10 ms·

Younger people (say 30ish and under, so me included) have been told their entire (or close to it) lives that they're precious snowflakes and that they're going

Younger people (say 30ish and under, so me included) have been told their entire (or close to it) lives that they're precious snowflakes and that they're going to change the world and they can be or do anything they want to. If you're a highly motivated, hardworking person or you already know what your passion is, this is great news to hear. The sky's the limit! If you're not so highly motivated or you aren't passionate about anything (that you know of) this kind of message is debilitating. The flip side of "you are talented and special" is that if you're not doing what you're passionate about and you're not changing the world and whatever, that the only person you have to blame is yourself. If the world isn't placing any constraints upon you to keep you from succeeding then the only thing that stands between you and success is you. I realize that in truth we tend to limit ourselves more than others put those constrains upon us. But what that cheery, the-world-is-your-oyster message fails to communicate is that life can be difficult and that for a great many people just keeping themselves alive SOMEHOW is really about all that they can do. And that for the entire history of the world minus about 50 years that could be considered Success(tm). It might be a job that they're not passionate about but are good at. Or it might be that circumstances out of their control took a substantial portion of their energy (sick parents for example). Or maybe they just found someone and got married and had kids before they figured their work-passions out and now they have whole other people counting on them for support. But when you could be Doing Anything (!!) just getting doesn't necessarily feel like success. The "you can do anything" SEEMS really amazing and that you really should impress it upon all kids from an early age. It SOUNDS great, I mean who doesn't want to encourage kids to succeed? Ultimately though it may have been a bit self-defeating. When faced with too many choices many people fail to take any action at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

