, they don't take as many people as the manual jobs before. In fact, even the services industry -- the traditional way to create non-essential jobs to employ people when the core industry jobs didn't need them anymore -- has been getting automated).

For automation to have a positive impact we will also have to rethink how people get employed and paid.

ryukafalz2• 12 years ago

Yeah, that was my point with basic income. With something like that, people without jobs wouldn't need to be homeless - the idea would be to give them enough to get by.

You're right, automation will tend to put people out of work. If they can find more skilled work that hasn't been automated yet, they're fine, but if not... we'll start to have a problem. Unless, of course, we rethink the idea that people need to work to survive.

Because honestly, if we don't need everyone to work for society to function, I don't see the value in forcing them to do so.

(And maybe, in the long run, capitalism isn't the best choice for how we ultimately run our society. That kind of change isn't happening anytime soon, however. A basic income, on the other hand, might just have a chance.)

restless• 12 years ago

I worked as bartender,eventecnician, MTB Guide, Skiing Instructor and a lot of other part time jpns. Before I started study with 27 and finished something like a year a ago. Working in software industry is a DREAM, you get a safe job, good money and good working time. Yes good working time compared to eventec it is insanly good. I financed my studys also with part time jobs in the beginning and soon (2 semester) could start programming for a local company, I needed to learn C# which just heard of in a GUI course and boy I was working hard, everything I couldn't do in the company I did at home, this brought me in the got position I am in today and that't what I would suggest to students. Learn, work, learn harder, work harder. Learn what 1 dollar or euro is worth. My role model Henry Rollins http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbnFJVgBcw0

gambiting• 12 years ago

I have finished my BSc degree in Software Engineering and then did postgrad MSc in Games Engineering from one of the best universities in the country for such courses(literally 99% of people on the course get into the games industry afterwards), as it has always been my dream job to work in games. Since I started programming(vb at the age of 12) I always wanted to work as a games programmer - that was my passion and my dream job. So I studied really hard at school, obtained all certificates needed to study abroad, got really good grades at uni,and got my dream job on the first try. It's exactly like you are saying - safe job, good working time, nice benefits - there's only one problem. The pay is literally half of what I could be getting in any other computer science related industry with an MSc title here in the UK. My girlfriend didn't do an MSc but went straight to work after her BSc in Computer Science and she makes 12k more per year than I do.

But hey, I absolutely love what I am doing,and I always wanted to do it. So should I just shut up and not complain about the money? Probably. But I am just saying this here,that even with a software engineering degree, fantastic grades and full portfolio, if you follow your passion you might end up making less than you would like to.

Aloha• 12 years ago

I've always told the soon to enter the job force something - "Pick two things, one is your passion, you should always follow it, the other is a practical skill you can always use to pay the bills - so yeah, go to school for game design, but pay close attention to those IT classes too, and you'll always have a job."

jt2190• 12 years ago

The article wastes a lot of time on "stay curious" (not very useful advice either!) and skips over the most important tidbit:

  > [My girlfriend] made me accountable.

Accountability is absolutely the key difference between "going through the motions" and "making progress". It is the way you put "deliberate" into your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. It's the thing that tells you if you're actually making any progress toward your goal.

Tycho• 12 years ago

A few thoughts:

- good point about the selection bias of graduation speakers and now they probably downplay the role of luck

- what makes people even think they know what their dream job is? After working for an interesting company for a few years their perception might change dramatically

- is it the job that is the dream, or is it the fame, esteem and wealth? Jobs like being an author or a musician or an artist are probably less pleasant than working in a nice office with a team you like

- most of your heroes... Did they learn to be great in their field by studying it in college?

- on the other hand, advice to follow your dream might be good as long as you give yourself a healthy dose of optionality/convexity

- my advice to people would be don't settle for a job that bores or distresses you, but prepare to be surprised just how fulfilling certain jobs can be

agorabinary2• 12 years ago

There's going to be a lot of developers on here who went the traditional high school -> CS degree route and think that this alternative life anecdote offers some real insights about the Other world of "passion-seekers", but it really doesn't. The take-away is to stay curious and keep learning even if, most likely, you will never find excitement in your life of corporate monotony, which is of course how many people view paths like CS. From the article, "Most people will have to choose between 'doing what they love,' and pursuing the more mundane promise of a stable paycheck and a promising career path." I think this is a false dichotomy common to a lot of college aged students.

