7 ms·

What a simplistic way to put things in. You need to do a lot of things you do not love before you have the skills, the vision and the attitude to actually do

What a simplistic way to put things in. You need to do a lot of things you do not love before you have the skills, the vision and the attitude to actually do what you love, and accomplish the goals you want to accomplish... As a millennial, I think this kind of attitude is the problem with our generation. I mean both simplifying things into instagram-quote-sized senteces like "always do what you love" and also convincing ourselves that if you are not doing what you love, you should be doing something else. Maybe we should focus more on how to be able to still motivate one-self to do things you do not love so much, but that are necessary. Often, things that I really do not want to do are necessary for me to achieve things I really want to achieve. Articles like this, and the beliefs they seems to want to propagate, are probably a big source of depression and failure in young adults (and not so young adults) these days.

paulryanrogers 7y ago
For my side projects I try to start with things I can't stop thinking about, but with a low bar of daily/weekly effort. It's that low bar that helps with the grind. Especially when the next shiny thing comes along, or other priorities prevent a 'real' effort. Some days I can put in hours. Though in practice I have too much else going on. So the baby steps help maintain momentum without feeling like I can't finish anything. It also helps to look back at milestones that were satisfying to me even if no one else noticed. And to remind myself it's OK to walk away if my original goals proved too far out of reach.
- Dansvidania 7y ago
  I tend to have a similar approach and experience to yours. My point is that to get me where I am today, so that I can even put a finger on WHAT it is that I love, i had to go through many hours of doing things I did not love.
freehunter 7y ago
Agreed. I see a lot here and on Reddit, any time something comes up that the person doesn’t want or like, the suggestion is to quit and move on. Work problems? Quit and find another job. Boyfriend problems? Leave and start a new relationship. Landlord troubles? Move out and find another place to live. My sister in law went to college and started working in the job she wanted at the company she wanted but at a location she didn’t want. She couldn’t get a transfer to the more prestigious location within her first year of working so she said it was a waste of her time and everyone was holding her career back. She’s now stocking shelves at a grocery store at 29 years old. You gotta shovel a lot of shit before you get to the top, but that stuff isn’t Instagram friendly so it’s not glorified in the media.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  You’re just taking the opposite extreme. Yes, you have to shovel a lot of shit to get to the top. But you also have to dump a lot of people (and jobs, and interests, and homes) to find people and places that really complement you. Maximum progress is made by people who can both trust their inner voice, AND can grit their teeth. The really hard part is using the former to know when to apply the latter. The only thing I wish someone had told me is you only get one chance to start those “we were here together from the start” relationships. So before you set off on that big search, really think about whether there is something or someone around you that you might want to know in the end, alpha to omega, and stay in touch with those people or places. Because if you disappear for 10 years, you won’t be able to go back.
  - paulryanrogers 7y ago
    > Maximum progress is made by people who can both trust their inner voice, AND can grit their teeth. Part of this is having an educated inner voice. IME one does best with the intersection of ones passions and demand for those skills. My younger inner voice craved to make videogames. Until gritting through the process a few years and learning about industry norms re-educated that voice. University also helped me discover some other passions that paid better and had better work-life balance, all with less risk. (Albeit none of the prestige.)
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  When you start accepting all the shit you don't like in your life,you just end up getting more and more of it.Most things,if you don't like them,are almost impossible to fix without some drastic measures. Having said this, things need to be done in a reasonable way with some sort of planning. If the job is shit because there are 10 assholes working in your department, you can't just remove them to make it better. You can, however make sure there's another job lined up before telling them what you think about them and etc.
rtkaratekid 7y ago
I agree with you and I can’t say for sure but I think it’s even worse in the next generation as well. I’ve talked with/tried to mentor more than a few but usually one gets fed up with the other because of this very issue. I knew a girl who wanted to be an astrophysicist. She could’ve done it too. But she started rock climbing (I was mentoring her), and eventually gave up college so she could be a climbing guide because “it’s what I love.” I tried my best to remind her that she also loves physics and can participate in BOTH if she pursued physics. But now she’s working to be a guide somewhere. I’m not saying being a guide is a bad thing, but I know more than a handful of people who’ve guided most their life and wish they had just put in the time to get skills to get jobs that pay more and have more longevity. This anecdote is just one example (there are more) of my experience with the next generation that I haven’t quite seen in millennials. However, I’m not the most social of person, and I’m rarely on social media other than here so I could definitely be wrong.
- LoveMortuus 7y ago
