
Do What You Love and Starve? (2006) - exolymph
http://www.martynemko.com/articles/do-what-you-love-and-starve_id1380
======
peppery
This article presumes the premise that "what you love"/"your passion" is the
same as "what you _can_ love"/the set of all "passions" you have not yet
discovered. This is untrue.

Especially for young people, the amount of time that you have been alive is
small compared to your lifetime. What you currently know to be interesting is
correspondingly a small subset of the number of things you can find
interesting over a lifetime, and an even smaller subset of the things which
you could find fulfilling to work on with many lifetimes. (For those who have
lived longer, your life experience makes it even more likely you can identify
fulfilling connections/facets of the universe to study.)

The challenge is to find the intersection between what you can be riveted to
work on, and what society values (in whatever its flawed wisdom) or can be
invited to value. This is not trivial, but the statistics of the universe are
on your side.

What sort of society would we be if e.g. Nikola Tesla/Jame Clark
Maxwell/Mozart/etc. had followed this advice?

To aspire is human, powerful, fulfilling. To eat is practical. It is possible
to do both. Society needs people who persist in that pursuit.

~~~
sametmax
Also, not only will you change, but if you invest in something, your taste
toward it will change as well. It's a nice trick for people looking for a
passion: invest yourself in anything that has depth and you don't have, and
you may end up getting passionate about it.

We often have it backward, trying to "feel like it" to do things. But it's one
of the tricky things in life: you may very well have to do things so you can
feel like it.

~~~
Regardsyjc
I started learning how to program so I could automate some of my business
processes. In the beginning I hated every minute of it. I would avoid working
on the project because it sucked but as soon as I made up my mind that I would
do this or die trying, it took being in the right mood off the table. It now
became, OK what's the next problem I need to solve to complete my project. I
ended up falling in love with the process and now I'm consistently
"programming" (more debugging?) for hours until I find a solution. I used to
hate that there was so much to learn, now it excites me that there are so many
new ways to improve.

------
hprotagonist
_Where to find a business to copy? Drive around to find a simple business at
which customers are lined up out the door. For example, see a successful
burrito shop or espresso cart? Open a similar one in a similar neighborhood.
Your chances of success will be a helluva lot higher than 20%._

... says the man who has obviously never done business in the food service
industry. The failure rate of restaurants is shockingly high.

~~~
D_Alex
Plus, I don't think you can build a great society on the back of burrito and
espresso shops...

~~~
sooheon
Why not? We have 8 billion people to build a great society with, I think 1/8
billionth of human effort could be directed to a great local burrito shop.
Great societies are built by people doing their part and loving their lives,
not by everyone trying to "change the world".

~~~
D_Alex
>I think 1/8 billionth of human effort could be directed to a great local
burrito shop.

But... that is not what the article was about - it suggested imitating an
already successful business. Whether you love that or not, by the way.

Now if a lot of people followed that advice, you'd get kind of what we have in
my home city, an oversupply of coffee shops, all trying desperately to stand
out, and nearly all struggling and being miserable.

------
faitswulff
> we’ve been sold a bill of goods when we’re told to “Follow your passion, “
> or “Do what you love and the money will follow.” Fact is, if you do what you
> love, you’ll probably starve.

I started thinking this somewhere around halfway through college, when my
parents were telling me to do what I love and I was trying to figure out what
to do for a living - especially when my parents were struggling, themselves. I
feel like "do what you love" was a really compelling pipe dream for my parents
because they had always done the opposite to get by and improve their
circumstances, and it sucked. They wanted better for their kids, but at the
same time, it is easily some of the worst advice I've ever received.

~~~
gh02t
It's give and take. Maybe not "do what you love no matter what" but "try and
do something you at least _like_ " is still good advice. If you force yourself
to do something you hate just because you think you'll make money not only
will you spend your life miserable, but you also likely won't be terribly
successful because it's hard not to burn out.

