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The article to me seems to be saying that if you pour your heart and soul into a skill, let's say playing guitar, and after several years despite your best effo

The article to me seems to be saying that if you pour your heart and soul into a skill, let's say playing guitar, and after several years despite your best efforts you are still not very good, you probably should not depend on it to support yourself financially. This doesn't preclude you doing it for fun on your own terms. > Why should you aim to have an unfair advantage over anybody? Cynical: This makes life easier. Exploiting an unfair advantage over others ensures you don't have to spend a large percentage of your life fighting for the basic elements of survival. It's selfish, but the number of people you are is 1 and not more or less, which also matches the number of people who truly care about your quality of life. Your mainframe example is bad because those people are still making a lot of money maintaining legacy systems somewhere.

leto_ii 6y ago
> The article to me seems to be saying that if you pour your heart and soul into a skill, let's say playing guitar, and after several years despite your best efforts you are still not very good, you probably should not depend on it to support yourself financially. This doesn't preclude you doing it for fun on your own terms. This is a perfectly sensible point, but it's basically a trivial bit of insight. Indeed, if you can't make a decent living from something then you have to find something different to do. It seemed to me that the article made the point that you should hyper-specialize on the thing that you're 'best' at (from an economic perspective, I guess). Incidentally I think that if you like smth enough to stick with it for a few years then you'll end up being pretty good at it (although, if the thing itself is not lucrative, you may not be able to make a living from it).
ozim 6y ago
I would oppose even stronger against "unfair advantage", author in the article wrote "almost unfair". If you worked harder than others to achieve some level of understanding or mastery it is not something I would ever call "unfair advantage".
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  The "unfair" part is that people have different personality traits and thus enjoy different things. Working hard to become great at something you enjoy is relatively easier than working hard to become great at something you hate. For example, my programming skills are a result of time and effort I spent learning programming, and the fact that even in my free time I learned new things and worked on my personal projects. Thus I "deserve" to be better than someone who doesn't care, doesn't learn, and doesn't practice. But the "undeserved" part is that enjoy exploring technical details and working alone; those are traits I was born with. If a person without these traits would try to spend the same time and effort doing the same things, it would be much harder for them, because they would suffer along the way, and they wouldn't get the emotional rewards along the way that I did. In that sense I have an advantage, because the same amount of hard work is less of a sacrifice for me. The opposite situation for me is social skills. I also spent a lot of work here, read various books, and practiced various techniques. First, the results are mediocre, simply because unless I force myself, I ignore many opportunities to practice. (Because, unlike with programming, this practice is not intrinsically pleasant to me.) Second, sometimes I focus and do a good job, but from inside it feels like hard work, even if from outside it seems "natural". I can seem like I enjoy it, but it actually makes me very tired and I need a break afterwards. This whole coronavirus situation feels like a wonderful vacation to me. The only way to excel in this area would be to torture myself (just like other people need to torture themselves to solve a simple math problem). So it makes sense, when you choose your career, to consider not just how well it pays and how much work is needed, but also how much suffering that work brings to you. If you are lucky, there is a profitable career where you have the unfair advantage that the same amount of work causes you less suffering than to your potential competitors. So you can work harder than them and still have more enjoyable life.

leto_ii 6y ago

> The article to me seems to be saying that if you pour your heart and soul into a skill, let's say playing guitar, and after several years despite your best efforts you are still not very good, you probably should not depend on it to support yourself financially. This doesn't preclude you doing it for fun on your own terms. This is a perfectly sensible point, but it's basically a trivial bit of insight. Indeed, if you can't make a decent living from something then you have to find something different to do. It seemed to me that the article made the point that you should hyper-specialize on the thing that you're 'best' at (from an economic perspective, I guess). Incidentally I think that if you like smth enough to stick with it for a few years then you'll end up being pretty good at it (although, if the thing itself is not lucrative, you may not be able to make a living from it).

ozim 6y ago

I would oppose even stronger against "unfair advantage", author in the article wrote "almost unfair". If you worked harder than others to achieve some level of understanding or mastery it is not something I would ever call "unfair advantage".

Viliam1234 6y ago
The "unfair" part is that people have different personality traits and thus enjoy different things. Working hard to become great at something you enjoy is relatively easier than working hard to become great at something you hate. For example, my programming skills are a result of time and effort I spent learning programming, and the fact that even in my free time I learned new things and worked on my personal projects. Thus I "deserve" to be better than someone who doesn't care, doesn't learn, and doesn't practice. But the "undeserved" part is that enjoy exploring technical details and working alone; those are traits I was born with. If a person without these traits would try to spend the same time and effort doing the same things, it would be much harder for them, because they would suffer along the way, and they wouldn't get the emotional rewards along the way that I did. In that sense I have an advantage, because the same amount of hard work is less of a sacrifice for me. The opposite situation for me is social skills. I also spent a lot of work here, read various books, and practiced various techniques. First, the results are mediocre, simply because unless I force myself, I ignore many opportunities to practice. (Because, unlike with programming, this practice is not intrinsically pleasant to me.) Second, sometimes I focus and do a good job, but from inside it feels like hard work, even if from outside it seems "natural". I can seem like I enjoy it, but it actually makes me very tired and I need a break afterwards. This whole coronavirus situation feels like a wonderful vacation to me. The only way to excel in this area would be to torture myself (just like other people need to torture themselves to solve a simple math problem). So it makes sense, when you choose your career, to consider not just how well it pays and how much work is needed, but also how much suffering that work brings to you. If you are lucky, there is a profitable career where you have the unfair advantage that the same amount of work causes you less suffering than to your potential competitors. So you can work harder than them and still have more enjoyable life.