How do you get the job you love?

To do any good you must like what you do. It's not just a story. I reduced the idea to a few words: "Do what you love." But just telling people this is not enough. Doing what you love is pretty complicated.

The basic idea is somewhat far from what we are taught in childhood. Back then, it seemed like work and fun were the opposite. Life then had two hypostases: sometimes, adults would make you do certain things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do whatever you wanted, and it was called a game. Sometimes the things that adults did were fun, just as occasionally playing was not just fun - when you fell and hit yourself. But with a few exceptions, work was generally, by definition, the opposite of fun. [...]

Why is it more convenient to pretend that you like what you do? The first sentence in my speech explains this. If you need to like your job to do it well, then successful people will all appreciate their jobs. Hence the traditions of the middle class. As you can find in any home in America chairs that are, without the owners knowing, the imitation of the seats of the kings of France, conventional attitudes towards work are, without their "owners" being aware of them, imitations of the attitudes of people who have accomplished great things.

A totally wrong recipe. By the time they reach the age when they can think about what they like to do , most children are already misguided about the idea of ​​loving their work. The school prepares them to look at work as an unpleasant task. It is said that having a job is more difficult than what you do at school. And yet, adults say they like what they do. You can't blame children for thinking, “I'm not like all these people; I do not integrate in this world ".

In fact, they are lied to three times: the things that are presented to them in school as work, are not really work; adult work is not (necessarily) worse than school work; and many adults around them lie when they say they like their job.

The most dangerous "liars" can be the child's parents. If you take a boring job in order to have a better financial situation, as most people do, you risk inoculating your children with the idea that work is boring. It may be best for children not to be so selfish. A parent who gives his child an example of love for his work could help him more than if he offered him an expensive home.

It was only in high school that I realized that work distances itself from the idea of ​​having a decent life. Then the most important question became not how to make money, but what to do. Ideally, the two would coincide, but a few exceptional cases, such as Einstein's, prove otherwise. The

definition is not, in general, how to make a contribution to the world in which you live, and at the same time not to starve. But still, after many years, my idea of ​​work still contained a great deal of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only difficult problems brought great results, and serious problems could not, in fact, be fun. Certainly, you need to work a little harder to solve them.

If you live with the impression that something has to hurt, you are less likely to realize that you are wrong. That's about my pre-high school experience.

Limitations

How much do you like what you do? Until you know this, you won't even know when to stop searching. And if you do like most people, and you underestimate this problem, you will be tempted to stop searching too soon. You will end up in a job chosen by your parents or the desire to earn money or fame.

To do what you love does not mean to do what you love most in this second. Even Einstein probably had his moments when he wanted to have a coffee, but he told himself that he had to finish what he had to do first.

I was usually surprised to read about people who liked what they were doing so much that there was nothing else they would have preferred. There was no work for me that I loved so much. If I had to choose between spending my next hour working on something or teleporting to Rome and walking for an hour, would there really be something I would prefer? Honestly not.

The truth is that almost anyone would prefer to float on a boat in the Caribbean at any time, or have sex, or eat a delicacy, rather than work on serious problems. The rule of doing what you love includes a certain amount of time.It does not mean doing what you enjoy most in this second, but what makes you happy for a longer period of time, a week, a month.

Unproductive pleasures fade in the end. After a while you get tired of sitting on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to take action.

You have to like your job more than your unproductive pleasures.It's good to like what you do so much that the concept of "free time" seems wrong. Which doesn't mean you have to spend all your time working. You can work as long as you don't get tired and start giving up. Then it's time to do something else, even something that doesn't require much thought. But do not consider this time a reward, and the time spent working a chore that you must endure to deserve your reward. [...]

I think the best test is the one learned from a friend: try to do things that would make your friends say: Wow! But it probably won't work until the age of 22, because most people don't have a wide range of friends to choose from.

Alarms

What I don't think you should do is worry about the opinions of others, except your friends. You shouldn't worry about pride. Pride is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you ask the opinions of people whose judgment you respect, what do the opinions of those you do not even know bring? [...]

Prestige is especially dangerous for the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on commissions, the way to succeed is to bring prestige into question. This is the recipe for getting people to give speeches, write emails, become department heads, and so on. It could be a good rule of thumb to simply avoid any task that would bring prestige.

Similarly, if you like two types of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Opinions about what to admire are always slightly influenced by pride, so if two tasks seem equal to you, you probably have more admiration for the less prestigious.

The other force that leads people astray is money. Money, in itself, is not so dangerous. When a job is well paid, but viewed with suspicion, such as telemarketing or prostitution, ambitious people will not be attracted to it. This type of work ends up being done only by people who "just try to make a living." The danger arises when money is combined with prestige, such as in law or medicine.A prosperous and secure career with some prestige is dangerously tempting for a young man who has not yet learned much about what he enjoys.

The test of whether people like their job is to see if they do it and if they don't get paid - even if they have to work elsewhere to make money. How many more lawyers would do their job if they had to do it for free, in their free time, and take on waiter jobs to support themselves? [...]

Discipline

[...]