Said differently, making money matters and should be considered, but it should
not override all other factors when choosing a career.

~~~
aregsarkissian
Yes there is something like the intersection of three overlapping circles. One
is do things you like, the other is do things you are good at doing and the
third is do things that will give you income that you will be satisfied with.

------
TheMagicHorsey
This is the wrong forum for this advice. I think most of the people here are
not looking for a median income or a simple business. They want to swing for
the fences or transform the world.

Having said that, its good advice. Most people underestimate the joy you get
from a good solid, routine job that pays well. And they overestimate the joy
you get from a giant windfall ... such as you get when you finally take your
startup public or sell it off.

Also, I have met far more douchebags among the ranks of lawyers and VCs in
silicon valley than I have among the ranks of small business owners (my
brother owns a couple small businesses and his circle is very down to earth).

~~~
war1025
I think you underestimate the number of people that follow this site because
they like the content, but are quite content to have a median income and a
nice work-life balance.

~~~
rabbadabba_99
Or a 1% level income from a "lifestyle" business that's boring and never in
the news.

------
throwaway84742
My experience is, stuff you love is best done as a hobby, not professionally
unless you can’t live without doing it professionally. I have ended up doing
what I love professionally twice, and hated it both times, because guess what,
if you do it professionally you don’t get to do just the sexy parts, you have
to go whole hog and do the unpleasant ones as well. And worse, you can’t lay
it off for a while if you’re bored. This kills the “love” part right there and
then.

------
rebuilder
In the arts, the advice I've heard repeated over and over again is: If you can
live without this, do something else. And it's pretty good advice in my
experience. The visual arts / media sector at least has such an overabundance
of desperate workers that a sane working environment seems impossible to
achieve. So if you don't have an inner drive that absolutely forces you to go
into a field like that, do something else.

~~~
jurassic
I got the same basic memo when I was a PhD student in science, and I think I
would have quit sooner if not for the emotionally coercive aspects of this
advice. This advice replaces the rational question of "is this going to get me
to the economic future I want for myself?" and puts it into the emotional
space of "do I love this enough?". It implies that if you quit, you didn't
really love it. It makes it easier for those who benefit from this
exploitation to rationalize it when you leave, saying "Well, they must not
have been cut out for this anyway." For the young people making these do-I-
stay-or-do-I-go decisions, it means that in order to quit they must not only
be ready to give up their dream but also signal to their community that they
never really loved it anyway.

As an external observer of course it is ridiculous to say someone can't love
something and also recognize the disastrous financial implications of pursuing
a particular type of career. The turning point for me was recognizing that the
"expected value" outcome of the path I was not going to get me anywhere close
to a middle class lifestyle.

------
clay_the_ripper
Every job comes with pros and cons. I think the software engineers of the
world are part of a lucky few who demand high salaries, are able to find good
work/life balance and get to work on things they like (in general).

For the rest of us (I am not an engineer, but have worked in tech with many
engineers) I think there are perhaps more trade offs. I’m generalizing here
but in my experience and those I know, you can either :

-have an office job that pays well but is not all that fun, or restricts your freedom to do what you want

-have a fun job that doesn’t pay well

-Strike out on your own and potentially make more money and have fun but have all the downsides of entrepreneurship: stress, no security, demanding clients, high potential for failure etc etc.

Choose one that suits you best. All have downsides and all have upsides.
Depends on what you value. If it wasn’t work, no one would pay you to do it.
No job and unlimited money seems like the best option, but unless you’re born
rich that’s not really possible. Such is life.

~~~
quickthrower2
The downside of software dev is you typically need to work in a city, and then
pay extraordinary costs of living.

As a doctor, for example you can earn good money in a town that is no where
near as expensive.