  Off-topic, but the following had me thinking: >"However, I’m not the most social of person, and I’m rarely on social media other than here so I could definitely be wrong." Do you people of the HN consider HN as a social media? I personally don't, to me it feels more like an aggregator of knowledge and useful opinions. The way I read HN is that I first look at the comments, and then based on that decided if I'll read the article. I understand why social medias exist, but to me they feel useless and quite often they have many serious negative effects. None of which are present here on HN.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    > Do you people of the HN consider HN as a social media? Yes, definitely. At times when I'm really busy, I'll even occasionally blacklist it to avoid distractions. The feelings HN gives me are very similar to the feelings that Reddit/Facebook would give me. I think that platforms like Reddit have additional downsides that HN has managed to avoid, but HN is a social forum.
  - rtkaratekid 7y ago
LoveMortuus 7y ago
The following quote helped me a lot: "The professional knows that the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, sets in motion a mysterious process that produces inspiration. The amateur waits for inspiration, the professional knows that it will come after he starts. The professional therefore acts in the face of fear, when the amateur fears a big creative endeavor he waits for the fear to disappear, the professional knows this will never happen and starts anyway." Basically, what it says is that you'll never feel like doing something that you don't want to do, and that's exactly the reason why you should just start doing and get it over with. That's my opinion
- draw_down 7y ago
  Well, there is nothing wrong with being an amateur. Recall that the root word means “love”. And I don’t think it’s necessary to hold a professional in higher regard than an amateur, either. Though you’d almost certainly pay the professional more money.
- glouwbug 7y ago
  Oh boy, I enjoyed that. Everytime I sit down to face a nasty problem I get a little sick, but as I start working a flow slowly starts to build, and before I know it the Starbucks I'm at is empty. I wouldn't consider myself a professional, but I know how to beat my own inner dialogues it seems
  - nukst 7y ago
    I can relate to that. Sometimes I'm dealing with a problem that is really complicated and I tried to solve several times without success... I can feel the resistance in bed, when having breakfast and before I sit on my chair and fire up vim to go to that very block of code. It also tears me apart to go to work and leave it unsolved. Resistance drags us down really, really bad. It makes it difficult to go back to working on a problem. Not a professional here, but boy this is the point where amateurs quit and that's exactly where I feel the urge to quit too... but somehow I just don't. That's where it clicks "I have to find a solution to this somehow!". Maybe it's a bit of ego but I don't drop something I started[1] and when I finally find the solution, it's almost orgasmic. I feel like I'm the biggest man in the world, and that's my drive to keep moving[2]. -- [1] Unless it becomes crucially destructive and is clearly harming people, but I guess you get what I mean. [2] I don't want to make it over minimalist because there's a lot more to it, but I'm referring to this specific motivation building block (I believe motivation isn't just an isolated urge to accomplish thing, but rather several `blocks` that together compose this `will` to do things).
danShumway 7y ago
I'm not sure I disagree, but I would like to add a caveat. > You need to do a lot of things you do not love before you have the skills, the vision and the attitude to actually do what you love, and accomplish the goals you want to accomplish. It will be very difficult for you to get the skills/attitude/vision you need if you don't have a clear vision of where you're going and why you're getting them -- and if you're struggling with motivation, asking yourself if you really care about the end goal can be valuable. As an example: I've been working on the same game for almost 2 years. There's a lot of boring stuff that goes into that, there are a lot of just multi-hour, multi-day coding sessions that are not spent on cool gameplay stuff, they're spent on optimizations and infrastructure, and signing up for conferences and writing blog posts. Stuff I don't really enjoy. I've spent 8 hour weekends just working on this, to the point that I struggled with insomnia at some points. And there's some stuff there that's really not fun. BUT, every day I get up I'm still excited about the game. Every day I get up I desperately want the game to be completed. So it's not actually all that hard to work on boring, mundane things that will get me to that goal. I know, with 100% certainty, baring some kind of horrible accident I will finish this game -- because even with all of the mundane and difficult work, finishing the game is easier for me mentally than living in a world where I have not finished the game. On the other hand, there are side projects I've tried to invest a lot of time into and when it got to the boring stuff, I couldn't be motivated to work on it. And I spent a long time trying to figure out what the difference was and why I couldn't pull off the same 8-hour practice sessions before realizing that I did not care enough about the final goals of these projects to put in the work. I am not a very good piano player. I'd like to be, but I don't care enough to put in the time and practice. I'd like to be the type of person who's an excellent piano player, but I don't actually love playing the piano. If you really, genuinely love something, you will be able to put in the time on the boring stuff. If you do not genuinely love something, putting in the time on the boring stuff will be exponentially harder. So while being able to preserver is important, I also advise people who are trying to do hard things to first find hard things that they really, really care about. Some motivational problems do come down to perspective, not character. I do believe that some people have problems with maintenance and work. But I also believe that sometimes people who can't preserver are in that state specifically because they have convinced themselves that they love something that they don't actually care about. If I wasn't working on my current game, I would go insane. Motivation does not factor into it; I just do whatever needs to happen next regardless of whatever it is, regardless of whether or not it's fun, because that's what needs to happen next and I emotionally need the game to be finished eventually. To me, that's what working on something that I love means: caring about something so much that you're willing to do hard or mundane things. If I'm going to spend 3-5 years on game, maybe even longer, I need to know up-front that I care about it on that level. So one of my tests when I start working on a game is exactly what the article asks: "can I stop thinking about this?" If I can stop thinking about it, then I probably am not going to have the motivation 4 years from now to spend a bunch of consecutive weekends debugging stack traces.
