Paul Graham - When To Do What You Love
Paul Graham - When To Do What You Love
Thoughts about When To Do What You Love by Paul Graham.
Thoughts along the way
When people talk about this question, there’s always an implicit “instead of.” All other things being equal, why wouldn’t you work on what interests you the most?
This is a very good question. Let’s typical question that someone asks is “Do you love what you are doing?” - This implies a very strong “yes” or “no” answer ~ as in if you say “yes”, you better be sure you love your work or “no” as ranging from “no” to “ok” to “better than previous work”. The better question to ask to poke at people I think is to ask “What interests you most/what could you work on for 8/9 hours a day”.
As for me, I’ve been trying to find something I’ve been interested in. It’s a guessing game. Almost always it’s something new ~ for me, if I’ve not experienced/seen what is possible in it before, it’s quite interesting. And I also bring previous knowledge with me. For example, I’ve seen this in professors as well ~ what interested them in their PhD might not be what they’re doing as an associate professor and most likely not as a tentured professor. Things get boring over time, so one typically wants to curve the path a little bit. I don’t know if this is human nature. Also when someone says I know I want to do this or this is my dream job, I think it’s more like they’re saying this is their goal post and they don’t know what it’s like until they reach that goal post.
So even raising the question implies that all other things aren’t equal, and that you have to choose between working on what interests you the most and something else, like what pays the best.
Yeah, this is unfortunately the reality. Money influences most people’s lives and solves most problems (while maybe creating others, but not nearly as impactful as not having money). There’s a reason why most people are going into software engineering these days (even if their passion is not software engineering and they look at software engineering as only a job that pays bills well ~ I wouldn’t blame them at all for this reason).
In some cases, you don’t know how long it will take until your passion burns out or what influences your passion to burn out. For example, some people start to dislike coding after joining big tech and “lose” motivation to work on hobby projects.
Pay influences people as well ~ a safety net (not just for you, but for your family), a prestige, work-life balance (and to some extent, that is some people’s passion or to be able to fuel another passion). Maybe you need to earn money first to add stability to your life before pursuing your passion again. Sometimes you need to spend time before going back.
And indeed if your main goal is to make money, you can’t usually afford to work on what interests you the most. People pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. But there’s an obvious exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if you love football, and you’re good enough at it, you can get paid a lot to play it.
Haha, it’s quite rare and even if it does exist, it’s EXTREMELY competitive.
Of course the odds are against you in a case like football, because so many other people like playing it too. This is not to say you shouldn’t try though. It depends how much ability you have and how hard you’re willing to work.
Ability. Willing to work. I like how Paul uses these terms.
Ability is the body/mind to naturally handle situations. For example, how much does genetics play in bodybuilding? Or how much stress/of a mental beating can you handle grinding for a year for the entrance exams in an asian country (China/Korea/Japan/etc…).
Willing to work is the effort that you’re willing to put in. This varies, but for me, primary influence is motivation and how much I’m able to see potential of the outcome. I don’t care much for safety nets/other things for now. Maybe later…
The odds are better when you have strange tastes: when you like something that pays well and that few other people like. For example, it’s clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a software company. He didn’t just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed, but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it.
This is what I refer to as uniqueness. What makes you distinct from others? What have you thought about that others haven’t? Usually, this takes a lot of effort and time to do for most people including myself. You have to craft new lens to look at something. For example, the fosbury flop jumping style technique was used by a person who wasn’t the best at that time with a straight line drop, but managed to use this technique to beat everyone else. How long did this person take to figure out that this technique worked? How long did he train? Probably many years. And many years before realizing that he could apply this technique.
In the end, he loved what he did and got paid well to do this sport. This is what it takes. If he approached jumping the same way everyone else, the only difference would be his strength (and at that point, it’s genetics/steroids). Add another dimension: a new technique.
Also, with doing this, one shoud reflect & observe your surrounds and figure out your known unknowns and maximize your chances to find unknown unknowns to gain more knowledge.
Another thought is: how do you love writing software for customers? How did Bill Gates come to love that? Did he grow up doing that? Did he have anyone he looked up who did that?
There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can’t help noticing when something is mispriced, and can’t help doing something about it. It’s like a puzzle for them.
Very true. If you see people play video games (especially mmorpgs), players typically find joy in “min-maxing”/optimizing their account to the best it can be (for example, clearing these dungeons/events in a certain time, calculating the total probabilty of increasing the effectivness of a weapon with an enhancement). There’s no reason to suspect that if these players applied the same type of thought to optimizing money in the lens of playing a mmorpg, one would find joy in doing such things, pouring many hours into finding resources and discussions about the topic of money.