~~~
fjsolwmv
Only mediocre devs in the biggest cities have trouble covering costs of
living. And you aren't going to make big bucks as a brain surgeon in Ames
Iowa. And doctors have to make back 4 years of lost income and 4 years of
medical school tuition and 4 years of entry level wages.

~~~
quickthrower2
That's a bold statement. It's challenging to support a family, pay rent on a
top 1% dev salary in my city (say $150k AUD). Sure you can make ends meet.

If my partner didn't work I'd have to give up being a dev and become a project
manager / BA.

------
SCAQTony
Yes, you should follow your passion 100% but it does not mean you can't have a
"Plan B" to fund your belly, family and shelter. It worked for me and I
happily doing "Plan A" right now. Why do people believe it is all or nothing
when choosing a career?

~~~
throwa_way_
If you're hedging with other plans then you're not really following your first
passion 100% are you?

~~~
SCAQTony
It's not hedging, it's being industrious. Imaging working on your passion just
2-4 hours a day seven days a week? You get really good, FAST!

My day day job was at Nuance, (I quit the end of January) and I was UI
designer there. "Plan A" is doing fine art and I got really good at it for I
was always doing something art related 10-12 hours a day.
[http://www.gkaustin.com/](http://www.gkaustin.com/)

------
prawn
Derek Sivers had a blog entry the other year where he suggested finding a
tolerable, well-paying job, then a passion. And then keep your passion as an
evening/weekend distraction rather than trying to turn it into a financially
viable thing you can live off. Earn money from the job, not your hobby.

Otherwise you end up forcing your art/passion through a sieve of viability
(struggling to sell your music, for example), or becoming disillusioned with
an otherwise unremarkable job.

~~~
scarecrowbob
True: I found a 30/h a week remote programming job and now I can afford to
play music professionally. LOL

------
chillingeffect
Time for everyone to remember Ikigai, the overlap between what you like, what
you can get paid for, what you're good at and what the world needs:

[https://www.hyperisland.com/community/news/feeling-
drained-a...](https://www.hyperisland.com/community/news/feeling-drained-at-
work)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai)

------
rossdavidh
One thing rarely said: if you are trying to get into a career where more
people want to do it, than the market can give jobs to, in order to get a spot
you will have to kill somebody else's dreams. The harsh math is, if there were
2 people for every 1 position, and you get 1, then somebody else gets to be a
loser because you got that spot.

It's not your job to make that person a winner, of course. But that helps to
balance out the propaganda part of "follow your dreams". If you pick a career
where more people want to find someone who does it, than there are people
doing it, you don't need sharp elbows to keep others out of your spot. Careers
in acting, singing, non-profits that actually pay a salary, etc. tend to have
harsh internal politics. This is why.

------
haZard_OS
I must say I'm puzzled by the author's choice to include environmental work
alongside the arts/humanities as being examples of "follow your passion and
starve".

As a scientist working in the environmental field(s), I can confidently say
that there is far more work than there are people to do it. Unless he meant to
specify NON-scientific work addressing the environment, I can't fathom what he
is referring to.

~~~
dyim
I think he's talking about the Blackfish-style, Greenpeace-ier environmental
stuff.

My dad's in the environmental field too, and that sounds about right. He spent
about 20 years working as a jack-of-all-trades-CTO-type guy for a Western
Widget Company, made a six figure salary, and was home every day by 5 PM. I
know a lot of my friends' finance-sector parents didn't get to spend nearly as
much time with their kids. There's a lot of very good advice in this article.

------
nicodjimenez
Life is way too complex and it's hard to generalize. Telling people that by
following their passion they will be starve is dangerous advice. So what if
people fail? Why is everyone so afraid of failure? And then telling people to
replicate instead of innovating! I do agree the passion thing is oversold but
now people are going too much in the opposite direction, especially after Cal
Newport's book.

------
hnzix
...and that is the story of why I quit graphic design to program CRUD webapps
for boring enterprise customers.

Now moving towards part-time consulting and setting up some passive income
streams to try and create the space to work on my creative projects before I
get old and die.

------
grosjona
You have to work for companies where capital accumulates quickly and then find
a way to sandwich yourself between where the capital is and where the capital
wants to go.

Follow capital and consumers will follow you.

------
mrlyc
Do what you love, what you are good at and what people are willing to pay for.
Sometimes you have to do the first one as a hobby and the last two as a job.

------
illnewsthat
Interesting take on passion vs. money.

Does anyone else think "requires a reasonable commute" doesn't fit on the list
of "keys to career contentment"?

