Transcript
Introduction
"How to do what you love? To do something well, you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to just four words: Do what you love. But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states. Some of the time, adults were making you do things, and that was called work.
The rest of the time, you could do what you wanted and that was called playing. Work was pretty much defined as not fun and it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grown-up work. If we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work. And indeed, that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so that they can work on more interesting stuff later.
Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me that I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun, fun like playing, it took me years to grasp that. It was not until I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.
How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents or the desire to make money or prestige, ore sheer inertia. Here is an upper bound.
Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself, he ought to finish what he was working on first. It used to perplex me when I read about people who like what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work that I like that much.
If I had a choice of A, spending the next hour working on something or B, be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no. But the fact is almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Caribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, then work on hard problems.
Doing what you love doesn't mean do what makes you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period. Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while, you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something. As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken, which is not to say that you have to spend all your time working.
You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else, even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it. I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems with procrastination. You will have to force yourself to work.
And when you resort to that, the results are distinctly inferior. To be happy, I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy but admire. You have to be able to say at the end, 'Wow, that's pretty cool.' What you should not do, I think is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You should not worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.
When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind, though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like and let prestige take care of itself.
The other big force leading people astray is money. The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it, even if they had to work at another job to make a living. With such powerful forces leading us to astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work equals pain. Those who escaped this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money.
How many people even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand perhaps out of billions. It's hard to find work you love. It must be, if so few do. So don't underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people who are still in denial.
Although great work takes less discipline than people think because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it. Finding work you love does usually require discipline. Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest, always produce. For example, if you have a day job, you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction? However, bad they may be. As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate.
Always produce is also a heuristic for finding work you love. It will automatically push away from things you think you're supposed to work on toward things that you actually like. Always produce will discover your life's work, the way water with the aid of gravity finds the hole in your roof," this may be my favorite line of the entire essay. 'You have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.
One has to make a living, and it's hard to get paid for doing work you love." And then he goes into one reason why it's so difficult to find work that you'd love to do is the fact that we usually have to decide what we're going to do way too early. "A friend of mine who is quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell, 'Don't do it,' but she never does.
How did she get into this fix? In high school, she already wanted to be a doctor, and she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way, including, unfortunately, not liking it. Now she has a life chosen for her by a high school kid. When you're young, you're giving the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it."
But this is certainly not so with work. When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information. In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media. Your best bet may be to choose a type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job career. That is probably part of the reason I chose computers. You can be a professor, or you can make a lot of money or morph into any number of other kinds of work. It is also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many different things so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like.
It is harder than it looks, constraints give your life shape, remove them and most people have no idea what to do. Look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want until your 30s or 40s. But if you have the destination in sight, you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch. And if you know what work you love, you're practically there.
That was an excerpt from an essay that changed my life, it's called How to Do What you Love, and it was written Paul Graham. So I've been reading Paul Graham's essays for years. I think they are the most influential writing for technology start-ups ever. And they've had a profound impact on me personally as well. So in case if you don't know who Paul Graham is, he's a programmer, a writer. He founded this company called Viaweb. I think within 2 years, they sold it for close to $50 million to Yahoo. This happened back in the late '90s.