Swizec 7y ago
Focus on things/projects you can’t stop thinking about, not tasks. Tasks are just the steps you take. Of course you won’t love every task, some might even be downright terrible, but if you can’t stop thinking of the overall goal, then keep going. But if you find yourself not caring about the end goal, time to reconsider.
caseymarquis 7y ago
I'd like to water that generalization down a bit: Unrealistic expectations and following/giving bad career advice are multigenerational human problems that have likely plagued humanity for millenia. I'd wager this problem began in earnest the moment humans started farming. Generational division is also nothing new. Please try to respond to the bad advice, and not provide generational troll bait. I'm not saying this with any authority, I just want to keep the level of discourse on HN from devolving. Please don't respond to this if you disagree, just give it a down vote so the discussion stays on topic.
- BossingAround 7y ago
  > Generational division is also nothing new. This is a person of generation X talking about a problem of the same generation (i.e. X). > Please don't respond to this if you disagree, just give it a down vote so the discussion stays on topic. Down vote trolls, not people you disagree with. Down voting for disagreeing leads to negative experience with the whole discussion platform.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    >Down vote trolls, not people you disagree with. Down voting for disagreeing leads to negative experience with the whole discussion platform. Using downvotes to disagree has always been ok (and encouraged) on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      That's a thread from 12 years ago. HN is obviously a different community now than it was then. One problem on HN is how quickly a discussion item will fade or disappear due to excessive downvotes. And for example, unlike Reddit, you can't downvote items on the main page, just comments. I'd be curious to hear an updated discussion on this, but I've seen salient points being downvoted into obscurity simply because it accrued a lot of downvotes, and I'll find myself upvoting posts I disagree with just to keep the post alive.
jvanderbot 7y ago
I regularly get obsessed with making video games and writing sci fi. I am regularly allowed to pursue these precisely because I work a flexible-schedule job that provides for my family and gives us the freedom to dream and live in peace together. Even if that job does not provide the flash-in-the-pan inspiration and passion all the time, it provides a warm glow that will last.
throwsprtsdy 7y ago
To be precise, the author isn't simply saying "Do what you love", he's saying "Do what you love in your leisure time". I think that's an important distinction. He's not giving diligent work short shrift, just trying to exclude drudgery from leisure time specifically.
- lisper 7y ago
  And he's not saying "do what you love" either. The word "love" appears only once in the article, and that is inside a quote. He's saying "do what you can't stop thinking about." That is not the same as "do what you love."
  - dcsan 7y ago
    It's maybe hard to know "what you love" but it's easy to know what keeps floating back up in the top of your brain, even if rational you says it might not be the best use of your time. Then again if "Dance Monkey" won't stop playing in your head... doesn't mean it's great art.
- Dansvidania 7y ago
  that's a fair point, but I still think the general sentiment is disagreeable. as many other commenters wrote, if one is just supposed to wait to get inspired, wait to have something to love and be unable to stop thinking about, a wide majority of people will wait forever. I have a much better time when I try something new, give it everything I got, and try to learn everything I can from it, even when I do not like it. This includes hobbies. That being said, I wont force myself into doing something I hate. It's just the absolute approach of the article that I have a problem with.
asdfman123 7y ago
This isn't advice so much as one person advertising his own professional status. But this article hits upon a good point: > To the experts, what looks like hard work from the outside, is play from the inside. People who are obsessed with "motivation" point to people like Elon Musk who work extreme hours, and recommend others do the same. But they have cause and effect backwards. You start working insane hours when your own personal talents align with society's rewards, and you are blessed/cursed with ambition that demands to be satisfied. Elon Musk didn't start off saying, "I'd rather spend time with my family and play video games, but I'm going to start working 80 hours a week to get rich." No, it started with a spark within him. How did it get there? I can't say. They say talent is rare, but I don't think that's true. I believe what is rare is the intersection of talent and ambition. I've been on both sides of this -- I've been very ambitious, and I've been not very ambitious in different parts of my life. It's hard to work your butt off when you don't feel particularly ambitious, and it's hard not to when you do.
dorkwood 7y ago
