How to Do What You Love

If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige.

The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. 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.

One has to make a living, and it's hard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes to that 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.

if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later.

When all the adults claim to like what they do, you can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people." They've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what t... See more

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.

Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically... See more

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.

conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know?