

Do whatever makes you happy is a lie - staltz
https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/eff9c8ca5285

======
woodchuck64
Arnold Schwarzeneggar said it pretty damn well on Reddit:

"We can't always do what we are passionate about, but everything we do can
move us closer to our passion. I was never passionate about construction. But
I laid bricks and worked so I could support my passion when I was starting out
in bodybuilding.

The most important thing is, you need to find your passion. And once you do,
put everything into it. Everything."

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/19sjfo/this_inspire...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/19sjfo/this_inspired_me_and_i_bet_it_will_inspire_you/c8qzryg?context=1)

~~~
VLM
"I was never passionate about construction."

Its interesting that HR would never permit him to be hired now a days.

~~~
alextingle
What? As a brickie's labourer? I think strength, and willingness to work hard
are quite sufficient qualifications for that job.

~~~
VLM
We're on hacker news... I think the analogy with pretty much any entry level
(or non-entry level) tech job is pretty obvious.

~~~
ZoF
Except that your comment is completely nonsensical... You can't apply one
industries hiring metrics to anothers as if they translate in some way(when
they clearly don't).

Not being passionate about laying bricks doesn't mean you won't be hired for
menial labor, not being passionate about a position in this industry might
very well stop your from being hired for a programming job...

~~~
johnward
but why must you be passionate about software development? What if you aren't
really passionate but you are still a good programmer? What's so bad about
that?

I'm curious because I've never really been "passionate" about any job. In fact
I've dislike or downright hated every job I've ever had. I still think I
perform well because I have to. Jobs are a means to an end.

~~~
ZoF
Yep, I agree, I wasn't trying to say that the process of determining whether
someone is "passionate" is the correct way of doing things.... For an
intelligent person the system is easy to identify and cheat anyway...

I was just pointing out that a bricklayer won't be vetted for "passion"
whereas a programmer very well could be.... Whether a programmer should
be(especially given that "passion" is basically an impossible to measure
metric) is an entirely different discussion.

My apologies for presenting my point in such a confusing manner.

------
reustle
I've been traveling around the world working 20-40 hours a week on my side
projects (startups) for extremely little money. I actually haven't spent a
dime in the last 1.5 months.

How do I do it? I spend an additional 10-15 hours working wherever I'm living
in exchange for a room and all of my food. It's called WWOOFing, you've
probably heard of it. The nice thing is, I get to focus on whatever it is I
want without worrying about bills. Sure, it's not for everyone, but I couldn't
be happier with how I get to spend my time.

I'm in the middle of brewing up a blog post about this, so feel free to get in
touch if you're interested in more about this.

PS: Here is where I currently am (Norway):
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/reustle/9465059825/lightbox/](http://www.flickr.com/photos/reustle/9465059825/lightbox/)

~~~
wffurr
WWOOFing sounds like a lot of fun! Wish I had done that instead of go to
graduate school and accrue debt. Now I'm stuck paying that off, and when
that's done my wife and I want to start a family. Maybe our children can WWOOF
if that's still a thing when they're of age...

~~~
VLM
"Maybe our children can WWOOF if that's still a thing when they're of age"

WWOOF is a marketing term / organization for what amounts to being an intern
on an organic / permaculture farm.

I've done some fun genealogy and per census records going back centuries young
people have done this kind of thing, so as long as organic / permaculture
farms still exist, our kids will be able to intern if mutually acceptable.

Beyond peasant labor there's an implied educational aspect where most WWOOFers
want to run their own farm some day and are touring around learning how. If
you're not learning anything new anymore, its time to move to the next farm.
Unless you got a masters in Ag Sci its probably not a fair comparison.

In the ancient apprenticeship structure, its basically being a journeyman in
the field of organic farming.

I've read a lot about it from having a goal of redesigning my backyard
according to permaculture guidelines, although not having the
time/weather/money combination optimized to really accomplish anything. One of
my neighbors has an excellent permaculture designed backyard, which is both
appealing to the eye and interesting to think about.

~~~
reustle
I would just like to note that not all WWOOFing spots are organic farms. Where
I'm currently living, we have a sawmill, some fields that get cut and bailed
by someone else, and some sheep that are starting to find their way back from
the mountains for the winter.

~~~
VLM
Ah thats interesting, I thought they were all O.farms or similar. The original
argument still stands that even if WWOOF went PPOOF and disappeared, they'd
still be interns at the sawmill... although it would probably be harder / less
efficient to match up the interns with the opportunities.