> You need to do a lot of things you do not love before you have the skills, the vision and the attitude to actually do what you love, and accomplish the goals you want to accomplish... I disagree with this, and I'm curious what long term goals you might have that aren't aligned with whatever it is you're doing now. How do you suggest a millennial choose a "long term goal they really want to achieve" in the first place? In my experience, goals grow out of a person performing an activity and having a desire to master it, but you appear to be suggesting that a person start with a goal in mind and then work on doing things they aren't motivated to do with the hope that the goal will be worth it in the end. That, to me, sounds like a recipe for depression. Now, I'm not suggesting one should avoid doing anything difficult. Learning hard things is difficult, after all. The problem, in my experience, is that people are initially curious about something, but then tell themselves they can't do it. That they don't have the brain for it, or whatever it is. They're curious about something and so they make an attempt at it, but they don't do a very good job, and so they say to themselves that they aren't good enough and then they quit. This, to me, is where resilience is necessary. This is where it's necessary to do something even though it's hard. But resilience to do something you don't even want to do in the first place because you've set some arbitrary far-off goal for yourself? That seems like a gamble to me.
- Dansvidania 7y ago
  You make a fair point, but I think we are looking at the article in different ways. At any rate, you stated yourself that goals come form performing something and getting the desire to master it. Would you say that such a desire sprouts in everyone the very first time they try something? I doubt it. It sounds like "love at first sight" and I believe it is very rare, to say the least. I am saying that, even to get to the point where you know what you love, you need to "push through" a lot of difficult moment that will make you think you hate that very "thing" that you might -through persevering- find out you love.
  - dorkwood 7y ago
    Yes, I agree with you on these points. I think what we both agree on is that "find your passion" is not good advice by itself. The mistake people make is thinking that their "passion" will be something they have a natural aptitude for, and that once they stumble across it, it will feel natural and fun and they'll never find it hard or challenging. Most of the time, it does not work this way. My reading of the article is that rather than seek out activites that are lucrative we should instead follow the thing that make us curious -- pay attention to the little voice in the back of our minds that says "I wonder if I could make something like that", and then go make that thing. When you do that, in my experience, you find yourself energised by your hobbies rather than depleted. And if you do your work in a place where other people can see, you start to meet people who are curious about the same things you're curious about, and that's a truly wonderful thing.
joeberon 7y ago
I definitely think that attitudes like "only do what you love/is automatically motivating" is a huge source of imposter syndrome, depression, and anxiety in me as a grad student
- Dansvidania 7y ago
  Thank you. I have had the same exact problem with imposter syndrome and innumerable motivation issues with things I felt like I loved (and still love). The "do what you love" narrative that our generation has been fed, I am not sure how and by whom, caused me to doubt my decisions much more than I think it's healthy, just because "I am not loving this, is this what I should be doing?". This applied to my university career, to my profession, to the jobs I took. Luckily through lots of work on myself I am able now to look at these feelings with more lucidity and to work through them. Thanks for sharing.
deleted 7y ago
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zelly 7y ago
Agreed. The focus on the interior world (feeling) versus the exterior world (results) is one of the reasons recent generations have not innovated
hinkley 7y ago
A lot of my friends are children or grandchildren of Boomers and have been spending a lot of time lately asking and not answering the question of how they got like this, and so I’ve been trying to answer that for myself. Below is my barely half baked theory as it stands today. After the War, there were kids everywhere. So, so many kids. They had to open schools. Whole industries about kids exploded into existence. But as one of those kids? There must have been ten other people wanting to be what you wanted to be and half of them were better at it than you could hope to be. That, my theory states, fucked them up badly. When they had kids, they pressured us into being unique snowflakes, to be exceptional. It was too goddamned much pressure, and that fucked us up. So the next cohort started congratulating their kids for doing absolutely nothing at all. Which fucked them up worst of all. So, like, we are very sorry, but we were just trying not to pass our neuroses down and ended up giving you different ones. Same as our parents.
- Dansvidania 7y ago
  This is an interesting take on the sociological change. I definitely think the pressure was one of the top factors in fucking us up :D
ehnto 7y ago
There are many issues that go into making the stereotypical Millennial psyche. But I think an issue overlooked is the loss of context for your own life in your own community, which in my opinion has been brought on by the internet and media machines, overwork, and with the individualist movement pointing the spotlight squarely on yourself. We have disconnected and disenfranchised a generation from the community, then told them to compare themselves on the global stage of highest achievers, while their local avenues for community support get diluted into commercial ventures and shallow social media connections. Couple that with the commercializing of pretty much everything that the sun bares down upon, such that nothing around you has much authenticity, which leads you to have bizarre situations like humans who think brands are their friends, and there being no non-commercial spaces to meet new people at. It's no wonder there are so many confused Millennials who don't really get how to fit into society anymore.
pier25 7y ago
"Do what you love" at face value doesn't make much sense, but IMO that's the wrong way to look at it. "Doing" is not only the mere act of doing something but also the time you invest towards a goal.
sonicxxg 7y ago
Life is supposed to be simple, people overcomplicate things.
m463 7y ago
On the other hand, this idea is the fastest way to level up your "tech tree" in one specialization.