lukasm 12y ago
this and: - there more and more automation. Creativity and analytical skills are more important. Schools sucks at first and are OK-ish at second - Kids are defaulting to get a job. Brainwashed to be doctors, layers, firemen a.k.a "the real job" - "If you work hard you will get reward" - Nope. If you do something valuable you prob. get reward. Doing something hard may be critical to crush the competition or to solve the problem, but it's not essential.
- ladzoppelin 12y ago
  Actually this is something the previous generation still fails to understand. The problem is besides being a Doctor or Lawyer , the concept of "be good at what you do and you will be reimbursed" is completely non-existent even in extremely important professions. How can we (USA specifically) still have no standardized schooling/testing for professions such as programing, network security, data management, etc where the "best" are recognized just like students are ranked in Law School? In my imaginary world the whole United States educational system would be rebuilt from the ground up, hopefully without invalidating past student accomplishments, creating a better framework that at least allows proper training and recognition of other technical professions.
  - lukasm 12y ago
    It's impossible to rebuild the system ground up politically. Smaller country could set up an example.
  - nsxwolf 12y ago
    I would be really unhappy if that kind of credentialism crept its way into technology professions. I shouldn't need a license to make money coding.
- ladzoppelin 12y ago
  Actually this is something the previous generation still fails to understand. The problem is besides being a Doctor or Lawyer , the concept of "be good at what you do and you will be reimbursed" is completely non-existent even in extremely important professions. How can we (USA specifically) still have no standardized schooling/testing for professions such as programing, network security, data management, etc where the "best" are recognized just like students are ranked in Law School? In my imaginary world the whole United States educational system would be rebuilt from the ground up, hopefully without invalidating past student accomplishments, creating a better framework that at least allows proper training and recognition of other technical professions.
- Karellen 12y ago
  Working hard is (virtually) necessary, but not sufficient. If you work hard and become proficient at something, you're in with a chance of having those skills rewarded. If you don't have useful skills, and it's unlikely you'll come by any without working hard, you'll find it very tricky to persuade people to reward you for anything you can actually do. Note that hard work is not a guarantee of reward. It helps to have the right skills in the right place at the right time. There's not much call for buggy-whip mfrs these days, so if that's your passion and you learn to excel at it, you still might find it hard to connect with anyone who's in a position to appreciate your work and pay you for it. And even with the right skills in the right place at the right time, the vast uncaring universe can still deal you the shittiest beats you never saw coming and clean you out in the blink of an eye. Or you could win the lottery. If you want to bet on the lottery, go right ahead. On the other hand, working hard at the right things is a good way of massively stacking the odds in your favour for keeping food on the table, a roof over your table, and shiny tech doodads in your pocket in the interim, while you wait for those numbers to come up.
hawkice 12y ago
So, I'd like to maybe focus in on three points you bring up. Specifically: (1) If you are unmotivated, hearing you can accomplish great things would lead people to believe their behavior is what is preventing them from doing so. (2) Life is hard so setting your sights high is a bad thing for some people. (3) "You can do anything" leads to analysis paralysis -- a better strategy would give children fewer options so as to encourage acting on them. I think (2) is nonsense simply because life doesn't get any easier when you try to do great things, and yet we still try and many still achieve great things. If you life being hard meant you shouldn't reach for the stars then no one in the world would. It's also worth noting that life doesn't seem to get substantially easier if you decide to be a corporate stooge -- that social contract is broken so badly that I think it's misleading to imply it's the secret to stability. There exist challenges on all paths, at least the ones on the road to greatness are generally first-class problems. I don't understand the danger of (1). All I can change is my behavior. If something aside from that is causing the world to be a way I don't like, that doesn't do me much good to know except in scenarios of absolutely impossible goals and inevitable failure. (3) isn't absurd, but I think there's a dearth of safe, unlimited capacity options for children these days, which is why there is no coherent script for them. "Engineer" is a fairly good script, but having worked with quite a few, I can say that if you don't have the temperament for thinking carefully and trying things out then even after 10 years you won't be any good. I imagine the fairly short list of "opportunities for youngsters" these days would be mostly filled by similar fields, where there could be a personality type conflict -- but that's merely speculation. If you have a script you want to advocate for children, parents are worried about their kids and listening for a direction they can point them in. Persuade them, and your ideal change will be made.
- couradical 12y ago
  Addressing number 1, I saw the other day a study that indicates that this can back fire for individuals with low self-esteem. [1] [1]: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/7/860 http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/7/860
  - hawkice 12y ago
