Love the Work You're With
Snippets from an excellent article by Paul Graham:
"Doing what you love is complicated. The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids…
Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like… Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious… So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.
Prestige is so effective at distracting the ambitious that society has evolved many ways to use it for this purpose. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. This pattern is so common that it might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious….
The other big force leading people astray is money… With such powerful forces leading us 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 = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.
That's an important thing to bear in mind. It's very 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. It's not a sign there's something wrong with you if you have trouble finding the work you love, any more than it is if you're out of breath climbing a 30% grade. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial...
You tend to become what you do. If you work on tedious stuff for too long, it will rot your brain…The kid who wants to write but decides to go to law school, thinking that he'll be a lawyer and write in his spare time, runs a great risk of finding ten years later that he has become a lawyer…
In the design of careers, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media. Unless you're fairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose a type of work that will allow you to delay deciding…
The only way to learn what a job is really like is to do it. So a job that lets you work at many different things is good not just because you can push it in many different directions, but because you can learn faster which direction you want to push it in…
If you work hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'll quit and write novels when you have enough money, what happens when you quit and then discover that you don't actually like writing novels?...
Constraints give your life shape. Remove all constraints 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..."
