Passion leads to hours of practice, and hours of practice leads to success. While you can't force yourself to be passionate about your current job, if you follow your passions - sincerely - I think that more often than not, it'll lead to a successful existence. I can think of very few passions where people can't at least maintain their existences. Maybe not get rich, I think in general that takes luck, but feed themselves and I think live happier as a result.
And honestly, what's the point of doing anything else? Be someone else's servant, because you want ... money? Recognition? You are going to die one day, and that's it. The purpose of life, as best I can tell, is self actualization.
It's stupid. You want money? Why? So your kids can follow in your footsteps and chase money so that their kids can follow in your footsteps and chase money so their kids can...
And then are you just blaming your children for your lack of ambition and risk taking? Would you say to your kids "I would have figured out what I loved, but then you were born". Would you think it, though?
If you want money, go work in finance. Otherwise you're not sincere in even chasing money, you're just treading water.
This (and its converse) are exactly the advice I give to undergrads who, here at the University of Chicago, are heavily recruited by both local and NY finance firms. I like to point out that if you love money, you will be among others who do and will probably enjoy your job and especially the pay. And if you don't, hearing about a trader's addition to his Rolex collection or figuring out "opportunities" in an exchange's rules or implementation will destroy your soul.
BTW, I don't give this advice in a loaded way - my wife and many of my friends work in finance.
As a recent uchicago grad, let me say your advice, while well intentioned, isn't quite sound. Work in finance is not as lucrative as work with finance. I was in finance for about a decade....at gs, bofa etc...the thing is, firms don't let you daytrade, or buy/sell naked calls, or short sell equities, or flout 90 day holding period rules, or trade stocks in the restricted blacklist, or...I could give you an dozen ways ib's ringfence you. Otoh, if you work in the valley and you know your shit, you can pull in 200k and wear shorts and torn tshirts to work, not be subject to any bureaucracy, and get your tradestation account and go nuts. Sell naked calls all day and nobody will bug you.
Certainly! If you want to trade on your _own_, then being in a financial firm - particularly a market maker - is a bad choice.
But if you just want to work 9-5, pull in your 200k (which goes pretty far in Chicago!), and enjoy your money, it's a pretty risk-free path.
I should caveat that my advice is given to CS undergrads looking to do tech-related work. I have more limited experience with people in other roles who want to be, say, traders on a desk.
Ah! In that case, professor, a couple more caveats. Chicago prop shops notoriously underpay. The IB's pay higher, but still less than google/fb/twitter. All of my uchicago classmates are in finance with roughly 50% in chicago, rest in nyc. With graduate degrees they don't pull in 200k...atleast as per the reported stats on the career counsel pages. So cs undergrads pulling in 200k in chicagob while working 9-5 in the finance industry....very unlikely. But if there is such a person out there, he/she is amazingly lucky. 200k goes very far in chicago. You could buy a nice 3 bdrm house with acreage about half hour from the loop and still have money to spare.
Not a prof, sadly - last year of my PhD, though! Thanks for the additional info on your peers.
I don't know what the undergraduate pay is like for 20-somethings. All of my friends (and wife) are > 30 and were experienced developers before entering the field. Most of them have bases above 200, but _all_ have total comps well over 200.
I'd be surprised if you make more at Google Chicago than at, say, Getco or Citadel as a new college hire developer. I'll ask around.
Certainly, though, if you accept with one of the butcher shops you should not be surprised to be treated like raw meat. The last time my wife was transitioning, she certainly experienced some offers that were just insulting. But these were also places just barely scraping by, so it shouldn't be a big surprise.
Of course, many of the top shops won't even hire new college grads in CS. They don't have or want to build the infrastructure required to take someone from barely pulling together a few thousands of lines of code to writing realtime software.
The small number of passions that most people can't earn enough from to maintain their existences tend to be those which are (i) shared by a lot of people and (ii) those in which success is least easily achieved through sheer willpower. Want to be an actor, a sport star, an author, like many people do? Chances are you'll never be good enough to earn a living at it (unless you count being a salesperson, personal trainer or author of press releases) because everybody else practises, and some of them are better and/or luckier. You can still have that self-actualization with your spare time drama group, sports team or novel that's just waiting for the right publisher, but in the mean time you'll probably need to spend the majority of your waking hours chasing an alternative source of money to put food on the table (sacrificing passion is very rarely about getting rich quick). It probably won't be in finance, because finance firms have exceptionally high standards too and you'd be surprised how many people are passionate about it. Want to be a bookkeeper or a refuse collector? No, neither do I, but someone has to do it and it's probably not their lifelong career aspiration.