If you want to make a really huge amount of money — hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars — it turns out to be very useful to work on what interests you the most. The reason is not the extra motivation you get from doing this, but that the way to make a really large amount of money is to start a startup, and working on what interests you is an excellent way to discover startup ideas.
I agree with the first statement. Doing what you love and as a side effect, money comes into play is quite possible, but very very rare. You need to identify a gap at a right time and be the first few to work on that problem and tackle it head on. The problem is that identifying a gap takes time and well, you’re competing with many many other people in the same field most likely, so whoever’s brain clicks first has a huge head start.
I disagree with the second statement. I would say that working on things that interest you and putting things that are interesting into startup ideas do not align typically. I would say that in this context, startup ideas are equalivant to money ideas. A lot of “startup ideas” are ones that don’t work in reality - “a social media for X”, “a llm for X”. Uninteresting ideas are the ones that work and typically those are incredibly boring. “Solving setup/automating the flow in kubernetes because kubernetes is too complicated”, “Solving the logistics problems for chairs”, “Making car cleaning 5% faster by fusing two machines”. Hey, one might say, the problems that arise from these problems can be interesting! - “How long does a train take to deliver 10,000 chairs from point X to Y and can it be done in Z days” or “What kind of new hose needs to be designed to make this new car washing machine”. Yes, I would agree, but the problem/goal itself is uninteresting and that makes a huge difference in motivation for most people especially if one wants to state that it’s a “startup idea” and pitch it to not only VCs, but other folks in SF. Younger folks would probably laugh at you.
Many if not most of the biggest startups began as projects the founders were doing for fun. Apple, Google, and Facebook all began that way. Why is this pattern so common? Because the best ideas tend to be such outliers that you’d overlook them if you were consciously looking for ways to make money. Whereas if you’re young and good at technology, your unconscious instincts about what would be interesting to work on are very well aligned with what needs to be built.
Yes. I agree. Best ideas come from finding and talking about problems about X. If people just talked about money, how would problem X be solved? It’s how people manage time and how to effectively use it.
On a tangent here ~ One might ask: how do you talk about it? of course every startup person will say: talk and interview people about X. Well, if you yourself yourself do not know about X, what makes you think another person will know about X and you can identify the important problems about X from the discussion? - this comes from myself and seeing this from my time working at startups.
Continuing the tangent ~ going deeper: Well, then how do you learn about X? Of course the typical answer is: it varies per person. But, a possible okay answer I think is: in what way do you learn most effectively (visually through blogs, talking to others, etc) and how you approach learning depends on what problem you think is a problem (if it’s a problem dealing with social issues, then talking to others might be more benefical). And it’s important to remember (hard to remember, that’s a different topic) that it’s not one solution fits all: it’s a feedback loop of different approaches that may work for some certain amount of time or may not work at all or may work well entirely. An example of this is parallel parking (which funnily enough, may not exist in some places…): you might first look a video of a topdown view of some animation of parallel parking. Then, you look a guide to parallel parking with different camera angles and say, hey, looks easy enough, strictly follow these rules to park your car. You begin to try it out. First of all, the car isn’t the same one in the video. And second, the cars parked in front and behind me are a bit tigher than the one in the video. Well, anyways you go for it and your car is like a foot away from the curb. So next, you want to visually see what is going on. You ask your parents/friends: can you park the car slowly so that I can see how you do it? You see how they do it and you try it again and the car is still a foot away. So you ask them: tell me what exactly I need to do ~ when should I rotate the wheels, etc… You do that and then you copy it exactly to fit into the curb. Great, you did it! Oh well, next day you find the spot even more tight. You try the same thing and you almost hit the other car. This is what happened with me and would be different for others.
Anyways, the point is that learning is trial and error, but not only that, it depends on how well one effectively learn with certain techniques that you learn best with. And lastly, my answer is one possible answer ~ because it works ok for me does not mean it works well for others (this style of learning)
Back to the topic: Another part that is missing here is the time spent to find the outliers. You need to spend a lot of time to find the gaps. And sometimes those gaps don’t actually make a lot of money. Maybe they’re just incredibly interesting. For example: “I want to make old games run on the phone”. That might not make as much money as say “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information”. I don’t believe that if you’re young and good with technology, that it would be aligned with what needs to be build. Here’s another example, building on top of games: emulators. A lot of very talented young engineers put a lot of time into building emulators for old games so that they can be played on the PC. Examples include Ryujinx, a switch emulator and Dolphin, a gamecube/wii emulator. The amount of time spent ~ reverse engineering hardware, writing the emulated hardware, writing a kernel for the hardware, writing a compiler to transpile the binary into X86 so that it can run fast natively on a computer, writing the wrapper around nvidia and amd gpus and be able to patch all the subtle glitches in certain games, etc… This does not need to be built.