paulryanrogers 7y ago

For my side projects I try to start with things I can't stop thinking about, but with a low bar of daily/weekly effort. It's that low bar that helps with the grind. Especially when the next shiny thing comes along, or other priorities prevent a 'real' effort. Some days I can put in hours. Though in practice I have too much else going on. So the baby steps help maintain momentum without feeling like I can't finish anything. It also helps to look back at milestones that were satisfying to me even if no one else noticed. And to remind myself it's OK to walk away if my original goals proved too far out of reach.

Dansvidania 7y ago
I tend to have a similar approach and experience to yours. My point is that to get me where I am today, so that I can even put a finger on WHAT it is that I love, i had to go through many hours of doing things I did not love.

freehunter 7y ago

Agreed. I see a lot here and on Reddit, any time something comes up that the person doesn’t want or like, the suggestion is to quit and move on. Work problems? Quit and find another job. Boyfriend problems? Leave and start a new relationship. Landlord troubles? Move out and find another place to live. My sister in law went to college and started working in the job she wanted at the company she wanted but at a location she didn’t want. She couldn’t get a transfer to the more prestigious location within her first year of working so she said it was a waste of her time and everyone was holding her career back. She’s now stocking shelves at a grocery store at 29 years old. You gotta shovel a lot of shit before you get to the top, but that stuff isn’t Instagram friendly so it’s not glorified in the media.

erikpukinskis 7y ago
You’re just taking the opposite extreme. Yes, you have to shovel a lot of shit to get to the top. But you also have to dump a lot of people (and jobs, and interests, and homes) to find people and places that really complement you. Maximum progress is made by people who can both trust their inner voice, AND can grit their teeth. The really hard part is using the former to know when to apply the latter. The only thing I wish someone had told me is you only get one chance to start those “we were here together from the start” relationships. So before you set off on that big search, really think about whether there is something or someone around you that you might want to know in the end, alpha to omega, and stay in touch with those people or places. Because if you disappear for 10 years, you won’t be able to go back.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  > Maximum progress is made by people who can both trust their inner voice, AND can grit their teeth. Part of this is having an educated inner voice. IME one does best with the intersection of ones passions and demand for those skills. My younger inner voice craved to make videogames. Until gritting through the process a few years and learning about industry norms re-educated that voice. University also helped me discover some other passions that paid better and had better work-life balance, all with less risk. (Albeit none of the prestige.)
cosmodisk 7y ago
When you start accepting all the shit you don't like in your life,you just end up getting more and more of it.Most things,if you don't like them,are almost impossible to fix without some drastic measures. Having said this, things need to be done in a reasonable way with some sort of planning. If the job is shit because there are 10 assholes working in your department, you can't just remove them to make it better. You can, however make sure there's another job lined up before telling them what you think about them and etc.

rtkaratekid 7y ago

I agree with you and I can’t say for sure but I think it’s even worse in the next generation as well. I’ve talked with/tried to mentor more than a few but usually one gets fed up with the other because of this very issue. I knew a girl who wanted to be an astrophysicist. She could’ve done it too. But she started rock climbing (I was mentoring her), and eventually gave up college so she could be a climbing guide because “it’s what I love.” I tried my best to remind her that she also loves physics and can participate in BOTH if she pursued physics. But now she’s working to be a guide somewhere. I’m not saying being a guide is a bad thing, but I know more than a handful of people who’ve guided most their life and wish they had just put in the time to get skills to get jobs that pay more and have more longevity. This anecdote is just one example (there are more) of my experience with the next generation that I haven’t quite seen in millennials. However, I’m not the most social of person, and I’m rarely on social media other than here so I could definitely be wrong.