    [Link isn't working?] "Back fire" is an interesting choice of words. Would you prefer we endeavor to improve children's self-esteem by telling them their failures are out of their control? I am concerned this both hyper-coddles them and encourages a victim mindset. It's a trade-off in the cases of people with worryingly low self-esteem -- I wouldn't say it's a "back fire", it's just we now have to choose precisely which bad thing happens to people with low self-esteem. The choice sucks, but let's not draw a false equivalency because it sucks.
gatehouse 12y ago
I don't see how it is about anything but money. I (27) don't know anyone who lives with parents without a major financial reason. Occasionally it is the parent who can use help to make rent, but usually it's the child.
- tzakrajs 12y ago
  Having parents to fallback on is a great ruiner of motivation for some people. The amount of negligent enabling that takes place between some parents and their spawn is staggering. I think the extra assurance that they have the ability to live cheaply with their folks hamstrings childrens desire to establish their own support mechanisms.
  - waps 12y ago
    Sadly psychological studies confirm this : there's nothing that motivates people quite like seeing a few others fail, and the consequences of that failure, like homelessness. This motivates a lot better than anything on Maslow's pyramid. But would you really want to live in a world where this is actually implemented ? I wouldn't. Your and my parents thought we wouldn't and didn't create such a world, even though they (or maybe their parents) did grow up in such a world, where failure to earn a living would effectively mean physical misery or even death (good luck trying to survive a winter homeless in Europe anywhere north of Italy). I say thanks for that. I mean I have a big fight with my parents but it's not about this.
  - gutnor 12y ago
    The flip side is that when you don't have parents to fall back the risk level of all your actions become higher, and that will limit you in other ways. For example, I emigrated in another country. Knowing that if I failed, I could go back home for a few months was a key factor ( as was the possibility to be there for a few months before, to manage the transition ). Maybe the extra-motivation of having my back against the wall would have pushed me in another successful adventure, but I would not have risked my career the way I did. So well, that's really not black and white. And depends a lot on the type of parent you have.
- 12y ago
zecho 12y ago
This old canard is quite tiresome, and is rarely presented with evidence, but it's always written as capital T truth. The realities, laid out in the article, are all economic and well researched. Millennials have high debt and low wages with a poor job outlook. The underlying trends have existed for quite some time and appear to be getting worse over time, especially with the recent recession hitting youth hardest. But yeah, let's blame motivation rather than figure out how to improve the system. Clearly kids with college degrees aren't motivated enough to will jobs that can cover their debts and maintain the comfortable standard of living their parents had.
- opendais 12y ago
  Yes. The only people in my social circle I know that didn't boomerang were STEM graduates. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/03/01/most-college-grads-cant-find-work-in-their-field-is-a-management-degree-the-answer/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/03/01/m... 60% can't find a job in their field isn't a "motivational problem" or a "I picked the wrong degree problem". It is a general, widespread economic problem. If your assumptions require more than 10% of people to be incompetent, your assumptions are wrong.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    I get the 'I can't find a job opening in the area I'm trained/passionate about' but what I would like to understand is whether or not that includes "I can't create a job in the area I am trained/passionate about." I have coached a number of folks who seemed to feel strangely disempowered, which is to say that the world had to change (job opening appears, company moves to their area, etc) in order for them to make progress on their goals. I've had some success at simplifying the question using the common trick of assuming solutions to the presumptive problems. So for example starting with "Ok lets stipulate that there is a million dollars in a bank vault that is paying you $1,200 a month in 'free' money. And you're living in an area where that pays all your food, rent, and gas. Now, what do you want to do with your time?" That gets us past blaming "the economy" and taking ownership of what they want to do. It is a different way of thinking, but it gets out of the rut of 'answer' based thinking. Life is like riding a train that you know is on a track with a bridge out over a 1000' chasm. When the train gets there, it will fall into the chasm, and everyone on board will die. Given that every train you could take from a station has this same "feature" what train do you pick? Who do you pick to ride with you? What places does the train need to go through before it gets to the missing bridge? Sometimes it isn't as complicated as what do you want to do with your life, it is simply what can you do today that is fulfilling to you?
callmeed 12y ago
I wish I could upvote this 1000x. It's not just "you can do anything" ... it's that it's been coupled with "do what you love for your career" and similar platitudes. I love cooking and photography as much as I love programming (maybe more). In fact, I recently told a recruiter that my "dream job" would be at a startup spending 1/2 the day being the company chef and 1/2 the day hacking. He thought I meant the Chef config framework :) I am never going to pursue either of those as a career. First of all, because it's a lot harder to make a decent living at. Second, I've come to learn that once your passion intersects with the pressure to make a living and pay your bills, it's less enjoyable. Sometimes it's better to keep your passions as just that–passions. Furthermore, I feel like the "do anything + do what you love" thinking can lead to a weird class division (I don't know the right term, sorry). The set of people's passions do not perfectly intersect with the set of people's wants/needs. I seriously doubt many people have a passion for standing in a field for 10 hours a day picking strawberries. Yet, we all love to put strawberries in our crepes. So, unless you're willing to live in a world where you can only have products/services that people are passionate about making (or wait for the strawberry-picking robots), it seems like a double-standard.
