to find work you love, don't (always) follow your passion

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

chose-a-job-you-love-never-work

Watch: https://youtu.be/MKlx1DLa9EA and read: https://80000hours.org/articles/dont-follow-your-passion then share your #Thoughts ...

ghost commented 7 years ago

omg I was watching this last night snap

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

@markwilliamfirth yeah, your fellow Ox-Grads are doing a decent job of helping people DWYL. ❤️ We are going to take it to a whole other level by building tools that help people understand (or discover) what they love doing (and whether they can create value by doing it), connect with others who share the passion (i.e. form a community) and track progress towards mastery in the skills required to DWYL... 😉

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/videos/2105/Do-What-You-Love

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

http://www.defencejobs.gov.au/women-in-adf/#/ 😕

chisNaN commented 7 years ago

The idea of not following our passion is also explained here in a simpler way. Thanks Nelson for this dialectic approach)))

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

https://youtu.be/CJN-D6kdvws & https://youtu.be/m7Btde7e7Hs

newswim commented 7 years ago

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/do-what-you-love-work-myth-culture/399599

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

@newswim thanks for reminding us of that article. 👍 I've ordered a copy of the book and will devour it when it arrives! 🤓

tl;dr

interesting article. (especially the comments) does not solve the problem of exploitative workplaces or appear to offer any practical advice for people who are "trapped" in the situation where they live "paycheque-to-paycheque" and hate their job...

News Flash: Most Companies Exploit Workers!

Miya Tokumitsu's book https://www.amazon.com/Do-What-You-Love-Happiness/dp/1941393470 and the corresponding "book-promo-interview" in The Atlantic is interesting from an "exploitative workplace" perspective ...

while I totally understand that Tokumitsu is trying to "protect" people from the companies that want to exploit their employees -- there is no shortage of unscrupulous companies who want to over-work & under-pay people in the name of "interesting work" -- it offers no "solution" to the problem; rather is pure liberal rhetoric about how all employment is evil!

people should rapidly realise this reality for themselves without having to pay $12 to read a book on the subject! (i.e. it's obvious that profit-motivated companies will always find a way to "squeeze" more time from their workers!)

Question is: Why Did Tokumitsu Write this Book...?

The interesting question we should ask is: Why did Tokumitsu write this Book and what qualifies her as an authority on the subject...?

it's pretty clear that Tokumitsu is disillusioned with her own life choices and has thus written a book about why others should not make the same mistakes ... ✅

Tokumitsu describes herself as an "Art Historian" ... https://twitter.com/MiyaTokumitsu Not exactly an "innovator" trying to make something new that solves a real world problem ... rather the prototypical person who studied something they were interested in only to realise after accumulating a few thousands dollars in student debt that "Art History" is totally useless to society and does not pay the bills! (quelle surprise!) The only "Art Historian" I know that makes a decent living doing "Art History" (enough to afford her own house and have a reasonably comfortable life) works for a wealthy collector! ... (i.e. gets paid for helping some rich guy avoid tax and get richer by off-shoring his investments in collectables while continuing to accumulate vast sums in rent from his "property portfolio"...) By definition, Art Historians are not creating anything new (and of value) for the world, merely studying the works of people who did ... I don't know how anyone could be happy merely trying to interpret meaning of art from the past, it sounds like the definition of "first world problems" to me ... hardly solving world hunger!

Good on her for writing a seemingly well-researched book, which naive people should absolutely read to avoid being taken advantage of ...

But perhaps her next book should focus on actually helping people to find meaning in their lives instead of simply telling people they should not do something they love without offering any practical alternative/advice.

It's invariably the people who are not enjoying their work/lives who are against the idea of "doing what you love" . The people who have succeeded in doing something they enjoy (and getting paid well for it) don't waste their time writing books about why others shouldn't ...

Sales Flop

Amazon Listing showing available editions: https://www.amazon.com/Do-What-You-Love-Happiness/dp/1941393470

Sales rank:

The fact that the book's Amazon sales rank is outside of the top 100k and it did not have sufficient volume to merit a paperback edition and the publisher "Regan Arts" is charging more for the eBook (which has zero marginal cost) than for the Hardback, suggests that it wasn't especially popular ... and they are trying to recover their costs by over-charging for the Kindle Edition.