LoveMortuus 7y ago
Off-topic, but the following had me thinking: >"However, I’m not the most social of person, and I’m rarely on social media other than here so I could definitely be wrong." Do you people of the HN consider HN as a social media? I personally don't, to me it feels more like an aggregator of knowledge and useful opinions. The way I read HN is that I first look at the comments, and then based on that decided if I'll read the article. I understand why social medias exist, but to me they feel useless and quite often they have many serious negative effects. None of which are present here on HN.
- danShumway 7y ago
  > Do you people of the HN consider HN as a social media? Yes, definitely. At times when I'm really busy, I'll even occasionally blacklist it to avoid distractions. The feelings HN gives me are very similar to the feelings that Reddit/Facebook would give me. I think that platforms like Reddit have additional downsides that HN has managed to avoid, but HN is a social forum.
- rtkaratekid 7y ago

LoveMortuus 7y ago

The following quote helped me a lot: "The professional knows that the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, sets in motion a mysterious process that produces inspiration. The amateur waits for inspiration, the professional knows that it will come after he starts. The professional therefore acts in the face of fear, when the amateur fears a big creative endeavor he waits for the fear to disappear, the professional knows this will never happen and starts anyway." Basically, what it says is that you'll never feel like doing something that you don't want to do, and that's exactly the reason why you should just start doing and get it over with. That's my opinion

draw_down 7y ago
Well, there is nothing wrong with being an amateur. Recall that the root word means “love”. And I don’t think it’s necessary to hold a professional in higher regard than an amateur, either. Though you’d almost certainly pay the professional more money.
glouwbug 7y ago
Oh boy, I enjoyed that. Everytime I sit down to face a nasty problem I get a little sick, but as I start working a flow slowly starts to build, and before I know it the Starbucks I'm at is empty. I wouldn't consider myself a professional, but I know how to beat my own inner dialogues it seems
- nukst 7y ago
  I can relate to that. Sometimes I'm dealing with a problem that is really complicated and I tried to solve several times without success... I can feel the resistance in bed, when having breakfast and before I sit on my chair and fire up vim to go to that very block of code. It also tears me apart to go to work and leave it unsolved. Resistance drags us down really, really bad. It makes it difficult to go back to working on a problem. Not a professional here, but boy this is the point where amateurs quit and that's exactly where I feel the urge to quit too... but somehow I just don't. That's where it clicks "I have to find a solution to this somehow!". Maybe it's a bit of ego but I don't drop something I started[1] and when I finally find the solution, it's almost orgasmic. I feel like I'm the biggest man in the world, and that's my drive to keep moving[2]. -- [1] Unless it becomes crucially destructive and is clearly harming people, but I guess you get what I mean. [2] I don't want to make it over minimalist because there's a lot more to it, but I'm referring to this specific motivation building block (I believe motivation isn't just an isolated urge to accomplish thing, but rather several `blocks` that together compose this `will` to do things).

danShumway 7y ago

I'm not sure I disagree, but I would like to add a caveat. > You need to do a lot of things you do not love before you have the skills, the vision and the attitude to actually do what you love, and accomplish the goals you want to accomplish. It will be very difficult for you to get the skills/attitude/vision you need if you don't have a clear vision of where you're going and why you're getting them -- and if you're struggling with motivation, asking yourself if you really care about the end goal can be valuable. As an example: I've been working on the same game for almost 2 years. There's a lot of boring stuff that goes into that, there are a lot of just multi-hour, multi-day coding sessions that are not spent on cool gameplay stuff, they're spent on optimizations and infrastructure, and signing up for conferences and writing blog posts. Stuff I don't really enjoy. I've spent 8 hour weekends just working on this, to the point that I struggled with insomnia at some points. And there's some stuff there that's really not fun. BUT, every day I get up I'm still excited about the game. Every day I get up I desperately want the game to be completed. So it's not actually all that hard to work on boring, mundane things that will get me to that goal. I know, with 100% certainty, baring some kind of horrible accident I will finish this game -- because even with all of the mundane and difficult work, finishing the game is easier for me mentally than living in a world where I have not finished the game. On the other hand, there are side projects I've tried to invest a lot of time into and when it got to the boring stuff, I couldn't be motivated to work on it. And I spent a long time trying to figure out what the difference was and why I couldn't pull off the same 8-hour practice sessions before realizing that I did not care enough about the final goals of these projects to put in the work. I am not a very good piano player. I'd like to be, but I don't care enough to put in the time and practice. I'd like to be the type of person who's an excellent piano player, but I don't actually love playing the piano. If you really, genuinely love something, you will be able to put in the time on the boring stuff. If you do not genuinely love something, putting in the time on the boring stuff will be exponentially harder. So while being able to preserver is important, I also advise people who are trying to do hard things to first find hard things that they really, really care about. Some motivational problems do come down to perspective, not character. I do believe that some people have problems with maintenance and work. But I also believe that sometimes people who can't preserver are in that state specifically because they have convinced themselves that they love something that they don't actually care about. If I wasn't working on my current game, I would go insane. Motivation does not factor into it; I just do whatever needs to happen next regardless of whatever it is, regardless of whether or not it's fun, because that's what needs to happen next and I emotionally need the game to be finished eventually. To me, that's what working on something that I love means: caring about something so much that you're willing to do hard or mundane things. If I'm going to spend 3-5 years on game, maybe even longer, I need to know up-front that I care about it on that level. So one of my tests when I start working on a game is exactly what the article asks: "can I stop thinking about this?" If I can stop thinking about it, then I probably am not going to have the motivation 4 years from now to spend a bunch of consecutive weekends debugging stack traces.

