Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn’t literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them. If you think something’s supposed to hurt, you’re less likely to notice if you’re doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.
How much are you supposed to like what you do?
- PG says here that almost anyone would rather be doing something else (in the Caribbean, having sex, eating food etc.) than doing their work at certain parts of the day.
- The notion that these things are unnatural if you’ve found work you want to do is misleading.
It doesn’t mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.
- The lower bound is you want to do something that you prefer to do on a aggregated cost level than your most unproductive pleasure.
- It’s funny, pretty much any studying I’ve done or things I’ve been trying to do I feel fit this lower bound.
- So, PG says the upper bound is finding something you love doing because of a long run payoff, or that its progress toward something noble, or that you feel is important.
- Then, the lower bound is doing something that passes that marker of at least as productive as being totally unproductive.
- I like this lower bound, it seems obvious but I think if you spend your whole day thinking about playing games or something its going to be a constant struggle to focus on work, wearing you out.
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To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire.
- I’m not totally sure I agree with his notions then that you should pick something you’re friends would admire. I don’t necessarily disagree, depends on your friends, just don’t really feel I can relate to it.
What you should not do
Not worry about the opinion of those outside your close group. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. This is something I’ve been trying to do, going back to Sam Altman’s “Substance over Status” tenet 1.
Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.
- This rolls into one of the most crucial ideas of choosing work to me. That choosing something based on the idea of who you should be doing it or an idea of what its like to do it is a problem.
- It’s useful to assume that all things you’re hoping to work on are distorted by this lens of prestige.
Is there a test, if you’re in this kind of transitory ping pong stage of finding what you like to do, to know if it’s laziness or just exploration. PG says you can: * Try and do a good job at whatever it is you’re doing. * Always produce: > For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you’re actually writing.
- Generally, a good heuristic is trying to keep your beliefs about what you think something is, with what it actually is. There’s a pain associated with this gap at times, but its often the case that there is some bridge available its just painful.
- The design of your life, like anything, works best with flexible media. This is why PG chose computers, they could be used to get money or go into academia.