So there’s something like a midwit peak for making money. If you don’t need to make much, you can work on whatever you’re most interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you can’t usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich, and you’re young and good at technology, working on what you’re most interested in becomes a good idea again.
I believe that this deals with how cautious one is. If you don’t care about money, well you know it won’t make money. If you care about money, you want to ensure that the idea is good enough and the money priotized and not mismanaged. If you’re young and a good programmer and want to be rich (see the qualifications here), you typically aren’t that cautious when you’re young anyways and every young person wants to be rich - who doesn’t?
But the message at the end of the day is: If you’re young, do what interests you.
And I believe in that. Otherwise, it gets harder to do what you’re interested in since you learn about other things that you need to take in consideration and have to prioritize time. Why is this the case? I haven’t dug deep into that. Maybe I’ll find an answer later.
What if you’re not sure what you want? What if you’re attracted to the idea of making money and more attracted to some kinds of work than others, but neither attraction predominates? How do you break ties?
The key here is to understand that such ties are only apparent. When you have trouble choosing between following your interests and making money, it’s never because you have complete knowledge of yourself and of the types of work you’re choosing between, and the options are perfectly balanced. When you can’t decide which path to take, it’s almost always due to ignorance. In fact you’re usually suffering from three kinds of ignorance simultaneously: you don’t know what makes you happy, what the various kinds of work are really like, or how well you could do them. [2]
[2] Difficulty choosing between interests is a different matter. That’s not always due to ignorance. It’s often intrinsically difficult. I still have trouble doing it.
On the spectrum of making money vs attracted to some work. Going to list some food for thought:
- I’m good at excel and I make good money as a data analyst/consultant, but I hate my job
- I hate my job and I want to go into computer science since it seems to make a lot of money and a good work life balance
- I love to play music, but it’s unstable to make money and I’m going to use my software engineering job to make money.
- I like my job, but it doesn’t make much money.
It’s hard to find a balance in life, I believe. I disagree with the term ignorance. It has a heavy negative connotation these days and evokes a certain feeling. A phrase I would use is “being uncertain” and ontop of that “being okay with yoloing”. Most people dislike uncertainity ~ what if X happens, or Y could be better than X. These can be labeled as known unknowns ~ things one can figure out with effort. There are also unknown unknowns. Things you haven’t even encountered before, so you don’t even know if they exist and can make you happy and/or money. And sometimes you discover these unknown unknowns and they become known unknowns through solving known unknowns. Here’s an example: You like to travel, but you’re not sure if you want to go to France because you heard Paris is unsafe. So you go to Paris and you discover that Paris is ok and you find a traveller buddy that takes you to a town in southern France for a wine event. You discover that southern france is amazing and its people are very warm.
People say money vs what you love to do is a tradeoff. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s luck involved and you get money while doing what you love to do. And that’s rare. And takes time.
So, I think I would ask myself this: If I had a scale between money and what I love to do, where would I place myself now?
Personally, I think money is important up to an extent now, but I want to find what I love to do more. I want to have interesting conversations about X. Conversations about how much potential money we can make and how to please VCs are boring for me. Maybe conversations about cost per machine and how to drive that down might be interesting. Another thought is: doing work in general. There are 8 hours in a day for a job and 8 hours to do whatever you want after (maybe for some jobs) and then 24 hours in the weekend. So, of your general time: (5 * 8) / (7 * 16) ~ 5 days of work per week / total hours awake in 7 days of week, 40 / 112 = ~1/3 of your time is spent on your work. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much. If we scale it to years ~ for both sexes 77.5, 1/3 of 77 ~ 22 years. 15-22 years of your life working (retire early + don’t have to work when you’re 4 years old). I think to myself: Do I want at least 15 years talking about things I don’t care about and would rather sit on a couch and just doom scroll/watch netflix instead?
In a way this ignorance is excusable. It’s often hard to predict these things, and no one even tells you that you need to. If you’re ambitious you’re told you should go to college, and this is good advice so far as it goes, but that’s where it usually ends. No one tells you how to figure out what to work on, or how hard this can be.