- tekalon 12y ago
  The book 'Too Good They Can't Ignore You' explains this well.
  - aliston 12y ago
    Agree -- though the book is actually called "So Good They Can't Ignore You." http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/1455509124 http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/145550912...
- silencio 12y ago
  > I am never going to pursue either of those as a career. I think that's a shame. I'm a coder and I also run a restaurant. My wedding photographer really loves what she does. Even when coupled with the pressure to make a living - which I have to say, programming fell under the same bucket for me - when you actually sit down and figure out how it could be done, it's very doable. The only reason I don't go with one or the other is that I don't enjoy one more than the other ;) I also have friends that love to cook and are really good at it. Honestly the thing that pops their bubble about "I want to be a chef/open a restaurant" is not the cooking, it's that a restaurant is also about management, staffing, and food safety in a completely different manner from programming. My roommate LOVES to cook and cooks all the damn time and it wasn't until he got food poisoning from a super swank SF restaurant that he finally started to wash his hands more often and actually listen to food-safety-manager-trained me about cleanup and cleanliness, and forget about trying to do other standard stuff like labeling food to figure out when to throw it out or hiring people for roles he's unfamiliar with. Would love to see more people in tech diversify a bit. Running a restaurant and knowing all levels of it is like a whole new fun challenge, and it also puts me at a different level from the rest of the stuff I do. I go from friends/coworkers making 6 figures sipping $5 coffees in SF, to a 30 minute train ride later in East Bay, employees that get paid just above minimum wage and people counting pennies to get something to eat. It's eye opening and worth seeing the differences when you're not exposed to it regularly.
cafard 12y ago
"have been told their entire (or close to it) lives that they're precious snowflakes and that they're going to change the world and they can be or do anything they want to." By whom, where and when? I've been to three commencement speeches in the last several years, and even there didn't hear this. As a baby boomer and parent of a millenial, I sure as hell didn't aim to convey that message. And by the way, a couple of my college friends lived with their parents for a year or more after college and while not in school.
- msandford 12y ago
  >By whom, where and when? I've been to three commencement speeches in the last several years, and even there didn't hear this. As a baby boomer and parent of a millenial, I sure as hell didn't aim to convey that message. When I was growing up it was prevalent in the media and in schools. Not all parents bought into it of course -- perhaps even the majority of them didn't -- but if the TV says something and your parents don't tell you it's a lie, it must be true right? What is a 5-10 year old's capacity to tell fact from fiction, especially if an authority figure (like a teacher or someone on TV) is saying it? I was fortunate enough to be able to figure out at a young age that not everyone could grow up to be President or an astronaut and to temper my expectations accordingly. But should it be required skills to figure that out WELL before you hit puberty? Should that be the standard by which all persons are judged? By the time a commencement speech has rolled around it's already a decade or two too late. Minds have been impressed with crazy ideas that have little/no bearing on how the world ACTUALLY works. Some people take years to un-learn these silly notions; others never do. You might not have aimed to convey that message. You might have done a good job explaining to your kids that life is hard and success isn't becoming President but making your own way in life. But even if you did that, they might have still picked up enough nonsense elsewhere to believe it. Other phrases of a similarly unfortunate bent: "Follow your dreams" "Reach for the stars" "Do what you love" If you don't believe me that this is prevalent in culture, check out Google n-grams in books. It's imperfect of course but it's illustrative: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=follow+your+dreams%2Creach+for+the+stars%2Clove+what+you+do%2Cget+a+good+job&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cfollow%20your%20dreams%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bfollow%20your%20dreams%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BFollow%20your%20dreams%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BFollow%20Your%20Dreams%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BFOLLOW%20YOUR%20DREAMS%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Creach%20for%20the%20stars%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Breach%20for%20the%20stars%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BReach%20for%20the%20Stars%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BReach%20for%20the%20stars%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BREACH%20FOR%20THE%20STARS%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Clove%20what%20you%20do%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Blove%20what%20you%20do%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BLove%20What%20You%20Do%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BLove%20what%20you%20do%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cget%20a%20good%20job%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=follow+your+dr...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

