What I learned from reading Paul Graham’s essays.
How to do what you love.
To do something well, you have to like it.
That idea is not exactly novel.
We've got it down to just four.
Do what you love.
But it's not enough just to tell people that doing what you love is complicated.
When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites.
By definition, life had two states.
Some of the time, adults were making you do things, and that was called work.
The rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing.
Work was pretty much defined as not fun, and it did not seem to be an accident.
School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grown up work.
If we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed, that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so that they can work on more interesting stuff later.
Once, when I was about nine or ten, my father told me that I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it.
I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun.
Fun like playing.
It took me years to grasp that it was not until I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living.
Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on.
The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world and in the process, not to starve.
How much are you supposed to like what you do?