Although doing extraordinary work requires less discipline than people think - because the road to such work begins with finding something that you enjoy so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it - finding a field that to love him is what discipline usually requires. Some people are lucky enough to know what they will do from the age of 12 and all they have been doing since then is walking along the road as if they had always done so. But this is an exception. More often than not, people who do great things have a career like a ping-pong ball. I go to school to study subject A, give up and take a job in field B, and become famous doing the C thing. [...]

"I always produce!"it is also a practical exhortation to look for work to love. If you take this into account, it will automatically push you from the things you need to do to the things you like. "I always produce!" it will help you discover the work you are going to do, just as water, with the help of gravitational force, finds a place to slip through your roof.

Of course, discovering a job that you enjoy does not mean that you will start doing it right away. This is a separate issue. If you are ambitious, you need to separate them: you need to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from what seems possible.

It is quite painful to keep them separate, because it is difficult to notice the difference between them. So most people lower their expectations preventively. For example, if you accidentally ask people on the street if they would like to be able to draw like Da Vinci, you would hear something like, "Ah, but I don't know how to draw." This is more of a statement of intent than a fact; it means "I'm not going to try," because the truth is that if you take a random person off the street and somehow get him to draw and work for it to the fullest for the next 20 years, it would be surprisingly far away. But this requires a great deal of moral effort; it would mean looking at failure in the eyes, every day, for many years. So people, to protect themselves, say, "I can't." [...]

Two ways

On the other hand, there is another meaning to "not everyone can do what they like" which is too true, however. We have to earn a living and it's hard to get paid for what you love to do. There are two ways to get to that destination:

1) As you become more eminent, gradually increase the parts you like more about your job than the rest.

2) Do less pleasant things to earn money to do what you love.

The first way is more common. It normally happens to anyone who does a good job. A young architect must accept any job offered to him, but if he does it well he will reach the position of choosing his own projects. The disadvantages of this method are the uncertainty and the fact that it is a slow process.

The second way has several options depending on how much you work for money. At one extreme is the daily job, where you usually work, and in your free time you take care of your project. At the other extreme, you work at something less pleasant until you raise money so that you never have to work again.

The second suggestion is less common than the first, because it requires your own choice. It is also more dangerous. Life gets more expensive as the years go by, so it's pretty easy to get deeper into the work than you would expect at first. Worse, everything you do changes you. If you work too hard in a boring environment, your brain will rot. And the highest paid jobs are the most dangerous, because they capture all your attention.

The advantage of the second method is that it allows you to jump over obstacles. The landscape of your job opportunities is not a plan; there are walls of different heights among many types of work. The trick to maximizing those parts of your job that you enjoy the most can take you from architecture to design, but not to music. If you manage to make money doing one thing and then do something else, you have more freedom in your choices.

Which path is preferable? It depends on how confident you are in what you want to do, how good you are at receiving orders, how much risk you can take, and the chances of someone paying, in your lifetime, for the choice you made. . If you are confident in the field you want to work in and it is very likely that people will pay you for what you do, then you should choose the first option. But if you don't know what you want to focus on or you don't like orders, you may want to choose the second option, if you can take the risk.

Don't decide too soon. Children who know too early what they want to do can be impressive; It's like I know the answer to a math problem before the others. Indeed, they have an answer, but the chances are high that it will be wrong.

A friend, a successful doctor, always complains about his job . When people ask for advice when they want to take an exam at medical school, they come to excuse them and tell them not to do that. How did he end up in this situation? Ever since high school, she wanted to be a doctor. And she was so ambitious and determined that she removed any obstacles in her way - including, unfortunately, the fact that she might not like it.

Now he leads a life chosen by a high school student.

When you are young, you get the impression that you have enough information to make every choice before you have to. But this is certainly not the case with the service. When deciding what to do, you need to use complete information. Even in college you have too few ideas about what kind of work you like. At best, you will go through several internship sessions, but not all jobs give you the opportunity for such a period. And the ones that give you this chance don't teach you much about later work.

It would be wise to look for jobs from the beginning that will allow you to do many different things, so you can learn faster what it's all about in each field. The most extreme option for the first option is dangerous because you learn a little from what you like to do. If you work hard to say, for ten years, on the scholarship, with the thought that you will give up one day, when you will have enough money to dedicate yourself to your passion, to be a writer, what happens when you give up this job and you realize you don't like writing novels?

Most say they take the risk. Give me a million dollars and I'll figure out what to do. But it's harder than it looks. Constraints are what shape your life. Take them away and you will see that most people do not know what they want to do: take a look at those who win the lottery or receive a substantial inheritance. No matter how much everyone thinks that all they want is to have financial security, the happiest people are not the ones who have it, but the ones who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the cost of not knowing exactly what you want to do is not as good as it sounds.

Whichever path you choose, expect to struggle. Finding a job to love is very difficult. Most fail. Even if you succeed, situations are quite rare when you are free to do what you want up to 30-40 years. But if you have a destination in sight, you are more likely to get there. If you know you are capable of loving your work, you are close, and if you know what work you love, you are almost there.

Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple Bayesian spam filter that inspired most current filters. He\'s currently working on a new programming language called Arc, a new book on startups, and is one of the partners in Y Combinator

Source: www.paulgraham.com/love.html