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          When To Do What You Love

          September 2024

          There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow
          your passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer
          with a simple yes or no. Sometimes you should and sometimes
          you shouldn't, but the border between should and shouldn't is
          very complicated. The only way to give a general answer is to
          trace it.

          When people talk about this question, there's always an
          implicit "instead of." All other things being equal, why
          wouldn't you work on what interests you the most? So even
          raising the question implies that all other things aren't
          equal, and that you have to choose between working on what
          interests you the most and something else, like what pays the
          best.

          And indeed if your main goal is to make money, you can't
          usually afford to work on what interests you the most. People
          pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. But
          there's an obvious exception: when you both want the same
          thing. For example, if you love football, and you're good
          enough at it, you can get paid a lot to play it.

          Of course the odds are against you in a case like football,
          because so many other people like playing it too. This is not
          to say you shouldn't try though. It depends how much ability
          you have and how hard you're willing to work.

          The odds are better when you have strange tastes: when you
          like something that pays well and that few other people like.
          For example, it's clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a
          software company. He didn't just love programming, which a lot
          of people do. He loved writing software for customers. That is
          a very strange taste indeed, but if you have it, you can make
          a lot by indulging it.

          There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual
          interest in making money. This is distinct from mere greed.
          They just can't help noticing when something is mispriced, and
          can't help doing something about it. It's like a puzzle for
          them. [1]

          In fact there's an edge case here so spectacular that it turns
          all the preceding advice on its head. If you want to make a
          really huge amount of money -- hundreds of millions or even
          billions of dollars -- it turns out to be very useful to work
          on what interests you the most. The reason is not the extra
          motivation you get from doing this, but that the way to make a
          really large amount of money is to start a startup, and
          working on what interests you is an excellent way to discover
          startup ideas.

          Many if not most of the biggest startups began as projects the
          founders were doing for fun. Apple, Google, and Facebook all
          began that way. Why is this pattern so common? Because the
          best ideas tend to be such outliers that you'd overlook them
          if you were consciously looking for ways to make money.
          Whereas if you're young and good at technology, your
          unconscious instincts about what would be interesting to work
          on are very well aligned with what needs to be built.

          So there's something like a midwit peak for making money. If
          you don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're
          most interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you
          can't usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich,
          and you're young and good at technology, working on what
          you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.

          What if you're not sure what you want? What if you're
          attracted to the idea of making money and more attracted to
          some kinds of work than others, but neither attraction
          predominates? How do you break ties?

          The key here is to understand that such ties are only
          apparent. When you have trouble choosing between following
          your interests and making money, it's never because you have
          complete knowledge of yourself and of the types of work you're
          choosing between, and the options are perfectly balanced. When
          you can't decide which path to take, it's almost always due to
          ignorance. In fact you're usually suffering from three kinds
          of ignorance simultaneously: you don't know what makes you
          happy, what the various kinds of work are really like, or how
          well you could do them. [2]

          In a way this ignorance is excusable. It's often hard to
          predict these things, and no one even tells you that you need
          to. If you're ambitious you're told you should go to college,
          and this is good advice so far as it goes, but that's where it
          usually ends. No one tells you how to figure out what to work
          on, or how hard this can be.

          What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty.
          And probably the best way to do that is to try working on
          things you're interested in. That will get you more
          information about how interested you are in them, how good you
          are at them, and how much scope they offer for ambition.

          Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out
          what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during
          college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to
          work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form
          yourself. And since figuring out what to work on is a problem
          that could take years to solve, the sooner you start, the
          better.

          One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to
          look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like
          whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these
          people?

          Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of
          work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the
          same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for
          how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who
          chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more
          soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you
          choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be
          surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested
          in it, and that will make it extra inspiring. [3]

          The other thing you do in the face of uncertainty is to make
          choices that are uncertainty-proof. The less sure you are
          about what to do, the more important it is to choose options
          that give you more options in the future. I call this "staying
          upwind." If you're unsure whether to major in math or
          economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of
          economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later
          from math to economics than from economics to math.

          There's one case, though, where it's easy to say whether you
          should work on what interests you the most: if you want to do
          great work. This is not a sufficient condition for doing great
          work, but it is a necessary one.

          There's a lot of selection bias in advice about whether to
          "follow your passion," and this is the reason. Most such
          advice comes from people who are famously successful, and if
          you ask someone who's famously successful how to do what they
          did, most will tell you that you have to work on what you're
          most interested in. And this is in fact true.

          That doesn't mean it's the right advice for everyone. Not
          everyone can do great work, or wants to. But if you do want
          to, the complicated question of whether or not to work on what
          interests you the most becomes simple. The answer is yes. The
          root of great work is a sort of ambitious curiosity, and you
          can't manufacture that.









          Notes

          [1] These examples show why it's a mistake to assume that
          economic inequality must be evidence of some kind of
          brokenness or unfairness. It's obvious that different people
          have different interests, and that some interests yield far
          more money than others, so how can it not be obvious that some
          people will end up much richer than others? In a world where
          some people like to write enterprise software and others like
          to make studio pottery, economic inequality is the natural
          outcome.

          [2] Difficulty choosing between interests is a different
          matter. That's not always due to ignorance. It's often
          intrinsically difficult. I still have trouble doing it.

          [3] You can't always take people at their word on this. Since
          it's more prestigious to work on things you're interested in
          than to be driven by money, people who are driven mainly by
          money will often claim to be more interested in their work
          than they actually are. One way to test such claims is by
          doing the following thought experiment: if their work didn't
          pay well, would they take day jobs doing something else in
          order to do it in their spare time? Lots of mathematicians and
          scientists and engineers would. Historically lots have. But I
          don't think as many investment bankers would.

          This thought experiment is also useful for distinguishing
          between university departments.



          Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston,
          Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts
          of this.



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