lukasm 12y ago

this and: - there more and more automation. Creativity and analytical skills are more important. Schools sucks at first and are OK-ish at second - Kids are defaulting to get a job. Brainwashed to be doctors, layers, firemen a.k.a "the real job" - "If you work hard you will get reward" - Nope. If you do something valuable you prob. get reward. Doing something hard may be critical to crush the competition or to solve the problem, but it's not essential.

ladzoppelin 12y ago
Actually this is something the previous generation still fails to understand. The problem is besides being a Doctor or Lawyer , the concept of "be good at what you do and you will be reimbursed" is completely non-existent even in extremely important professions. How can we (USA specifically) still have no standardized schooling/testing for professions such as programing, network security, data management, etc where the "best" are recognized just like students are ranked in Law School? In my imaginary world the whole United States educational system would be rebuilt from the ground up, hopefully without invalidating past student accomplishments, creating a better framework that at least allows proper training and recognition of other technical professions.
- lukasm 12y ago
  It's impossible to rebuild the system ground up politically. Smaller country could set up an example.
- nsxwolf 12y ago
  I would be really unhappy if that kind of credentialism crept its way into technology professions. I shouldn't need a license to make money coding.
ladzoppelin 12y ago
Actually this is something the previous generation still fails to understand. The problem is besides being a Doctor or Lawyer , the concept of "be good at what you do and you will be reimbursed" is completely non-existent even in extremely important professions. How can we (USA specifically) still have no standardized schooling/testing for professions such as programing, network security, data management, etc where the "best" are recognized just like students are ranked in Law School? In my imaginary world the whole United States educational system would be rebuilt from the ground up, hopefully without invalidating past student accomplishments, creating a better framework that at least allows proper training and recognition of other technical professions.
Karellen 12y ago
Working hard is (virtually) necessary, but not sufficient. If you work hard and become proficient at something, you're in with a chance of having those skills rewarded. If you don't have useful skills, and it's unlikely you'll come by any without working hard, you'll find it very tricky to persuade people to reward you for anything you can actually do. Note that hard work is not a guarantee of reward. It helps to have the right skills in the right place at the right time. There's not much call for buggy-whip mfrs these days, so if that's your passion and you learn to excel at it, you still might find it hard to connect with anyone who's in a position to appreciate your work and pay you for it. And even with the right skills in the right place at the right time, the vast uncaring universe can still deal you the shittiest beats you never saw coming and clean you out in the blink of an eye. Or you could win the lottery. If you want to bet on the lottery, go right ahead. On the other hand, working hard at the right things is a good way of massively stacking the odds in your favour for keeping food on the table, a roof over your table, and shiny tech doodads in your pocket in the interim, while you wait for those numbers to come up.

hawkice 12y ago

So, I'd like to maybe focus in on three points you bring up. Specifically: (1) If you are unmotivated, hearing you can accomplish great things would lead people to believe their behavior is what is preventing them from doing so. (2) Life is hard so setting your sights high is a bad thing for some people. (3) "You can do anything" leads to analysis paralysis -- a better strategy would give children fewer options so as to encourage acting on them. I think (2) is nonsense simply because life doesn't get any easier when you try to do great things, and yet we still try and many still achieve great things. If you life being hard meant you shouldn't reach for the stars then no one in the world would. It's also worth noting that life doesn't seem to get substantially easier if you decide to be a corporate stooge -- that social contract is broken so badly that I think it's misleading to imply it's the secret to stability. There exist challenges on all paths, at least the ones on the road to greatness are generally first-class problems. I don't understand the danger of (1). All I can change is my behavior. If something aside from that is causing the world to be a way I don't like, that doesn't do me much good to know except in scenarios of absolutely impossible goals and inevitable failure. (3) isn't absurd, but I think there's a dearth of safe, unlimited capacity options for children these days, which is why there is no coherent script for them. "Engineer" is a fairly good script, but having worked with quite a few, I can say that if you don't have the temperament for thinking carefully and trying things out then even after 10 years you won't be any good. I imagine the fairly short list of "opportunities for youngsters" these days would be mostly filled by similar fields, where there could be a personality type conflict -- but that's merely speculation. If you have a script you want to advocate for children, parents are worried about their kids and listening for a direction they can point them in. Persuade them, and your ideal change will be made.

couradical 12y ago
Addressing number 1, I saw the other day a study that indicates that this can back fire for individuals with low self-esteem. [1] [1]: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/7/860 http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/7/860
- hawkice 12y ago
  [Link isn't working?] "Back fire" is an interesting choice of words. Would you prefer we endeavor to improve children's self-esteem by telling them their failures are out of their control? I am concerned this both hyper-coddles them and encourages a victim mindset. It's a trade-off in the cases of people with worryingly low self-esteem -- I wouldn't say it's a "back fire", it's just we now have to choose precisely which bad thing happens to people with low self-esteem. The choice sucks, but let's not draw a false equivalency because it sucks.

gatehouse 12y ago

I don't see how it is about anything but money. I (27) don't know anyone who lives with parents without a major financial reason. Occasionally it is the parent who can use help to make rent, but usually it's the child.