There's probably a startup idea involving WWOOF as a template for other fields
of endeavor. Probably not hyperregulated field like becoming a surgeon, but
maybe something a little less regulated like a tree-surgeon or something in
tech. A formalized online group to help "guide" the internship process in tech
or maybe media?

~~~
reustle
[http://helpx.net](http://helpx.net) fills that gap

------
kylec

        Telling investors that the startup makes no revenue is a joke to them
    

Maybe this is just poor word choice on the part of the author, but a startup
with no revenue _is_ a joke unless you haven't launched yet. If you have, you
still haven't taken in any money, you might want to think about whether the
product or service you're offering is worth someone paying for.

On the other hand, if the author meant "profit" instead of "revenue", then
this sentence makes far more sense, there are plenty of promising startups and
companies whose expenditures currently exceed their revenues, and shouldn't be
outright dismissed by potential investors.

~~~
bluedino
"We have a million and a half users in 3 months" is a pretty good substitute
for "We're making a million dollars in revenue a year"

~~~
qu4z-2
By that heuristic "free-beer.com" is a great startup! :)

------
dragonwriter
Author's problem seems to be "what I thought would make me happy doesn't"—so
the issue isn't that "do whatever makes you happy" is a lie, it's that it's a
learning process, not something who h involves one choice and never thinking
again.

~~~
skore
He also underestimated another crucial fact: What he _thought_ would make him
happy didn't turn out to make him enough money to be happy. So in the end, it
didn't make him happy for _two_ reasons.

Really doesn't warrant the title.

------
jasonkester
I think the advice is sound, but it's phrased in a way that can be easily
misinterpreted (as the author discovered). Better would be:

"Arrange things so that you can do whatever makes you happy".

As an example, Rock Climbing, Surfing, and Travelling (to do those other
things) make me happy. So I program computers.

Notice that Programming Computers doesn't necessarily make me happy directly
(though lucky for me I do find it plenty of fun). It does, however, allow one
to quickly sock away a bunch of money by working a contract, and has lots of
easy and socially acceptable ways to quit (contract ends/startup burns a hole
in the ground). The end result is that I get to spend a lot of time
Travelling, Climbing, and Surfing.

Now, had I misinterpreted "do whatever makes you happy" as "find a job doing
whatever makes you happy", I'd be guiding people up easy routes and hosting
children's birthday parties at the crag for $60/day. That would not, in actual
fact, make me happy. Even though technically I'd be climbing rocks all day
every day.

So yeah, turns out it is actually quite simple. Better still, by virtue of
being here to read this story, most of us here are in a really good position
to do exactly the same thing.

------
steven2012
It sounds like the author has mistaken the original advice of "Do what you
love" as "Do what you think you love". How can this person know he "loves"
being an entrepreneur when he never was one?

I guess he thought that being an entrepreneur meant more "If you build it,
they will come", which is wrong. The reality of it is that creating a startup
takes a lot of different skill sets, including knowing how to build a business
and managing cash flow, etc. And just because you love the idea of being
something doesn't mean you are actually good at doing it.

------
mathattack
There's a sad reality, which is most fun things don't pay the bills for the
median performer. Otherwise more people would be doing it, driving the wages
down. The exceptional guitar player makes a killing doing what they love. Not
the person at the 95th percentile, let alone the 50th.

~~~
cousin_it
So the advice reduces to "do the most fun thing you can do that pays the bills
for the median performer". Sounds about right. Stronger versions, like "follow
your passion no matter what" coming from Schwarzenegger, are wrong because of
survivor bias.

I suspect that in many competitive fields persistence actually hurts people in
aggregate, and everyone would benefit if everyone agreed to be less
persistent. For example, in a sports competition with a large prize for #1,
making people more persistent won't grow the size of the prize. After a
certain point, the sum of resources spent by all participants will be greater
than the prize, but by the deadly logic of game theory, everyone will just
keep spending more and more. The same thing seems to be happening in
music/art/writing/acting (because popularity is a zero-sum contest), and parts
of the startup scene (for the same reason).

~~~
mathattack
Or "do the most thing you can do that pays the bills based on a _realistic_
assessment of your competence."

~~~
cousin_it
Unfortunately there are many biases that stop people from realistically
assessing themselves.

One good trick is using the "outside view", deliberately tricking your brain
into ignoring all the special details of your situation and looking at the
typical case instead. For example, "how long do you think your classmates will
take to finish their theses?" vs "how long do you think it'll take you to
finish your thesis?" Studies show that asking the first question yields a much
more accurate answer to the second question than asking the second question
directly :-)

~~~
mathattack
This works when asking someone else, but how about asking oneself?