I was like this for a while, working in restaurants and the sort before going back to school, and in these jobs you find a lot of people who are afraid to place a bet on a career so they can focus on some wholly non-unique set of "interests". I noticed that few of these people actually pursue these supposed passions to any real extent, and most of these interests were strictly of the creative, non-pragmatic category.

I figured that such jobs offered flexibility from the rigid 9-5, and would allow one to pursue these "interests" more freely. This is not the case. Working a developer job you have mental stimulation from learning new things and getting things done. This is normalized of course, and so it's important to remind that working odd jobs while you "write your novel" is entirely devoid of such stimulation, and I believe, actually and actively kills brain cells. And this is the path the author suggests many of our "undecided" college graduates will go? Say it ain't so! If you want to write a novel or learn to paint, and if these are genuine passions, you will make time after work and on the weekends.

It's less about "finding your passion" than it is developing a discipline to work on big projects that is completely absent from high school and non-STEM college education. Take your average "undecided" and finance them for a year to follow their passion. A few will make something of their time. Harper Lee did, writing To Kill a Mockingbird uninterrupted for a year thanks to donations from friends. But most will not for the same reason many of us developers (mundane corporate drones) struggle with our own interests and side projects--- because we all lack the discipline. Bukowski summarizes this "myth of creativity" well: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/04/charles-bu...

It feels good to solve hard problems and challenge yourself. Doing so at work acts as a momentum towards your other goals and interests, and with persistence, lead to a discipline of continued creativity.

In case you have not read PG's high school graduation talk, I highly recommend it. Very relevant: http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

EdwardDiego4• 12 years ago

This is normalized of course, and so it's important to remind that working odd jobs while you "write your novel" is entirely devoid of such stimulation, and I believe, actually and actively kills brain cells.

Hmm. I'm a developer now because I had a brain-numbing government employee job - I had developed an interest in programming as a young child, but it never went anywhere, and I'd largely forgotten about it.

Fast forward, I'm stuck in an underpaid overworked dead-end job which I'm resigned to because I have a wife and child to support, and I'm borrrrred. I then stumble across a website discussing how fun and accessible Python can be for newbies, and I give it a crack, and I'm hooked.

I get a new government job, better pay, less work, still boring. But the boredom at work gives me a huge amount of mental capacity for my learning at home. My sleep admittedly suffered because of my programming, but my work didn't. In my downtime at work, I'd write programs. I spent a lot of time learning JS because it was available to me for hacking on in my locked down work environment.

After five years of government schlepping by day, and programming by night, I met a man who could overlook my lack of qualification and who would give me a chance to prove myself. And all that boredom finally paid off.

Now that I'm a developer, my work is so intellectually challenging and interesting that I could not replicate the same learning that I did in my duller days. I just don't have enough mental capacity left at the end of the day, these days.

In summary - my boring day job gave me the capacity and impetus to learn to code.

agorabinary2• 12 years ago

Thanks for sharing!

thothamon• 12 years ago

I'd say if you feel you can be happy in typical or standard career path, then by all means save yourself a lot of trouble and do that. Some people really are happier that way. If you're one of those who can't be happy in that lifestyle, you probably know who you are. If you're one of those people, then I think you have to keep trying for what you really want. Nothing else will ultimately satisfy.

grifpete• 12 years ago

If it is your dream to be truly exceptionally good at something then - if at first you don't succeed, give up.

mercer• 12 years ago

Sam Spurlin wrote an interesting article that really resonated with me, and this article reminded me of it. In particular this bit:

I think there is an underlying metaphor that we can examine between values and passion. I'm not sure I can go a day without hearing or reading the advice about "finding a passion." I used to be a purveyor of this piece of advice as well. Until I figured out it's basically pointless. The belief that everybody has a particular passion waiting for them somewhere in the world and it just needs to be uncovered like a treasure under a rock is not helpful. Therefore, the dominant activity when trying to uncover or find this passion seems to be flitting from activity to activity, from rock to rock, looking for that elusive passion that will fix all your ills. There's a driving force that if you don't like your situation then you just haven't found your passion yet. I've since decided that this line of thinking is mostly fallacious and that "finding" is the wrong verb to use when describing passion. Instead, we should talk about "developing" passion. The focus is on action and practice. I feel the same way about values. The traditional way of thinking about value places little emphasis on actual action, just like the quest for finding a specific passion. Values shouldn't be discovered but developed over time, like passion. Both of these constructs need a radical overhaul.

It's worth a read: http://samspurlin.com/blog/2012/2/12/values-dont-make-your-l...

Don’t follow your dreams: A commencement speech for the mediocre

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