Paul Graham’s Excellent Essay ‘How to Do What You Love’

January 31st 2006 at 3:10 pm

How to Do What You Love:

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was 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 do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn’t– for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.

This is the kind of thing that I live breath and eat in the back of my skull but need to put into written form more often.

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