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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Paul Graham Essay Summaries</title>
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<div class="page-header"><h1>How to Do What You Love</h1></div>
<p>When you’re young, it seems like life has two states: work and play.</p>
<p>If we’re going to make kids work on dull stuff, we should at least make it clear to them that they have to do this now so they could work on more interesting stuff later. Otherwise, kids start to get the idea that work = boring.</p>
<p>People usually pretend that they like their job. 1) Because there’s social pressure to do so, and 2) because if you don’t like your job you probably won’t be good at it (and you don’t want others to think that you’re bad at your job).</p>
<p>It’s confusing being a high school kid who starts thinking about their career. On one hand, school has taught you that work = boring. On the other hand, it seems that all these people with jobs really like what they do. It’s frustrating when you can’t find your passion and it seems that everyone around you has no problem doing so.</p>
<p>Kids have been told 3 lies: 1) the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work, 2) grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork, and 3) many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.</p>
<p>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. 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.</p>
<p>How much are you supposed to like what you do?</p>
<ul>
<li>Upper bound: doing what you love doesn’t mean do what will make you happiest this second, it means doing what will make you happiest this week, or this month. At any given second/minute, you’ll almost always rather eat chocolate than do work. However, if you want to stay happy, you have work on something meaningful.</li>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
<p>To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool.</p>
<p>Don’t think about prestige. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.</p>
<p>Don’t be tempted by money either. The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?</p>
<p>Parents’ advice tends to err on the side of money. Probably because they share the consequences of a bad career decision more than the rewards of a good one.</p>
<p>Of course, figuring out what you like doesn’t mean that you get to work on it. But if you’re ambitious, you have to keep those questions separate (what you like vs. what’s possible).</p>
<ul>
<li>If you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. If they worked as hard as they could at it for 20 years, they’d get surprisingly far.</li>
</ul>
<p>Often times the main thing that prevents people from doing work that they love is the fact that you have to make a living. There’s basically 2 ways to combat this problem:</p>
<ul>
<li>The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don’t.</li>
<li>The two-job route: work at things you don't like to pay the bills while you work on things you do like.</li>
<li>The organic route is more common, but is slow and uncertain. The two-job route is less common because it takes deliberate choice, and is more dangerous because it’s easy to forget about the passion job and continue with the money job.</li>
<li>If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.</li>
</ul>
<p>Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. However, they’re usually wrong.</p>
<ul>
<li>A friend of mine is a successful doctor, but hates it. How’d she get there? In high school she “knew” she wanted to be a doctor, and she’s so ambitious that she overcame every obstacle along the way, including not liking it. Now she has her life chosen for her by a high-school kid.</li>
<li>In choosing careers, you barely have any information as to what they’re really like. So it’s a good idea early on to seek jobs that give you the option to go down different paths.</li>
</ul>
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