On the other hand, you might consider simply finding what you love, and letting the rest take care of itself.
Yep, this works great for me. Because I'm never bored by what I love, never discouraged by what I love, never heedlessly irresponsible about what I love, never sick of what I love, never resentful of what I love, never scared to death of what I love. I'm never distracted by what I don't love, never seduced by what I don't love, never fooled by what I don't love. I'm never foolish in my love, never shallow in my love, never fickle in my love, never maturing or changing in my love. And of course I never, ever love more than one thing at a time.
I don't think that's really the author's point. I think his point is that when you find something you love, you will forgive the little aggravations and just power through them, because they are part of this activity that you love. You find yourself loving the aggravations as much as the achievement, so that it's the process that pulls you along.
I'm debugging a double-free in a C library right now. I have basically no information to go on other than the failing test; ASAN/Valgrind was no help, and the liberal assertions sprinkled throughout the code aren't catching it. Many people would say that this is a pretty sucky task, but it is challenging and engrossing enough that I debated not writing this comment (I'll try and keep it short so I can return to my work soon ;-)).
That's why people usually use the metaphor of running. Running is hard work; it is hard on your joints, it is hard on your muscles, it gives you a hell of an aerobic workout and leaves you sweaty and out of breath afterwards. Yet many runners (not I) get a high from the process - not from having finished the race, nor from how fast they finished the race, but just from having run.
> Yet many runners (not I) get a high from the process
I think it's within the grasp of anybody. You just have to learn to enjoy the pain running (or any other workout) brings. It sounds perverted but it does help to approach exercise with such mindset.
Now, how to convince yourself to enjoy it, is an interesting question. For me, the realization that we (as animals) were meant to run much (if not most) of our waking day did wonders (the aha moment, if you will).
Even games consist of work. If they don't they tend to be rather boring.
I think it's not good for humanity to be forced to things, because it prevents them from learning to love them. As an example everyone loves to read books unless they are for school. Everyone loves to read stuff on Wikipedia unless it's for university and everyone loves to solve puzzles unless it's to make money. Well, or you learn to carry over that love.
Seriously, I think all these "get people interested into math/science/engineering" things wouldn't be necessary if one of the first experiences wouldn't be to be forced to do it, forced to do lots of boring homework, to sit still in class listening to the teacher, preventing you from being outside.
I think the only reason I am into computer science is because I never really had it in school.
(And now I am studying CS and suddenly history and languages are interesting as hell)
Look at the bright side, at least there is something you love instead of trying to keep afloat in a sea of indifference and drifting lukewarm interests. Not everyone has it so good.
I was there a while ago. The only advice I can give to those who are feeling this that it takes tremendous effort to move yourself into a position in life that you enjoy. What's worth having or keeping in life isn't easily obtained.
"Do what you love, and you'll never have to work again"
Some act like this is a joke, saying: "Yea right, you still need a job to survive." Yes, you do need income to buy food and shelter. But the income doesn't even need to come from a job, and it certainly doesn't have to come from tasks you dislike.
If you hate your job, you are probably in the wrong career or working in the wrong field. If you really hate your job, people close to you know, and it affects them.
My husband loves his job, as a freelance programmer, like most of you out there. He loves it even more when there's no money involved. He can't be bothered marketing the projects he loves spending time on. He's in the right career, all right, but is he making a living?
This is fucking bullshit. In the words of Jake, sucking at something is just the first step to being kinda good at something. Often when you are bad at something, you don't enjoy it, often when you are good at something you still don't enjoy it, but the ability to self-discipline, to get good at something despite not enjoying it, translates to power over oneself.
If we all just gave up because we didn't enjoy shit initially, nothing we love would ever have happened.
+ 1, complete BS article, the author seems to have a very naive understanding of what self-improvement is and what it's benefits are. We can also use self improvement proven techniques to get at the next level that we aspire.
PS. I'm obsessed with Self Improvement and I've grown a lot using those techniques.
