January 2006To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactlynovel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." Butit's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love iscomplicated.The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When Iwas 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 dothings, and that was called work; the rest of the time you coulddo what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally thethings adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playingwasn't — for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But exceptfor these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined asnot-fun.And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, wastedious 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 ofwork meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we dislikedschool, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, andthat we had it easy.Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that workwas not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most ofthem. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playingdodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch ofkids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn't just do what youwanted.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 makekids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousnessis not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reasonthey have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on moreinteresting stuff later.[1]Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whateverI wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember thatprecisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being toldto use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think hemeant work could literally be fun — fun like playing. Ittook me years to grasp that.JobsBy high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon.Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or wewould go to see them at work. It was always understood that theyenjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: theprivate jet pilot. But I don't think the bank manager really did.The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work waspresumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposedto. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that youdespised your job, but a social faux-pas.Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The firstsentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like somethingto do it well, then the most successful people will all like whatthey do. That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from.Just as houses all over America are full of chairsthat are, withoutthe owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about workare, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations ofthe attitudes of people who've done great things.What a recipe for alienation. By the time they reach an age tothink about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughlymisled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trainedthem to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is saidto be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adultsclaim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "Iam not like these people; I am not suited to this world."Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taughtto regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not(necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults aroundthem are lying when they say they like what they do.The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. If you takea boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as somany people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea thatwork is boring. [2]Maybe it would be better for kids in this onecase if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an exampleof loving their work might help their kids more than an expensivehouse.[3]It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally brokefree from the idea of making a living. Then the important questionbecame not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally thesecoincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein inthe patent office) proved they weren't identical.The definition of work was now to make some original contributionto the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habitof so many years my idea of work still included a large componentof pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because onlyhard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn'tliterally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely tonotice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experienceof graduate school.BoundsHow much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless youknow that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like mostpeople, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching tooearly. 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 youwould like to do most this second. Even Einstein probablyhad moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himselfhe ought to finish what he was working on first.It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what theydid so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn'tseem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had achoice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b)be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, wasthere 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 deliciousfood, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what youlove assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do whatwill make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiestover some longer period, like a week or a month.Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tiredof lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to dosomething.As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductivepleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of"spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spendall your time working. You can only work so much before you gettired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else— even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as theprize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earnit.I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your workis not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problemswith procrastination. You'll have to force yourself to work, andwhen you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not onlyenjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow,that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something.If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign languagefluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least,wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, isreading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences,there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's whymerely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to dosomething with what you've read to feel productive.I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do thingsthat would make your friends say wow. But it probably wouldn'tstart to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven'thad a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.SirensWhat you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion ofanyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige.Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can askthe opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does itadd to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4]This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially whenyou're young. [5]Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warpseven your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work noton what you like, but what you'd like to like.That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. Theylike reading novels. They notice that people who write them winNobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than tobe a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is notenough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you'regoing to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything wellenough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we nowconsider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes tomind — though almost any established art form would do. So justdo what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want tomake ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to doit is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for gettingpeople to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, bedepartment heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply toavoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't havehad to make it prestigious.Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is moreprestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinionsabout what's admirable are always going to be slightly influencedby prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably havemore genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itselfis not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regardedwith contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personalinjury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it. Thatkind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying tomake a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners saythis.) The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in,say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperouscareer with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously temptingto someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they reallylike.The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd doit even if they weren't paid for it — even if they had to work atanother job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would dotheir current work if they had to do it for free, in their sparetime, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kindsof academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect. Mostgood mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobsas math professors, whereas in the departments at the other end ofthe spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver:people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies,and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs. Mathwould happen without math departments, but it is the existence ofEnglish majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls intobeing all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identityin the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun.The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. Itseems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelistsand whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctorsand whose parents want them to be novelists. The kids think theirparents are "materialistic." Not necessarily. All parents tend tobe more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves,simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. Ifyour eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenagedaughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a sharein the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter getspregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences.DisciplineWith such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprisingwe find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most peopleare doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain.Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestigeor money. How many even discover something they love to work on?A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don'tunderestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeededyet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented,you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. Ifyou're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that youfind contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves. Notnecessarily, but probably.Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think — because the way to do great work is to find something you like somuch that you don't have to force yourself to do it — findingwork you love does usually require discipline. Some people arelucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and justglide along as if they were on railroad tracks. But this seems theexception. More often people who do great things have careers withthe trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A,drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C aftertaking it up on the side.Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign ofenergy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you droppingout, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself.Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointmentsearly on, when they're trying to find their niche.Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is totry to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don'tlike it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfactionas an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll getinto the habit of doing things well.Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if youhave a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be anovelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction,however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're notmerely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to writeone day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the alltoo palpably flawed one you're actually writing."Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love.If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automaticallypush you away from things you think you're supposed to work on,toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discoveryour life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds thehole in your roof.Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean youget to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you'reambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a consciouseffort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminatedby what seems possible. [6]It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observethe gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower theirexpectations. For example, if you asked random people on the streetif they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find mostwould say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statementof intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Becausethe fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehowgot them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for thenext twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would requirea great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye everyday for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can dowork they love — that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs. Really?How do you make them? In the US the only mechanism for forcingpeople to do unpleasant jobs is the draft, and that hasn't beeninvoked for over 30 years. All we can do is encourage people todo unpleasant work, with money and prestige.If there's something people still won't do, it seems as if societyjust has to make do without. That's what happened with domesticservants. For millennia that was the canonical example of a job"someone had to do." And yet in the mid twentieth century servantspractically disappeared in rich countries, and the rich have justhad to do without.So while there may be some things someone has to do, there's a goodchance anyone saying that about any particular job is mistaken.Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if noone were willing to do them.Two RoutesThere's another sense of "not everyone can do work they love"that's all too true, however. One has to make a living, and it'shard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes tothat destination: The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don't.The two-job route: to work at things you don't like to get money to work on things you do.The organic route is more common. It happens naturally to anyonewho does good work. A young architect has to take whatever workhe can get, but if he does well he'll gradually be in a positionto pick and choose among projects. The disadvantage of this routeis that it's slow and uncertain. Even tenure is not real freedom.The two-job route has several variants depending on how long youwork for money at a time. At one extreme is the "day job," whereyou work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on whatyou love in your spare time. At the other extreme you work atsomething till you make enough not to have to work for money again.The two-job route is less common than the organic route, becauseit requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Lifetends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to getsucked into working longer than you expected at the money job.Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If you work toolong on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. And the best payingjobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump overobstacles. The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there arewalls of varying heights between different kinds of work. [7]The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get youfrom architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music.If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, youhave more freedom of choice.Which route should you take? That depends on how sure you are ofwhat you want to do, how good you are at taking orders, how muchrisk you can stand, and the odds that anyone will pay (in yourlifetime) for what you want to do. If you're sure of the generalarea you want to work in and it's something people are likely topay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. Butif you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to takeorders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can standthe risk.Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to doseem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math questionbefore the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but oddsare it's wrong.A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantlyabout her job. When people applying to medical school ask her foradvice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But shenever does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school shealready wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determinedthat she overcame every obstacle along the way — including,unfortunately, not liking it.Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll getenough information to make each choice before you need to make it.But this is certainly not so with work. When you're deciding whatto do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information.Even in college you get little idea what various types of work arelike. At best you may have a couple internships, but not all jobsoffer internships, and those that do don't teach you much more aboutthe work than being a batboy teaches you about playing baseball.In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, youget better results if you use flexible media. So unless you'refairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose atype of work that could turn into either an organic or two-jobcareer. That was probably part of the reason I chose computers.You can be a professor, or make a lot of money, or morph it intoany number of other kinds of work.It's also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many differentthings, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like.Conversely, the extreme version of the two-job route is dangerousbecause it teaches you so little about what you like. If you workhard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'llquit and write novels when you have enough money, what happens whenyou quit and then discover that you don't actually like writingnovels?Most people would say, I'd take that problem. Give me a milliondollars and I'll figure out what to do. But it's harder than itlooks. Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and mostpeople have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those whowin lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they wantfinancial security, the happiest people are not those who have it,but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedomat the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good asit seems.Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you loveis very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it'srare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties orforties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be morelikely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're inthe home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you'repractically there.Notes[1]Currently we do the opposite: when we make kids do boring work,like arithmetic drills, instead of admitting frankly that it'sboring, we try to disguise it with superficial decorations.[2]One father told me about a related phenomenon: he found himselfconcealing from his family how much he liked his work. When hewanted to go to work on a saturday, he found it easier to say thatit was because he "had to" for some reason, rather than admittinghe preferred to work than stay home with them.[3]Something similar happens with suburbs. Parents move to suburbsto raise their kids in a safe environment, but suburbs are so dulland artificial that by the time they're fifteen the kids are convincedthe whole world is boring.[4]I'm not saying friends should be the only audience for yourwork. The more people you can help, the better. But friends shouldbe your compass.[5]Donald Hall said young would-be poets were mistaken to be soobsessed with being published. But you can imagine what it woulddo for a 24 year old to get a poem published in The New Yorker.Now to people he meets at parties he's a real poet. Actually he'sno better or worse than he was before, but to a clueless audiencelike that, the approval of an official authority makes all thedifference. So it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. Thereason the young care so much about prestige is that the peoplethey want to impress are not very discerning.[6]This is isomorphic to the principle that you should preventyour beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by howyou wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously.The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index ofthat.[7]A more accurate metaphor would be to say that the graph of jobsis not very well connected.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Dan Friedman, Sarah Harlin,Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, David Sloo, and Aaron Swartzfor reading drafts of this.