Yeah, experienced this out myself after college. It’s up for you to decide and now the time is ticking. What the fuck am I suppose to do?
What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty. And probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you’re interested in. That will get you more information about how interested you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they offer for ambition.
Yes. Same thoughts. Wish I had the brain capacity to think about this earlier on and started to do this eariler on, but at least I’ve started to at least think about this.
Don’t wait. Don’t wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don’t even wait for internships during college. You don’t necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring out what to work on is a problem that could take years to solve, the sooner you start, the better.
Wish I had this advice eariler on. With examples :)
One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You’ll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?
Good advice. Not every is perfect in anyone’s eyes or should be. I think it’s also just as important to find qualities you like from people and naturally you will be drawn.
Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you’ll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you’re genuinely interested in, you’ll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring. [3]
[3] You can’t always take people at their word on this. Since it’s more prestigious to work on things you’re interested in than to be driven by money, people who are driven mainly by money will often claim to be more interested in their work than they actually are. One way to test such claims is by doing the following thought experiment: if their work didn’t pay well, would they take day jobs doing something else in order to do it in their spare time? Lots of mathematicians and scientists and engineers would. Historically lots have. But I don’t think as many investment bankers would.
Interesting thought. I don’t have much to talk about investment bankers. But yes, I have the same view that people who care about things do it outside their “profession”. It’s very rare that it overlaps by a lot and even in places people think it will overlap such as going to a PhD.
Another question to ask for engineers: Would you want to work at OpenAI? The general answer is: of course I would! Then the question goes: what do you like about OpenAI? They making cool stuff like llms and things. If you were a software engineer at OpenAI, would you think that you would be a better engineer than say, an engineer at google/meta/apple/amazon? Do you think you would get paid more? Do you think you will be working on something like LLMs or would you think you would be doing the same things you were working on in your previous job (ex, writing bash scripts to automate infra?)? Do you think the people there are smart? And in what way do think OpenAI has discussions versus the current job you’re working at? The underyling question is: Do you like the prestige/money? Do you care about knowledge and learning from others?
I haven’t asked this question to anyone yet, but would like to in such a way without making people emotional or hurting their ego. Typically, people in computer science (from what I’ve observed), have very high ego/self-esteem. Which is good and bad.
The other thing you do in the face of uncertainty is to make choices that are uncertainty-proof. The less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this “staying upwind.” If you’re unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math.
Haha, I’ve observed this as well. Think about the linage of great scientists in computer science: Von Neumann, a mathematician & physicist, transistor ~ John Bardeen, physicist & electrical engineer, Alan turing, mathematics, Edsger W. Dijkstra, mathematics, Leslie Lamport, mathematics.
Interesting that learning about foundations, grounded in math/physics/biology can give you more options. I don’t know why this is the case, but my guess it that the foundations allow you to have adaptable lens of sort to see other things in a math / physics way that makes it easy to understand for these people who study these fields. Another thought is: how hard is it to learn math versus economics? And how is it interesting or rather how to make it interesting to me?
There’s one case, though, where it’s easy to say whether you should work on what interests you the most: if you want to do great work. This is not a sufficient condition for doing great work, but it is a necessary one.
If you found that you’ve done great work, you should be proud of it and would definitely have put a lot of effort into making it great.
There’s a lot of selection bias in advice about whether to “follow your passion,” and this is the reason. Most such advice comes from people who are famously successful, and if you ask someone who’s famously successful how to do what they did, most will tell you that you have to work on what you’re most interested in. And this is in fact true.
Interesting. I would like to ask people this. And well, I’ve not met a lot of successful people yet, so when I do, I want to ask them this and their history to get to where they are (without the BS).
That doesn’t mean it’s the right advice for everyone. Not everyone can do great work, or wants to. But if you do want to, the complicated question of whether or not to work on what interests you the most becomes simple. The answer is yes. The root of great work is a sort of ambitious curiosity, and you can’t manufacture that.
Great advice! I think most people want to do what they’re interested in (well, like in general), regardless of money. And sometimes interests change. And sometimes you don’t enough money to do what you’re interested in. And sometimes you have to learn and take time before you build great work. And time to make money. And time to find what you’re interested in. :)
Other thoughts along the way
Some people argue that you should quit if it doesn’t give good feedback(money).
This is what’s hard ~ if you are doing what you love, but you get consistent bad results: what do you do? Is it early to quit? If you start to hate it, are you just optimizing for money then?
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