Agreed, the author attacks a strawman and then prescribes the most trite cliche in all of self-help: "do you what you love and the rest will take care of itself". Its anti-advice.
I've had essentially the same goals and dreams for over a decade, and still grow more deeply fascinated by the month. But I'm not getting any younger, old enough that I can no longer expect that things will naturally fall into place. That I too often find myself compulsively reading HN at 3pm and ahem navel-gazing at 3am, instead of "moving my feet" down the path of progress, is not due to a lack of love or inherent drive. Rather, its the steep learning curve against a background of distraction which disrupts "flow". Has for years.
I wish I hadn't thought so cynically of self-help when I was younger. But its only recently that I've found insightful any particular resources. "The Willpower Instinct" audiobook is readily available and highly recommended, and BJ Fogg's free program at tinyhabits.com complements it well. The lift.do app complements both (daily dont's can track your will-not-power). Also, the Pomodoro Technique is a good no-nonsense alternative to GTD and other complex productivity systems.
One last thing I read somewhere and keep in mind, was a study which showed that focusing on the positive outcomes of not doing [bad habit/thing] is more effective at changing behavior than fearing the anxiety and guilt felt after doing [bad habit/thing] (which was actually found to be counter-productive as a preventive technique).
Well the way I see it, self improvement is like playing guitar - initially it's bloody hard and doesn't make sense and when you do lock down a chord it takes ages to then play the next one and is a whole mess and is super awkward and annoying, however, once you get vaguely good at it then it becomes less about the gruelling learning and more about playing around and enjoying what you're good at - it's not just a learning exercise, it's something you understand and can develop in your own sweet way.
Self improvement, learning, guitar skill - nobody, unless you're innately talented, is something anyone just "slips into" naturally because it "feels right and is easy" as this article suggests - making the most out of this pointless spec of time takes hard work, paying attention, taking risks, learning the hard way, but it's like, deferred gratification...being bored easily helps (otherwise we'd just devote our lives to the mundane shit children enjoy), it's a fantastical journey of discovery, and it's not necessarily easy to reach things that can reward us the most.
I thought the point of the article was that hard work, paying attention, and taking risks can itself be fun. Perhaps I'm just projecting my own views onto the author.
The author actually agrees with you to a certain extent: "Well, it is a big deal. And in spite of how effortless these accomplishments may appear, people work harder than you likely realize to make these things happen." He or she isn't denying that there's an element of self-discipline and pain in achieving your goals, actually the opposite.
I think the author is asking us to take a step back and really consider why we have these aspirations. Is it only for status? If so, we're already at a disadvantage because there are people out there who enjoy the grind for that goal more than us.
For me, the trick is finding the goal that has the highest ROI and the least grind/friction. There is always going to be a certain amount of pain and discomfort in pursuing any goal, but it doesn't hurt to try to minimize it.
You've misread the article - he's advocating doing things you feel driven to do by your own will, rather than doing things you think you should (based on external motivations). Of course those things will be difficult sometimes but you won't care.
It's 'programming' for me - I have spent countless hours doing it; sometimes it's frustrating and difficult, sometimes I suck at it - but the drive is always there so I keep doing it, and still enjoy it.
You hit the hail on the head. My argument is that curiosity is more powerful than notions of what one "should" do.
All things come with some level of challenge. Getting past such hurdles has a lot to do with how much you get out of the overall experience. Yes, hard work is required; and I'm no stranger to sticking with something. For more thoughts on this notion, read The Muck: http://www.deliberatism.com/editorial/the-muck/
I've done creative things for the better part of my life. This path has often been difficult. In spite of that, I find a strange pleasure in sitting down and putting pen to paper: be that in a drawing, something I'm writing, or in a new business idea.
I'm not doing these things to improve myself. I'm just interested in seeing what the next thing might lead to. As a result, even the toughest parts become more tolerable.