tzakrajs 12y ago
Having parents to fallback on is a great ruiner of motivation for some people. The amount of negligent enabling that takes place between some parents and their spawn is staggering. I think the extra assurance that they have the ability to live cheaply with their folks hamstrings childrens desire to establish their own support mechanisms.
- waps 12y ago
  Sadly psychological studies confirm this : there's nothing that motivates people quite like seeing a few others fail, and the consequences of that failure, like homelessness. This motivates a lot better than anything on Maslow's pyramid. But would you really want to live in a world where this is actually implemented ? I wouldn't. Your and my parents thought we wouldn't and didn't create such a world, even though they (or maybe their parents) did grow up in such a world, where failure to earn a living would effectively mean physical misery or even death (good luck trying to survive a winter homeless in Europe anywhere north of Italy). I say thanks for that. I mean I have a big fight with my parents but it's not about this.
- gutnor 12y ago
  The flip side is that when you don't have parents to fall back the risk level of all your actions become higher, and that will limit you in other ways. For example, I emigrated in another country. Knowing that if I failed, I could go back home for a few months was a key factor ( as was the possibility to be there for a few months before, to manage the transition ). Maybe the extra-motivation of having my back against the wall would have pushed me in another successful adventure, but I would not have risked my career the way I did. So well, that's really not black and white. And depends a lot on the type of parent you have.
12y ago

zecho 12y ago

This old canard is quite tiresome, and is rarely presented with evidence, but it's always written as capital T truth. The realities, laid out in the article, are all economic and well researched. Millennials have high debt and low wages with a poor job outlook. The underlying trends have existed for quite some time and appear to be getting worse over time, especially with the recent recession hitting youth hardest. But yeah, let's blame motivation rather than figure out how to improve the system. Clearly kids with college degrees aren't motivated enough to will jobs that can cover their debts and maintain the comfortable standard of living their parents had.

opendais 12y ago
Yes. The only people in my social circle I know that didn't boomerang were STEM graduates. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/03/01/most-college-grads-cant-find-work-in-their-field-is-a-management-degree-the-answer/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/03/01/m... 60% can't find a job in their field isn't a "motivational problem" or a "I picked the wrong degree problem". It is a general, widespread economic problem. If your assumptions require more than 10% of people to be incompetent, your assumptions are wrong.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  I get the 'I can't find a job opening in the area I'm trained/passionate about' but what I would like to understand is whether or not that includes "I can't create a job in the area I am trained/passionate about." I have coached a number of folks who seemed to feel strangely disempowered, which is to say that the world had to change (job opening appears, company moves to their area, etc) in order for them to make progress on their goals. I've had some success at simplifying the question using the common trick of assuming solutions to the presumptive problems. So for example starting with "Ok lets stipulate that there is a million dollars in a bank vault that is paying you $1,200 a month in 'free' money. And you're living in an area where that pays all your food, rent, and gas. Now, what do you want to do with your time?" That gets us past blaming "the economy" and taking ownership of what they want to do. It is a different way of thinking, but it gets out of the rut of 'answer' based thinking. Life is like riding a train that you know is on a track with a bridge out over a 1000' chasm. When the train gets there, it will fall into the chasm, and everyone on board will die. Given that every train you could take from a station has this same "feature" what train do you pick? Who do you pick to ride with you? What places does the train need to go through before it gets to the missing bridge? Sometimes it isn't as complicated as what do you want to do with your life, it is simply what can you do today that is fulfilling to you?

callmeed 12y ago

I wish I could upvote this 1000x. It's not just "you can do anything" ... it's that it's been coupled with "do what you love for your career" and similar platitudes. I love cooking and photography as much as I love programming (maybe more). In fact, I recently told a recruiter that my "dream job" would be at a startup spending 1/2 the day being the company chef and 1/2 the day hacking. He thought I meant the Chef config framework :) I am never going to pursue either of those as a career. First of all, because it's a lot harder to make a decent living at. Second, I've come to learn that once your passion intersects with the pressure to make a living and pay your bills, it's less enjoyable. Sometimes it's better to keep your passions as just that–passions. Furthermore, I feel like the "do anything + do what you love" thinking can lead to a weird class division (I don't know the right term, sorry). The set of people's passions do not perfectly intersect with the set of people's wants/needs. I seriously doubt many people have a passion for standing in a field for 10 hours a day picking strawberries. Yet, we all love to put strawberries in our crepes. So, unless you're willing to live in a world where you can only have products/services that people are passionate about making (or wait for the strawberry-picking robots), it seems like a double-standard.

