How to Do What You Love

[How to Do What You Love]

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January 2006

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly
novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But
it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is
complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. 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. Occasionally the
things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing
wasn't — for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except
for these few anomalous cases, 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 grownup work.

The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids.
Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn't,
but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of
work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked
school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and
that we had it easy.

Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work
was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of
them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing
dodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of
kids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn't just do what you
wanted.

I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want.
They may have to be made to work on certain things. But 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 they can work on more
interesting stuff later.
[1]

Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever
I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that
precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told
to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he
meant work could literally be fun — fun like playing. It
took me years to grasp that.

Jobs

By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon.
Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we
would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they
enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the
private jet pilot. But I don't think the bank manager really did.

The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was
presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed
to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you
despised your job, but a social faux-pas.

Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first
sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something
to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what
they do. That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from.
Just as houses all over America are full of
chairs
that are, without
the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed
250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work
are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of
the attitudes of people who've done great things.

What a recipe for alienation. By the time they reach an age to
think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly
misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained
them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said
to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults
claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I
am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."

Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught
to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not
(necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around
them are lying when they say they like what they do.

The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. If you take
a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so
many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that
work is boring.
[2]
Maybe it would be better for kids in this one
case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example
of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive
house.
[3]

It was not till 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. Ideally these
coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in
the patent office) proved they weren't identical.

The definition of work was now to make some original contribution
to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit
of so many years my idea of work still included a large component
of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only
hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't
literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.

If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to
notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience
of graduate school.

Bounds

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'll 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 — or sheer inertia.

Here's 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 liked what they
did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't
seem to be any sort of work I liked 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 Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious
food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you
love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what
will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest
over some longer period, like a week or a month.

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 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'll have to force yourself to work, and
when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.

[...]

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