I try to come up with some objective metric. "I think I'm fast, how does my 50
yard dash compare?" "I think I'm smart, how were my grades? And standardized
test scores?" Even still, the smartest amongst us have the best ability to lie
to ourselves. Everyone thinks they're in the top half, and most in the top
quartile.

~~~
cousin_it
If the question is whether to drop everything and follow your passion, e.g.
game development, you can ask yourself what will happen to the typical person
who decides to follow that passion. The answer is obvious, they run out of
money.

Then you can try to adjust the starting conditions, and ask what happens to
the typical person who decides to do gamedev while having a day job. The
answer is again obvious, they stay afloat financially but fail to complete the
game.

And so on, you keep adjusting the starting conditions until you find a
scenario that works for the typical person. This is similar to the startup
advice saying "make a product that people would buy even if it wasn't very
good".

~~~
mathattack
Isn't the unfortunate ending that very little greatness is achieved by the
mean or median person?

------
lnanek2
> Even if it would get investment, most investors would typically push me to
> make money as soon as possible.

Hell no they don't. They push you to get users/hyper growth. The whole point
of investment is to let you grow faster than you can bootstrapping, which this
article then goes on to say is the way to go with sustainability being
paramount.

If you go for bootstrapping and sustainability and a competitor is being VC
funded and burning down their runway of cash every year, they are going to
blow you away in growth and your company will be irrelevant.

------
bcl
"So Good They Can't Ignore You" does a good job of covering this -
[http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-
You/dp/145550912...](http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-
You/dp/1455509124)

------
mcdougle
Recently, I went on vacation to the beach with some friends, and before I left
I snagged some books from my father's bookshelf, one of which was "Big Bucks"
by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. It's short and simple and I was able to
read it through quickly.

The message is pretty intuitive, and not especially innovative, but over the
course of the book, the story lays out 3 rules of success:

1.) Do what makes you happy -- this way, "work" becomes "play" and you
actually get excited enough to put the necessary hours and effort into it.

2.) Monetize what you're doing -- prioritize money and success over "play" \--
you can do what you love all day, but unless you actually make it bring in
cash, it's still just playing!

3.) Focus on increasing your income moreso than cutting costs -- not really
relevant for this article, I guess.

I think what happened here was that the author didn't make it to step 2. He
was enjoying what he was doing, but he wasn't striving to monetize it -- at
least, not to the extent that turns it from a hobby into a successful means of
income or cashflow.

(btw I recommend the book, even though it probably just tells more of the same
stuff you read in many other success books)

------
niuzeta
If _making money_ is the goal and not the means, of course you're going to
stop liking it when the prospects stop looking good.

------
Yhippa
Do the highest-paying job that you hate the least.

~~~
ionforce
I get what you're saying but taken literally, this would imply that there are
multiple, equally high-paying jobs, when in reality there's probably only ever
one, which has a constant value of hate.

What we need is a normalized value that is proportional to pay but inversely
proportional to hate. This is probably what you meant.

~~~
dragonwriter
> What we need is a normalized value that is proportional to pay but inversely
> proportional to hate.

Well, except that _positive utility from pay_ (what you'd really want to weigh
against disutility, or "hate") probably isn't directly proportional to pay
(several studies have shown decreasing marginal utility from increasing income
and even a point beyond which the marginal impact of additional income on
realized happiness becomes undetectable.)

And you probably want to maximize _net_ utility (utility - disutility), not
(utility/disutility).

------
wffurr
It's bizarre how much shelter, food, clothing, health care, internet access,
etc. cost given how productive our economy is.

Guaranteed basic income + a modicum of required public service would allow
people to literally do whatever makes them happy and drastically reduce
suffering.

------
nickthemagicman
I agree with this 100%.

Happiness is an arbitrary condition based more on psychological factors than
actual actions performed.

And as such should never be the full determining factor of your career.

For example, what makes you happy changes as you grow. Also, environmental
conditions instill certain standards of happiness in people and as those
conditions change so will a persons perception of what makes them happy.

Somtimes a simple change in your perception and internal state can do more for
your happiness than changing some external materialistic aspect of you life
like a new job or new car.

Existentialists would say: "love what you do".

------
bitwize
A lot of people in the HN nouveau riche tend to forget: you can't just skip to
the self-actualization bit; there's a whole hierarchy of needs you have to
fill first. Starting with food on the table.

