111–120 of 332 posts
Even the artificial deadlines can be fun, though there is a definite cost to working an 80 hour week.
Most days are like playing, really. Sometimes you have to come into work and push a pencil, but hopefully those are rare.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ira Glass has some advice on the issue of when you start something you enjoy, but your skill doesn't match your taste. Push through and keep practicing until your skill matches your taste. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbC4gqZGPSY
I don't think the problem is things you enjoy but don't have skill to match your taste, the issue is identifying things you would enjoy if you had more skill, so you know where it is worth investing the effort to get over the lack of current skill.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Physics is applied math and I think that is an important distinction.
^ This. I ended up majoring in pure mathematics as an undergraduate after finding out that applied mathematics courses had too much material to memorize after finding out that physics courses had too much material to memorize. Pure math was so much easier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the problem is things you enjoy but don't have skill to match your taste, the issue is identifying things you would enjoy if you had more skill, so you know where it is worth investing the effort to get over the lack of current skill.
Programming, maths & science, etc. are acquired tastes. Not things you can enjoy from the get-go. I think many friends and family of mine would make far better programmers than I, or great scientists, but they've never had the need to venture out of their comfort zone to try something new. The age of constant distractions and an easy lifestyle is not conducive to breaking out of the norm. The things I enjoy most took…
I dunno, I enjoyed all three from the get-go. Ballroom dance I suspected I would enjoy, but it took me a while to get to the point where it wasn't just work to do it (even though I enjoyed watching it.)
I know plenty of people for whom those things are flipped. I don't think "what you can enjoy from the get-go" and "what takes more time to learn you can enjoy" is constant from person to person.
What if the idea of work itself is what you dislike? There are plenty of activities I can enjoy, and some, quite a few of them in fact, are profitable. Once you shoe-horn them into the power dynamic situation of a traditional job (with the bureaucracy that entails unless you're dealing with Actual People as opposed to corporations), suddenly a lot of the luster disappears. As a ridiculous example - I enjoy reading. I…
Anytime I read one of those "just do what you're passionate about!" posts, or job postings that read like "we're looking for people who are passionate about [thing that literally no-one has ever been passionate about]" I try to think whether there's anything whatsoever that I'd enjoy (let alone stay passionate about) doing (at least) 40 hours a week, 49ish weeks a year. I haven't thought of anything yet. Left to my o…
For me it's not so much the absolute requirements (i.e. 8 hours a day, these specific hours, can't do anything else within that time) but rather the subordinate aspect of having no control over that. The way in which it's just the only option for seemingly _no reason_. It's totally arbitrary.
I'd love to work a job where I could say, choose three days a week to work (or alternatively have 100 days holiday, restricted to not allow huge stints off) and receive 60% of a reasonable salary.
Even better, though less realistic, would be an MMORPG-style job in which you could choose to put in 100 hours in week 1, 20 hours in week 2, etc and choose those hours whenever you wish.
Self employment comes close if you're not dealing with megacorps, but you still run into the problem that clients may not want you to just disappear for weeks at a time.
This excerpt - "what he really liked was solving problems. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems—to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually." is literally me. I did that. Every year at my school I did exactly that. Once I actually turned in m…
> The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems I literally did the opposite of this. I went so far as to make deals with my teachers that if I got an A on every test, I wouldn't have to do any work outside of class. Maybe I figured it to be a challenge, maybe I was plain lazy. Whatever it was, that didn't pre…
What if the idea of work itself is what you dislike? There are plenty of activities I can enjoy, and some, quite a few of them in fact, are profitable. Once you shoe-horn them into the power dynamic situation of a traditional job (with the bureaucracy that entails unless you're dealing with Actual People as opposed to corporations), suddenly a lot of the luster disappears. As a ridiculous example - I enjoy reading. I…
In one of the economic courses I took, the Professor posed this very question. Apparently Karl Marx had also opined along these lines - how would a society incentivize someone who only likes to build sand castles ? He can't monetize the sandcastle because the waves wash them out, so he just builds another one & another one & so on.
Sometimes I think programming is like that. You write some code in some language & 5 years later write the same thing in some other language & then another 5 years later...I am pretty sure much of the Scala I write these days is simply something I've written in my early teens in QBasic. We're just building sandcastles that time will wash off.
If you do know of something which doesn't feel like work to you, but does feel like work to everybody else, there's indeed probably something there. But if you don't, it may be possible to create such a something...
I also really enjoy the process of understanding things in general - figuring out the important/disparate parts, determining how they link together, exploring connections, etc. Once I understand something all of the possibilities hidden in that topic are open to me and my creativity.
But I'm terrible at taking time to create things. Once I have the solution it is very difficult to find the drive to actually continue and build on it. It's always a slog, as if I were a kid being forced to eat vegetables. I think I'm slowly improving, though.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Problem_book_in_high_sch...