"Maybe you aren’t supposed to bother with the tedious stuff. Perhaps the reason you haven’t done it yet, is that you weren’t meant to. "
I don't like being meant to do anything, I choose what I work on and falling back to "well maybe I wasn't meant to" is using magical thinking and silly escapism to avoid a simple truth: You. Are. Lazy. And. Procrastinating.
Here's what I suggest to everyone who gets discouraged by some schlep work: Either find somebody else who will do it, or just get it over with, the sooner you are done with the enablers the sooner you can get to doing the things you love.
For instance: Most business owners find it tedious, boring and utterly painful to do accounting. But accounting is important. They don't say "Well maybe I wasn't meant to be a business owner", no, they hire a bloody accountant.
I think this author's point was more of a person that would find working on a business more interesting but instead is painting right now and hating every single day that they have to put brush to canvas. Some people find certain sets of activities more interesting than others. If I were a professional farmer, I would not enjoy it very much; but there are many people that would. Similarly, there are people that would find developing or testing software to be the most boring job they'd ever seen ... and yet I enjoy it.
I mostly agree with the author's message that we spend far too much time trying to "improve" ourselves through knowledge-seeking, rather than simply doing.
However, simply "doing what you love" ignores the reality that our level of interest and passion waxes and wanes, and sometimes willpower is needed to pull us through those times where we're waiting for our feelings to "catch up" with what our mind knows to be true (that we really do love something). I've been a runner for two decades now and genuinely love the pleasure of an intense puke-worthy workout, but some days running doesn't immediately fall under the category of "doing what I love", until I coax myself to get out there and take a few steps.
He does touch on another great point, which is man's want for eternal significance - that desire to be known long after he is dead. It often does manifest itself as an increasing incline on the treadmill of "achievement".
"man's want for eternal significance - that desire to be known long after he is dead"
That's something I've never understood. What does it matter whether you're known after you're dead? You'd never know anyway since you're dead, and you couldn't derive any benefit from it since you're dead!
People fear being forgotten. That their life had no significance or impact on the world at large. Some people even believe that you live on through the collective memories of those that knew you and those that you influenced.
"... [Cho Chikun] was asked by a Dutch reporter why he loved Go so much. Cho replied 'I hate Go'. He continued saying that it was too tiring and tense for him. This led to his habit of ruffling his hair or constantly moving about." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cho_Chikun
There's a glimpse of this in "The Master of Go". The author indicates there are different kinds of Go players—one kind, like Go Seigen, a light, bold, self-assured type that play every move as if they have perfect knowledge that it's the best one possible; the other being a dark type that always seem ill at ease, uncomfortable, questioning every move they make and pouring over their decisions for hours afterwards, like Minoru Kitani and current prodigy Cho Chikun. Strangely, the book brings up this dichotomy and never really classifies the main character, Honinbo Shusai, into one or the other category, mainly implying that he is somehow glacially slow, relentless and insatiable at the same time. Good book.
Frankly, I don't believe Andre here. You can't be the best in the world at something over a long period of time (8 Grand Slam titles, gold Olympic medal, etc. etc.) hating it the way he asserts in his book.
>What is the point of doing something you are good at if it makes your life worse?
Most people on earth are not defined by their jobs. They work because they have to. So he could be doing it for the money. Or the girls. Or the publicity. Or the lifestyle. Or the travel. He doesn't have to do it for the sport itself.
The "do something you love and you don't have to work a day in your life" is feel-good BS for relatively affluent or generally lucky in their life path people.
In any case, it only applies to "likable" jobs: a pilot, a manager, a doctor, an artist, a chef, a journalist, a teacher, a programmer etc. E.g jobs that a lot of people CAN find interesting and fulfilling.
But most of the world goes round by the non-likable jobs. Maybe some people like those jobs too --but they are bizarro outliers. The vast majority of people doing them do not like them.
E.g I don't think many people "love" flipping burgers at a McDonalds, washing dishes, or working 16 hour shifts in a mine, or cleaning the streets from garbage. But they do because they have to --until something better comes along. And a lot of them have kids and such dependent on them, they cannot leave it all behind and go chase some Hollywood dream or whatever.
