January 2015My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he workedfor Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors.He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they want todo. When you talk to him about his childhood, there's a clearwatershed at about age 12, when he "got interested in maths."Hegrew up in the small Welsh seacoast town of Pwllheli. As we retracedhis walk to school on Google Street View, he said that it had beennice growing up in the country."Didn't it get boring when you got to be about 15?" I asked."No," he said, "by then I was interested in maths."In another conversation he told me that what he really liked wassolving problems. To me the exercises at the end of each chapterin a math textbook represent work, or at best a way to reinforcewhat you learned in that chapter. To him the problems were thereward. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solvingthem. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediatelywork out all the problems — to the slight annoyance of his teacher,since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually.Few people know so early or so certainly what they want to work on.But talking to my father reminded me of a heuristic the rest of uscan use. If something that seems like work to other people doesn'tseem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for.For example, a lot of programmers I know, including me, actuallylike debugging. It's not something people tend to volunteer; onelikes it the way one likes popping zits. But you may have to likedebugging to like programming, considering the degree to whichprogramming consists of it.The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidencethey probably are of what you should do. When I was in college Iused to write papers for my friends. It was quite interesting towrite a paper for a class I wasn't taking. Plus they were alwaysso relieved.It seemed curious that the same task could be painful to one personand pleasant to another, but I didn't realize at the time what thisimbalance implied, because I wasn't looking for it. I didn't realizehow hard it can be to decide what you should work on, and that yousometimes have to figure it out from subtle clues, like a detectivesolving a case in a mystery novel. So I bet it would help a lotof people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems likework to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston,Robert Morris, and my father for reading drafts of this.