Regan Arts, makers of such fine quality products as: http://www.reganarts.com/books/2016/the-godfather-notebook-special-edition Changing the world one over-priced gimmick coffee table book at a time. 😕 Regan Arts have given up on promoting Tokumitsu's book on their website: http://www.reganarts.com/books it's languishing on page 3 http://www.reganarts.com/books/page-3/ (of 4) after their 3 books on why Trump was elected president ... 😖

If we use the formula for calculating sales: https://www.quora.com/Can-you-tell-how-many-copies-of-a-book-have-been-sold-by-Amazon-rank we can deduce that the book has sold fewer than 10k copies ... (generous estimate!) i.e. the time (estimate: 18-24 months) that Tokumitsu invested in writing it has barely covered the cost of publication. (ouch!)

Only 15 Amazon Reviews ?

Who doesn't have enough friends & family to get a few positive reviews...? It's the negative review(s) that are most often insightful: https://www.amazon.com/Do-What-You-Love-Happiness-ebook/product-reviews/B00T0GIA3Y/ A few more reviews on Good Reads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23492333-do-what-you-love-and-other-lies-about-success-and-happiness

Ironically Tokumitsu Works for a "Private Equity" Company

Interesting tid-bit: Regan Arts is owned by Phaidon Press which is in turn owned by Leon Black the chap who paid $119.9 million for Edvard Munch's "The Scream" ...

so Tokumitsu is (in)directly working for the owner of a [Private Equity]() firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Global_Management which as we all know are the ultimate left-wing organisations that respect workers rights in their Leveraged Buyouts ... 😕

Bottom Line

The Bottom Line is: write about something you are passionate about and good at and that inspires others if you want people to actually read your content. wasting your own time writing about why people shouldn't do something they love will backfire spectacularly in terms of your own opportunity cost! Even if the book is well-researched and well-written, the cold-hard reality of the marketplace will pour cold water on it.

Alternative Book Recommendation

I'm personally not going to waste my own time reading the book on the basis that I don't expect to learn anything from it.

People who haven't discovered something they are passionate about should instead read something that will actually inspire them and help find some meaning: https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/080701429X/

YvesMuyaBenda commented 7 years ago

@nelsonic Personally, I would less take to task the individual and her publishing company, but I very much agree with the concept of a postive goal that "pulls one through" to something better.

newswim commented 7 years ago

@nelsonic I hope I didn't push you over the cliff of buying this apparently self-indulgent do-over thesis from someone, who after reading your comments and some of the other reviewers' comments, seems to have lost their own moral center.

It's misguided to vilify a whole enterprise (or worse, [C]apitalism) while at the same time failing to articulate the actual flaws, or offer alternatives. I can sympathize with a classical liberal view-- pursue one's own interests and basically do no harm. But when scaled out, is this position causing harm? There's this whole concept of Neo-Liberalism but I won't weight into that. Ironically, Tokumitsu's book almost sounds like an apologetics for the Bourgeoisie (my own fumbling understanding of marxism), self-interested actors following her own advice. However they might be violating that second command, do no harm. Maybe there is tension between these two commands, and out of that a dissertation might've seemed plausible (speculating), which nonetheless failed due to these flaws in the criticism. Beyond that, just further speculation...

Frankl is a great recommendation, I have a copy and need to sit down with that for a few days (slow reader). I'll just add that I don't know much about Tokumitsu, and don't plan to investigate after reading that interview. But, I understand what it's like to make a drastic career change, and spend a decade dawdling in liberal arts before finding meaning in something more hard. We tend to undersell the notion of self-work in exchange for "self-improvement", particularly in the US. Liberal education is important when it comes to gaining an understanding of human achievements and motivations.. but I think can be taught in a way which doesn't bring out the underlying urges, it's too "soft" in a way.

I want my hard sciences made more approachable and integrative, and my soft arts made more rigorous and formal. Damnit, I'm a centrist.

Anyway, please ignore me and just read Maria Popova's blog and do as thou wilt.

YvesMuyaBenda commented 7 years ago

@newsmim On the relationship between soft and hard, my basic thought is that programming/computer science is the most perfect playground for learning how to build things. Insights I have gotten from the study of the topic has been applied to thoughts related to dance, yoga, poetry, grammar, music, mathematics, and so on, and so on. In fact, building a computational model of a domain might be said to be the ultimate test of understanding, because you have to be super clear and explicit about how you are thinking about a topic.

dwyl / start-here