Swizec 7y ago

Focus on things/projects you can’t stop thinking about, not tasks. Tasks are just the steps you take. Of course you won’t love every task, some might even be downright terrible, but if you can’t stop thinking of the overall goal, then keep going. But if you find yourself not caring about the end goal, time to reconsider.

caseymarquis 7y ago

I'd like to water that generalization down a bit: Unrealistic expectations and following/giving bad career advice are multigenerational human problems that have likely plagued humanity for millenia. I'd wager this problem began in earnest the moment humans started farming. Generational division is also nothing new. Please try to respond to the bad advice, and not provide generational troll bait. I'm not saying this with any authority, I just want to keep the level of discourse on HN from devolving. Please don't respond to this if you disagree, just give it a down vote so the discussion stays on topic.

BossingAround 7y ago
> Generational division is also nothing new. This is a person of generation X talking about a problem of the same generation (i.e. X). > Please don't respond to this if you disagree, just give it a down vote so the discussion stays on topic. Down vote trolls, not people you disagree with. Down voting for disagreeing leads to negative experience with the whole discussion platform.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  >Down vote trolls, not people you disagree with. Down voting for disagreeing leads to negative experience with the whole discussion platform. Using downvotes to disagree has always been ok (and encouraged) on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    That's a thread from 12 years ago. HN is obviously a different community now than it was then. One problem on HN is how quickly a discussion item will fade or disappear due to excessive downvotes. And for example, unlike Reddit, you can't downvote items on the main page, just comments. I'd be curious to hear an updated discussion on this, but I've seen salient points being downvoted into obscurity simply because it accrued a lot of downvotes, and I'll find myself upvoting posts I disagree with just to keep the post alive.

jvanderbot 7y ago

I regularly get obsessed with making video games and writing sci fi. I am regularly allowed to pursue these precisely because I work a flexible-schedule job that provides for my family and gives us the freedom to dream and live in peace together. Even if that job does not provide the flash-in-the-pan inspiration and passion all the time, it provides a warm glow that will last.

throwsprtsdy 7y ago

To be precise, the author isn't simply saying "Do what you love", he's saying "Do what you love in your leisure time". I think that's an important distinction. He's not giving diligent work short shrift, just trying to exclude drudgery from leisure time specifically.

lisper 7y ago
And he's not saying "do what you love" either. The word "love" appears only once in the article, and that is inside a quote. He's saying "do what you can't stop thinking about." That is not the same as "do what you love."
- dcsan 7y ago
  It's maybe hard to know "what you love" but it's easy to know what keeps floating back up in the top of your brain, even if rational you says it might not be the best use of your time. Then again if "Dance Monkey" won't stop playing in your head... doesn't mean it's great art.
Dansvidania 7y ago
that's a fair point, but I still think the general sentiment is disagreeable. as many other commenters wrote, if one is just supposed to wait to get inspired, wait to have something to love and be unable to stop thinking about, a wide majority of people will wait forever. I have a much better time when I try something new, give it everything I got, and try to learn everything I can from it, even when I do not like it. This includes hobbies. That being said, I wont force myself into doing something I hate. It's just the absolute approach of the article that I have a problem with.

asdfman123 7y ago

This isn't advice so much as one person advertising his own professional status. But this article hits upon a good point: > To the experts, what looks like hard work from the outside, is play from the inside. People who are obsessed with "motivation" point to people like Elon Musk who work extreme hours, and recommend others do the same. But they have cause and effect backwards. You start working insane hours when your own personal talents align with society's rewards, and you are blessed/cursed with ambition that demands to be satisfied. Elon Musk didn't start off saying, "I'd rather spend time with my family and play video games, but I'm going to start working 80 hours a week to get rich." No, it started with a spark within him. How did it get there? I can't say. They say talent is rare, but I don't think that's true. I believe what is rare is the intersection of talent and ambition. I've been on both sides of this -- I've been very ambitious, and I've been not very ambitious in different parts of my life. It's hard to work your butt off when you don't feel particularly ambitious, and it's hard not to when you do.

dorkwood 7y ago

> You need to do a lot of things you do not love before you have the skills, the vision and the attitude to actually do what you love, and accomplish the goals you want to accomplish... I disagree with this, and I'm curious what long term goals you might have that aren't aligned with whatever it is you're doing now. How do you suggest a millennial choose a "long term goal they really want to achieve" in the first place? In my experience, goals grow out of a person performing an activity and having a desire to master it, but you appear to be suggesting that a person start with a goal in mind and then work on doing things they aren't motivated to do with the hope that the goal will be worth it in the end. That, to me, sounds like a recipe for depression. Now, I'm not suggesting one should avoid doing anything difficult. Learning hard things is difficult, after all. The problem, in my experience, is that people are initially curious about something, but then tell themselves they can't do it. That they don't have the brain for it, or whatever it is. They're curious about something and so they make an attempt at it, but they don't do a very good job, and so they say to themselves that they aren't good enough and then they quit. This, to me, is where resilience is necessary. This is where it's necessary to do something even though it's hard. But resilience to do something you don't even want to do in the first place because you've set some arbitrary far-off goal for yourself? That seems like a gamble to me.