~~~
ForHackernews
I think it is! A reasonable (as opposed to unreasonable) commute makes your
day-to-day life much more pleasant.

~~~
illnewsthat
I guess it makes sense thinking of it as reasonable vs. unreasonable.

It didn't make sense to me at first, because I think working from home could
add to quality of life, and it felt as if they were specifically saying you
NEED to commute. But it probably just means, if you do commute, don't make it
2 hours each way.

------
mellowdream
Most people don't have the IQ, psychometric personality profile, and
circumstantial history (the right/rich family, friends, networks, etc.) in
conjunction to succeed.

Romanticism, per Goethe and Nietzsche, has always erred toward the side of
spiritual sickness - it's often nothing more than an opiate to distract
oneself from the mundaneness, difficulties, and responsibilities of authentic,
lived experience.

Say what you will of Jordan Peterson, but I believe his experience as a
credentialed psychologist and counselor is worth considering as well - one is
more likely to preserve his sanity by pursuing (perhaps unpleasant, but stable
and providing) responsibility rather than upheaving his life with little more
than a mistaken impression via survivorship bias.

~~~
yters
It'd certainly be interesting to see the other side of all the success
stories.

------
ggm
.. except the franchise thing? It's a huge ripoff risk: you pay licence fees
up the wazoo for brand value and models which can be terrible. As in any
endeavour, you have to do your homework. Lots of franchise holders looking
enviously at class action suits to recover

------
bitL
I absolutely despise the advice about cloning; why do we need dozens of clones
of the same idea, all of them executed poorly, so that somebody can build
their business quicker and have safe returns? What's the point of such life?

------
nikkwong
Heh, I don't know how I feel about this, at least for people who are highly
talented. Intelligent hard working people at this day in age often choose
practical career paths that they like, which lead to ample job opportunity.

------
nerdponx
I prefer "do what you like enough to keep doing it every day, so that you can
earn enough income and time to do what you _really_ love after-hours."

------
paraschopra
My entire blog is on this premise: following your passion is a recipe for
economic failure as economic value gets created when you help other people
follow their passion. I write about this here
[https://invertedpassion.com](https://invertedpassion.com)

------
JulianMorrison
UBI, do what you love and prosper.

------
p3llin0r3
What a crock of crap.

"Don't be ambitious: be mediocre and replaceable."

He's right. Don't try to be a youtube star or a professional athlete, or an
actor. Do something realistic.

But I mean... do something ambitious for god's sake! Be an accountant! Be a
doctor! Be a computer programmer! Hell: Be a lawyer. These are not crazy pipe
dreams.

Lets say someone makes $120k as a programmer a year taking out NO debt, and
having NO risk invested in the company they work for. That is a damn healthy
small business.

~~~
corndoge
being a programmer is pretty far from ambitious these days, I am already
beginning to regret my career choice just a few years into it and I make six
figures doing exactly the programming I always wanted to do and more. I am
already bored of what can be done with computers and the entire tech culture
that I grew up in and loved. it is so repetitive.

~~~
neffy
A lot of programming, especially in industry, is horribly boring unfortunately
(it shouldn't be) - but computers and what can be done with them, is anything
but. It's just a question of somehow keeping your imagination from getting
bogged down by the job.

~~~
corndoge
I work on gpl'd systems software that is very relevant to my interests but I
look to the future and can't see myself doing this for many more years,
software as a whole is just so depressingly mundane