I agree with your general point that focusing your attention on what earns the most money is likely to be a recipe for dissatisfaction, unless money offers you everything you want. But the article seems to be making - somewhat fluffily - the perfectly reasonable point that successfully solving others' problems barely related to your interests will usually satisfy (and earn) more than consistently failing to interest the world in personal projects the market doesn't care for, especially if that's because you simply don't have the aptitude to complete the project.
> The purpose of life, as best I can tell, is self actualization
I basically agree with you. But, do you have a definition or explanation of "self actualization"? I know Maslow talks about this (so maybe I should go read him).
To quote Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.:
"Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are 'It might have been.'"
And Tennyson/M: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield"
And Bruce Lee: "If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
I think it's about being totally comfortable with yourself and your existence, and being able to define your goals and ambitions, and separate them from the distractions.
We're all vain creatures, selfish, we have vices, we get offended, we seek acceptance, we hurt other people, we make excuses, we disappoint, and we never know what we want. We're often not fully present, distracted by dozens of things in the back of ones mind but not doing anything about it other than worrying, and pulled in many directions, unsure of how to proceed, left with high speed but low velocity. So I think that self actualization is being fully in control of yourself.
It's hard to describe. I was on a long bike ride in the country when I first experienced a glimpse of this. I'd biked maybe 80 miles, alone, winding road, no cars, empty mind, wind, time becomes irrelevant or just another dimension, and a singular purpose for that moment.
And how do you find out your passion is a passion?
So, this article may be overly facile (I agree with you that it is) but that doesn't mean he's entirely wrong, even if he's only right accidentally.
There's quite a bit of research into expert performance that shows that passion isn't in-born, but developed, and developed through hard work. The initial steps of most careers (even passion careers) are completely unenjoyable. Yes, maybe you are born with a passion for it, but that's very rare. Most people aren't born with an innate passion, not even most who eventually exhibit expert performance.
Most people come to be passionate about what they do well in, and you can't do well until you've gotten over the vicious first humps. What gets the non-born-passionate over the humps is simple dedication.
You might enjoy the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Or, for lighter reading, Kathy Sierra's blog/conference talks, which are based on a lot of that same research but much more fun to listen to.
Therein lies the challenge. And I agree with you that it comes down to dedication. Heck, the stuff I'm most interested in today I didn't even know existed five years ago.
The article said:
| "Passion is something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world."
Which I agree with. But then it went on to say
| Then apply this test: Will people pay you for it? Will they pay you a lot for it?
| "Money matters, at least in a relative sense," Newport says. "Money is a neutral indicator of value. Potential customers don't care about your passion. Potential customers care about giving up money."
Which I really disagree with as a first measure, to which I say - go work in finance. Your expected value there is far higher than doing anything else. Even if you'll go on to sell a company for $20 million to Google, you'll probably make more money in finance. Money is a side effect - it's important, but if you're looking for money first, I think that you'll miss the forest for the trees. Self actualization should be everyone's primary passion, I feel. And it's hard.
What I was getting at more was people who make excuses about not trying for that - always external, "I would, but I have kids", "I would, but I'm married", which I think are the worst kind of excuse (blaming your wife for preventing you from even trying to make anything of yourself! Can you imagine?). "I would, but I want more money to pay off more debt I used to buy a middle class car and a middle class house with a garage and a lawn and an iPad and a pool and and a vacation to some curated hotel in some third world country every couple years. So that's why I'm not trying to figure out who I really am."
I will check both of those out, thanks for the recommendations.
And honestly, what's the point of doing anything else? Be someone else's servant, because you want ... money? Recognition? You are going to die one day, and that's it. The purpose of life, as best I can tell, is self actualization.
It's stupid. You want money? Why? So your kids can follow in your footsteps and chase money so that their kids can follow in your footsteps and chase money so their kids can...
And then are you just blaming your children for your lack of ambition and risk taking? Would you say to your kids "I would have figured out what I loved, but then you were born". Would you think it, though?
If you want money, go work in finance. Otherwise you're not sincere in even chasing money, you're just treading water.