Is Passion Serendipitously Discovered or Painstakingly Constructed? | Hacker News Reader

Is Passion Serendipitously Discovered or Painstakingly Constructed?

calnewport.com

30 pointsNewWorldOrder14 comments

I find it hardest to be passionate about my work when I'm doing mundane, uninteresting work. No job involves doing something interesting and challenging at all times. If I was 10x better at my job, it wouldn't improve how I felt about doing mundane work. In fact, I might detest it more because I would feel like my time could be spent doing higher-level work.

Resonates nicely with something Cormac McCarthy said in a recent interview.

Someone asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, and she said, "Because I was good at it." And I think that's the right answer. If you're good at something it's very hard not to do it.

I prefer this gem: "I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870457620457452...

You could rephrase the whole article, "Just do anything enough to get good at it. It doesn't matter what you want or like."

My response: "yes, it really does."

My response to your response: "no, it doesn't."

You have to progress beyond the initial period of total incompetence, where nothing is fun. Your guitar strings buzz mutely, you keep dropping your hand and your opponent punches you in the face, and javac keeps yelling at you about "array index out of bounds." After that, though, the increasing success in the activity becomes a positive feedback loop, increasing your desire to practice it. The end result is what any reasonable person would call passion.

With regards to being a passionate about hacking though, there's another problem: the pace of technological change. Take the guitar example: you invest a couple of years learning to play the guitar and perhaps develop a passion for it. That's something you can continue to nurture for a lifetime.

On the other hand, take the example from the article: the bored web developer spends "a few years" mastering Ruby on Rails. Oops, by then RoR is yesterday's news, now it's Clouds and Hadoop and Clojure and [insert technology/language/architecture du jour here]. So I think what you need to work on is not mastering something like "Ruby on Rails" but something at a higher level of abstraction... skills and habits that let you remain proficient and passionate about your craft even as the technological sands shift under you. I'm not sure how to really articulate what these are.

Yes and no. There are underlying truths to programming that you can and should carry with you from environment to environment. Some are very difficult to put into words, but some are not. One example that is now considered trivial and well-known is "shun global variables"... but then, just today I was fighting with code that's hard to work with because it uses global variables. This stuff is always news to somebody....

Another more recent example that may pass into that peculiar state of "everybody agrees its common sense but by golly I sure see an awful lot of violations of it every week" is being suspicious of mutable state. I'm not quite 100% sold on the "never use mutable state" idea (getting closer every month, though...), but I sure am 100% sold on being suspicious of it. Doesn't matter what your environment is, that carries over. A lot of stuff does.

In a sense, global variables and mutable state are much the same. Even if the scope of the mutable variable is local, if it maintains state beyond any specific call, it has a global lifespan. I think using mutable variables within a function that don't live beyond the function is generally fine (for loops, etc).

You truly believe that no matter what you try to get good at, it's equally good?

I agree that you need to get past the initial total incompetence, but redefining "passion" to mean "something you worked on for a long time" is ignoring or denying the idea that passion means enjoyment.

That's not an accurate summary. What he's saying is that you can pick any of your superficial interests (the things that you want or like) and construct a passion from it by getting really good at it. The message is for those people who have many interests but are either trying to figure out which of these interests contains their passion or they're waiting for a flash of insight that tells them to drop everything and do a 180.

In short, his point is that you should stop trying to discover your passion and start creating it.

"What he's saying is that you can pick any of your superficial interests (the things that you want or like) and construct a passion from it by getting really good at it."

Yes. That's what he saying. That you can pick any of those interests, and that it doesn't matter which.

He's doing that partially by redefining "passion" to mean "something you've done long enough to be good at it", which is strongly at odds with the colloquial definition, which involves liking it.

His redefinition of passion is:

Passion: The feeling that arises from having mastered a skill that earns you recognition and rewards.

He did not toss out the "like" or even the "love" from the idea. The feeling is the exact same. What he changed is how that feeling comes about.

If you have an interest in something, that means you like it at least enough to explore it further. What he is saying is that if you like something, you can work at it and get to the point where you've turned a simple "like" into a "passion".

Agreed (sorta). I think achieving a certain level of proficiency is a necessary condition (not a sufficient one). However, as noted in the article, sometimes reaching a particular level of proficiency creates the "I like this" emotion.

Sure, but "sometimes" without any particular predictive ability isn't very helpful.

I suppose he could be saying "before you done something for awhile, you probably won't like it." That would be a statement with more content. It's a different argument than the one he made, though.

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