Required Reading - Paul Graham on Doing What You Love

For years I've been preoccupied with figuring out how I should be occupied.  Today I discovered an essay by Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator, called How to Do What You Love, and would like to share some thoughts.

Defining "What You Love"

"It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no."

This distinction is critical - it seems all too easy to decide that all you want to do is relax on the beach, and you should just accept that work will always be unpleasant.  We all know people who feel this way, right?

"The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

[ . . . ] 

You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken." 

So when the mindless pleasures become unsatisfying, what will satisfy you?

"To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool." 

There are lots of ways to lead a fun life, but given the choice, wouldn't you rather create or at least contribute to something magnificent?  (And this isn't a choice, because magnificent things are usually fun too!)

Discovering "What You Love" 

"That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies." 

Uh oh. Time to think hard - have you been pretending to be something you aren't?  I have just realized that I might not be a writer.  In fact, I've never written a story in my spare time.  How foolish!  But better late than never, I suppose.

"Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.

"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof." 

So.  Think - whatever it is, this work that you love, it has to be something that you are willing to do even if you aren't paid for it, in your spare time.  Ask yourself if you can narrow it down.

In the past 10 years, I've discovered that procrastination is the most obvious indicator.

1. I thought I wanted to be an architect.  When I landed a job designing custom homes, I procrastinated for weeks on end.
2. I studied ceramics in college,  built a ceramics studio in my garage after graduation and took 2 years to create one kiln load.
3. In 2012, I decided to make comics my career, and I am procrastinating on the final edits for our first issue AT THIS VERY MOMENT.

BUT.  I'm procrastinating less on this third option - which means I'm on the right track, I think.  If it's not comics, it's something close.
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Note to self:  think on this one more.

Getting The Job

Further down in the article, he describes two options for getting into the career you love - the "Organic" method and the "Two-Job" method.

If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.

I'm most familiar with the "Two-Job" route, but I haven't really looked for "Organic" routes into the industry.  What would be an ideal situation?  To get started as an apprentice, inking backgrounds perhaps, developing technical skills in the process?

Maybe this has been discouraging.  But this too can be overcome, if you follow Jimmy Valvano's advice:

• Remember where you were
• Remember where you are 
• Remember where you want to be.  

As discussed, even if you don't know where you want to be, figuring that out is actually the hardest problem that we face.  The agony of not knowing is drastically worse than the agony of working hard at your passion.  But take heart.  Remember where you were.  Are you closer now than you were 10 years ago?  or 2 years ago?  or 1 month ago?