Dansvidania 7y ago
You make a fair point, but I think we are looking at the article in different ways. At any rate, you stated yourself that goals come form performing something and getting the desire to master it. Would you say that such a desire sprouts in everyone the very first time they try something? I doubt it. It sounds like "love at first sight" and I believe it is very rare, to say the least. I am saying that, even to get to the point where you know what you love, you need to "push through" a lot of difficult moment that will make you think you hate that very "thing" that you might -through persevering- find out you love.
- dorkwood 7y ago
  Yes, I agree with you on these points. I think what we both agree on is that "find your passion" is not good advice by itself. The mistake people make is thinking that their "passion" will be something they have a natural aptitude for, and that once they stumble across it, it will feel natural and fun and they'll never find it hard or challenging. Most of the time, it does not work this way. My reading of the article is that rather than seek out activites that are lucrative we should instead follow the thing that make us curious -- pay attention to the little voice in the back of our minds that says "I wonder if I could make something like that", and then go make that thing. When you do that, in my experience, you find yourself energised by your hobbies rather than depleted. And if you do your work in a place where other people can see, you start to meet people who are curious about the same things you're curious about, and that's a truly wonderful thing.

joeberon 7y ago

I definitely think that attitudes like "only do what you love/is automatically motivating" is a huge source of imposter syndrome, depression, and anxiety in me as a grad student

Dansvidania 7y ago
Thank you. I have had the same exact problem with imposter syndrome and innumerable motivation issues with things I felt like I loved (and still love). The "do what you love" narrative that our generation has been fed, I am not sure how and by whom, caused me to doubt my decisions much more than I think it's healthy, just because "I am not loving this, is this what I should be doing?". This applied to my university career, to my profession, to the jobs I took. Luckily through lots of work on myself I am able now to look at these feelings with more lucidity and to work through them. Thanks for sharing.

deleted 7y ago

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zelly 7y ago

Agreed. The focus on the interior world (feeling) versus the exterior world (results) is one of the reasons recent generations have not innovated

hinkley 7y ago

A lot of my friends are children or grandchildren of Boomers and have been spending a lot of time lately asking and not answering the question of how they got like this, and so I’ve been trying to answer that for myself. Below is my barely half baked theory as it stands today. After the War, there were kids everywhere. So, so many kids. They had to open schools. Whole industries about kids exploded into existence. But as one of those kids? There must have been ten other people wanting to be what you wanted to be and half of them were better at it than you could hope to be. That, my theory states, fucked them up badly. When they had kids, they pressured us into being unique snowflakes, to be exceptional. It was too goddamned much pressure, and that fucked us up. So the next cohort started congratulating their kids for doing absolutely nothing at all. Which fucked them up worst of all. So, like, we are very sorry, but we were just trying not to pass our neuroses down and ended up giving you different ones. Same as our parents.

Dansvidania 7y ago
This is an interesting take on the sociological change. I definitely think the pressure was one of the top factors in fucking us up :D

ehnto 7y ago

There are many issues that go into making the stereotypical Millennial psyche. But I think an issue overlooked is the loss of context for your own life in your own community, which in my opinion has been brought on by the internet and media machines, overwork, and with the individualist movement pointing the spotlight squarely on yourself. We have disconnected and disenfranchised a generation from the community, then told them to compare themselves on the global stage of highest achievers, while their local avenues for community support get diluted into commercial ventures and shallow social media connections. Couple that with the commercializing of pretty much everything that the sun bares down upon, such that nothing around you has much authenticity, which leads you to have bizarre situations like humans who think brands are their friends, and there being no non-commercial spaces to meet new people at. It's no wonder there are so many confused Millennials who don't really get how to fit into society anymore.

pier25 7y ago

"Do what you love" at face value doesn't make much sense, but IMO that's the wrong way to look at it. "Doing" is not only the mere act of doing something but also the time you invest towards a goal.

sonicxxg 7y ago

Life is supposed to be simple, people overcomplicate things.

m463 7y ago

On the other hand, this idea is the fastest way to level up your "tech tree" in one specialization.