I'm surprised people are even responding to this. How much nuance did you expect from a 8-paragraph, 18-sentence blog post titled "Forget self improvement"?
If the author can't be bothered, why should you? I realize 99% of blog posts are half-baked throwaway propositions like this one but that doesn't mean we have to validate them with serious rebuttals.
This is good advice, but I think he's missing a distinction between "finding what you love" and "being good at something". I see a lot of people who seem to feel a ton of pressure to find what they're good at struggling and becoming frustrated.
Find something you like to do, even if you don't feel like you're naturally good at it. Don't worry about being good at it, just make sure it continues to make you happy and eventually you'll realize that you're better than most.
I am so tired of this same idea popping up over and over on the blogosphere. It's complete nonsense, as other commenters have pointed out. But what makes me really angry is that it really devalues the hard work of people who do accomplish amazing things.
"She just won a gold medal in the Olympics? Oh, it wasn't hard for her, she loves to do it. If only I could just find the thing I really love, I could get up off this couch and really make something of myself, you know?"
Really? Personally, I think the more people recognise that hard work can actually be enjoyable, the better. I don't think that recognition devalues the achievement of those who accomplish amazing things.
At an old job, I used to deal with a co-worker who'd complain continuously about the work they had to do. I figured they were trying to, in an odd way, impress us ("Oh, X hates their job - it must be really difficult"). I really do think some people would benefit from recognising that it's possible to achieve great things while also finding some form of enjoyment in the work involved.
And I honestly don't think the Olympian cares what the viewer on the couch thinks!
Running the marathon is the easy part, it's the training that'll get you. The vast majority of runs when I'm training for a marathon are not tranquil, peaceful, or enjoyable. In fact, the runs that matter, the ones that make the difference between a PR and a disappointing race, are the ones that suck the most. Forcing yourself to run when you're tired, burned out, have other things you want to be doing, that is what it means to be a runner. I love to run, but it would still be a hell of a lot easier to go home tonight and veg out in the couch instead of getting out and putting rubber to pavement, and that's a temptation tat hasn't gone away, even after 10 years of running.
Perhaps the lesson isn't "Find what you love", but rather, "Decide what's worth loving and force yourself to grind your teeth and power through no matter what". Summoning the grit to power through and do what you love even when it sucks is what separates the marathoner from the runner that never steps up to the start line.
Forcing yourself to run when you're tired, burned out, have other things you want to be doing, that is what it means to be a runner.
I really respect your approach to running. You sound like someone who likes to get your times down, ya? I bet you're fast. Good on you.
But I just want to throw out there that there are lots of kinds of runners. I, for one, do NOT run when I'm burnt out, or have other things I want to be doing. I run when my body says "mmm... let's go for a run!" I run to get closer in tune with my body, and to get better at listening to myself. And when I'm out on the road or the trail, I don't push myself, I just listen. I get into a groove, and I see how far my body can take me.
I'm never going to be fast, and that's OK with me. That's what being a runner means to me. I think we all have different reasons for why we get out and do stuff.
I remember my Aikido club in Uni. At the beginning of every year, we held welcome tea with flashy demonstration to attract freshmen. The demo always looked so good that we often got ~40, 50 new members easily. By the end of the third months, can you guess how many new members stay? On average, 3, fking 3 out forty something new members. Why is that so? Because the first 3 months are boring. You stretch and learn to roll. That's it. And it sucks, you look like a fish out of water, awkwardly trying not to hurt yourself. But the three who endured all that and stayed, they became permanent members and almost all went on to become black belts few years later.
What I want to say is that loving something is hard work and usually the initial period is the hardest. If you don't grind your teeth to overcome this, you will never find what you love.
It's all very simple. The trick to always succeeding is to take all your failures and make yourself think they're successes. If you can't fail, you've got no fear. Being delusional or mentally/emotionally unstable helps.