tekalon 12y ago
The book 'Too Good They Can't Ignore You' explains this well.
- aliston 12y ago
  Agree -- though the book is actually called "So Good They Can't Ignore You." http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/1455509124 http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/145550912...
silencio 12y ago
> I am never going to pursue either of those as a career. I think that's a shame. I'm a coder and I also run a restaurant. My wedding photographer really loves what she does. Even when coupled with the pressure to make a living - which I have to say, programming fell under the same bucket for me - when you actually sit down and figure out how it could be done, it's very doable. The only reason I don't go with one or the other is that I don't enjoy one more than the other ;) I also have friends that love to cook and are really good at it. Honestly the thing that pops their bubble about "I want to be a chef/open a restaurant" is not the cooking, it's that a restaurant is also about management, staffing, and food safety in a completely different manner from programming. My roommate LOVES to cook and cooks all the damn time and it wasn't until he got food poisoning from a super swank SF restaurant that he finally started to wash his hands more often and actually listen to food-safety-manager-trained me about cleanup and cleanliness, and forget about trying to do other standard stuff like labeling food to figure out when to throw it out or hiring people for roles he's unfamiliar with. Would love to see more people in tech diversify a bit. Running a restaurant and knowing all levels of it is like a whole new fun challenge, and it also puts me at a different level from the rest of the stuff I do. I go from friends/coworkers making 6 figures sipping $5 coffees in SF, to a 30 minute train ride later in East Bay, employees that get paid just above minimum wage and people counting pennies to get something to eat. It's eye opening and worth seeing the differences when you're not exposed to it regularly.

cafard 12y ago

"have been told their entire (or close to it) lives that they're precious snowflakes and that they're going to change the world and they can be or do anything they want to." By whom, where and when? I've been to three commencement speeches in the last several years, and even there didn't hear this. As a baby boomer and parent of a millenial, I sure as hell didn't aim to convey that message. And by the way, a couple of my college friends lived with their parents for a year or more after college and while not in school.

msandford 12y ago
>By whom, where and when? I've been to three commencement speeches in the last several years, and even there didn't hear this. As a baby boomer and parent of a millenial, I sure as hell didn't aim to convey that message. When I was growing up it was prevalent in the media and in schools. Not all parents bought into it of course -- perhaps even the majority of them didn't -- but if the TV says something and your parents don't tell you it's a lie, it must be true right? What is a 5-10 year old's capacity to tell fact from fiction, especially if an authority figure (like a teacher or someone on TV) is saying it? I was fortunate enough to be able to figure out at a young age that not everyone could grow up to be President or an astronaut and to temper my expectations accordingly. But should it be required skills to figure that out WELL before you hit puberty? Should that be the standard by which all persons are judged? By the time a commencement speech has rolled around it's already a decade or two too late. Minds have been impressed with crazy ideas that have little/no bearing on how the world ACTUALLY works. Some people take years to un-learn these silly notions; others never do. You might not have aimed to convey that message. You might have done a good job explaining to your kids that life is hard and success isn't becoming President but making your own way in life. But even if you did that, they might have still picked up enough nonsense elsewhere to believe it. Other phrases of a similarly unfortunate bent: "Follow your dreams" "Reach for the stars" "Do what you love" If you don't believe me that this is prevalent in culture, check out Google n-grams in books. It's imperfect of course but it's illustrative: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=follow+your+dreams%2Creach+for+the+stars%2Clove+what+you+do%2Cget+a+good+job&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cfollow%20your%20dreams%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bfollow%20your%20dreams%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BFollow%20your%20dreams%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BFollow%20Your%20Dreams%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BFOLLOW%20YOUR%20DREAMS%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Creach%20for%20the%20stars%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Breach%20for%20the%20stars%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BReach%20for%20the%20Stars%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BReach%20for%20the%20stars%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BREACH%20FOR%20THE%20STARS%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Clove%20what%20you%20do%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Blove%20what%20you%20do%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BLove%20What%20You%20Do%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BLove%20what%20you%20do%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cget%20a%20good%20job%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=follow+your+dr...

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