How to Work Hard

"What can one do in the face of such uncertainty? One solution is to hedge your bets, which in this case means to follow the obviously promising paths instead of your own private obsessions. But as with any hedge, you're decreasing reward when you decrease risk. If you forgo working on what you like in order to follow some more conventionally ambitious path, you might miss something wonderful that you'd otherwise have discovered. That too must happen all the time, perhaps even more often than the genius whose bets all fail."

I'm not sure the things we view as safe, such as, medical/law/grad school/mba are really hedges.

You could go to medical school as a safe path but be interested in tech. I thought about this but the medical gate keepers didn't value the tech when I was applying ... Today we see ambitious medicine/tech convergences which arguably present a path there.

I think there is a bigger issue is that we don't know what the jobs of the future will be. But we do know they will be organized around disciplines but not exactly what they are. They will most likely have a technology component because tech is what enables growth.

It's more often things like going on a walk and identifying the birds, going to the bar and getting better at telling stories or playing pool, seeing patterns in watching daily traffic or weather. Things you absolutely could go deep on, but just can't justify as "character building exercise" because they won't directly lead to you acquiring property or power.

And that's where the alarm bells start to come in; if you get anxious about that, you can get stuck on the idea of work and cut yourself off from a balanced set of interests, and this hits young people especially hard because they don't know what the balance could look like, or they observe media(including HN) where the balance is clearly defined towards one extreme, think "I will become that" and treat it as a masochistic exercise. I believe this to be a deep affliction of the online world particularly since, without trying you can stumble into media containing the "best" of everything.

Of course one of the great things about parenting is that mostly you get to have the same situations over and over again, and get to change your approaches (including consistency) to see what happens with different approaches. So you get practiced at each thing. And the talent needed for parenting is more intimate that for writing software - it's the talent to make your toddlers laugh, to make your 4 year old confident enough to try something they want to try. It's a set of skills for doing stuff between a particular parent/child system. My tricks might not work for you; my tricks for my first born did not work for my second born.