This entire exchange read almost exactly like an exchange from the comic Dilbert, to the point that I still have a bit of a suspicion that it might be.
Let's say I'm lazy. Sure, maybe I "haven't found what I'm meant to do" quite yet, but if I'm lazy AND armed with the "I don't want to do it - the universe is telling me not to!" rhetoric then how will I ever find something I love? You have to be willing to invest effort into things that hold your interest, but until you've done something for a while the aspect that holds your interest is the result and not the process. For example, I didn't get into programming because I loved programming. I got into programming because I didn't know what to do and I thought making video games would be cool. After a couple of semesters (yes, this was late in my life >.<) I realized that hey, programming is actually quite enjoyable! Now I try to invest in opportunities for self-improvement in the programming space (among others).
"Self-help books and workshops arm us with ways to trick ourselves into doing things we perhaps should, but generally don’t want, to do."
That seems like quite a generalization. I get that it's hard to create a catchy title without making some form of generalization, but... really? I guess the author is talking about workshops like "How to write and sell your awesome novel in 7 days", but what comes to my mind when hearing "self-improvement" is something like the 7 habits. I hardly saw the latter as an attempt to trick myself into doing things I don't want to do.
Research heavily contradicts the idea of finding something you love, then getting good at it-it's usually the other way around (though it's a bit more complex than just that). Cal Newport recently released a book around this topic: http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-ebook/dp/B0076DD...
This article has a good point - better than you'd think from reading the quotes in the comments.
It's rather easy to fool yourself into thinking that you want to do what you're currently doing, or the thing that you've already sunk time and effort into. It's rather easy to fool yourself into thinking you want to be a great writer, when actually you just want to have people respect you.
A bit of time spend honestly examining whether there's a path you'd rather your life was taking is rarely wasted - not least because if you conclude that you're on the right track, it's a good way to quiet nagging doubts.
OTOH, as dkarl says, we don't always feel the same way about what we love, either, and that's worth remembering too.
I agree with a bit here (doing what you love) and disagree with a whole lot more. I'll just make two quick points.
First, self improvement is a broad area that covers many topics. How can the author discuss one topic, make a vague claim, and then dismiss the whole area?
Second, things in life are rarely black and white. Saying 'forget self improvement' is like saying 'self improvement is the most important thing in the world'. Both stick to one end of the spectrum. What is right probably lies somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, and changes depending upon the person.
One thing this article doesn't seem to address is that some things take some work before you can appreciate them. Most runners don't remember how hard it was when they were first starting out - how much it hurt and how little encouragement there was, and no runner's high. Same thing goes for writing: I doubt anyone reading this can remember how hard it was to learn how to even read. Some things are an "acquired" taste and take more than simply trying them out once before making a decision one way or the other.
"On the other hand, you might consider simply finding what you love, and letting the rest take care of itself."
damned if this isn't the mantra of pretty much every self-help/self-improvement guru out there. And in writing this, the article basically goes back on its own premise.
I disagree. There's usually a difference between the easy and unrewarding thing that I love and the thing which requires real effort. Sometimes I have to force myself to write some code instead of play a video game. This is just the way it is for me. YMMV.
I kind of read it as this: in light of all the self-help "do the work" type discourse that's been flying around the internet/HN, maybe think about how much time you're spending reading that sort of stuff. What does that tell you?
I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit. Enjoying something usually comes after hating it. Did you love beer the first time you tried it? Coffee? Sushi? Programming? etc...
Yep, this works great for me. Because I'm never bored by what I love, never discouraged by what I love, never heedlessly irresponsible about what I love, never sick of what I love, never resentful of what I love, never scared to death of what I love. I'm never distracted by what I don't love, never seduced by what I don't love, never fooled by what I don't love. I'm never foolish in my love, never shallow in my love, never fickle in my love, never maturing or changing in my love. And of course I never, ever love more than one thing at a time.