------
tomasien
Outside of hubs, and even in hubs, it's ridiculously hard to raise money for a
startup that isn't making money. I had so many conversations with investors
for thecityswig.com who literally did not even want to have a conversation
about user and customer traction if it didn't involve them writing me a check
or paying me for something - no matter HOW good the news was. Did not even
want to hear it. And maybe that's ok, maybe that's even good, but it's
certainly true.

------
edsiper2
Happiness is not an "end", its about to enjoy everything you do.

If you enjoyed the process, does not matter if your startup failed or not,
thats a total different thing.

------
doctorwho
Let me fix that title for you...

Do whatever makes you happy (without taking reality into account) is a lie
(well, not a lie, just a wee bit stupid and naive).

Like people who go to university with NO IDEA what they want to do when they
get out and then whine about not having a job and a huge student loan when
they graduate.

Think. Decide. Do. And take responsibility instead of looking for someone to
blame for why you are where you are in life.

------
RafiqM
"Do what you love" comes with caveats BUT ... you didn't do what you love.

You said what you love is building a product. However, what you chose to do is
be an entrepreneur. These are different things.

You took on a combination of building a product and building a business.

If you had just built a product, without the necessity of having to make it a
business, then I guess you would be much happier.

------
feintruled
I agree with others that OP has likely just misidentified what it is makes him
happy, but I don't think that what it really was is necessarily money. Sounds
like the author was actually most happy when he was designing his startup. So
maybe he needs to focus more on the bit he actually likes - i.e. the creative
process of designing web platforms. This may mean getting a salaried job with
another company.

~~~
staltz
OP here. I pretty much enjoyed the whole journey up until now when it got
unsustainable. Creative initial designs are really fun, but I have lots of fun
also perfecting the system and seeing users coming in. It really "makes me
happy".

------
speeder
Unfortunately, he is very much correct.

My associate, left finance to do something that he thought it was valuable to
the world, that was make Android (because for iOS it was already a popular
business, but Android noone was doing yet) games for children, with quality,
and ethics, no ads, no in app purchase, no abusive tactics, no information
tracking...

He came to me with that dream, and I jumped on it.

Now 1 year a a couple months forward, we have lots of free downloads, almost
none paid downloads, also although other stores invited us, OEM contracts were
offered to us, and whatnot, Apple and Google ignore us (I cannot decide what
is worse, Apple, that we cannot find how to contact them at all, or Google,
where a Developer Advocate review all our newly launched apps, and all of them
so far he approved and sent to the editorial team, that... did nothing with
them).

Then we look at our competitors, and what we see is: those having profits, are
those that throw away ethics, like making games that allow kids to buy 1500
USD in smurfberries, or that not only put ads, but put them in a ambiguous
manner so that kids activate them by accident. Those that follow the same path
as us, are all extremely unprofitable, no matter the quality of their apps,
the exception is those owned by huge conglomerates (ie: TocaBoca for example,
owned by Bonnier) or those that profit from something else (for example making
unprofitable kid games, and selling outsourcing services to other companies).

The reason we don't jumped ship yet, is mostly because there IS some wildly
profitable companies out there (as I said, for now mostly conglomerate-owned
ones), and the market is still new and growing, and we are trying to be one of
the early ones on it. But it is painfully obvious and tempting the power of
unethical behaviour.

~~~
RyanZAG
Great job trying to do something to help the situation, but unfortunately
simply wanting to help is not a substitute for market research: very basic
research would have shown you that many ethical pay-for games for children
exist on iOS and Android, however you don't hear about them and they're hard
to find because nobody buys them. It looks like you researched the (few)
successes, but not the (many, many) failures.

The reason most consumers will know about the games that let children buy IAPs
is because these games make a lot of money, which gives them large advertising
budgets which lets them quickly climb the sales charts. You also see the big
conglomerate ones because of advertising. As anybody involved in the Apple or
Play store will tell you, most of the money goes to the top apps, and being a
top app for any decent length of time requires heavy advertising: either paid
or viral. You won't get viral advertising for an ethical children's game.

I honestly don't believe it's even possible to succeed with a quality
children's game and make livable money off app store purchases from an unknown
developer. Your best bet is to fund it from outside of the app store using
something like Kickstarter which will hopefully drum up some support in
addition to cash flow. Another option may be to sell it somehow in brick and
mortar children's stores at the same kind of prices physical children's games
are sold, possibly by including your game on some cheap hardware as a complete
package. Either way, good luck, and keep looking for novel business ideas to
keep it going!

~~~
speeder
Oh, like I said, the idea came from not finding quality games on Android at
all, while some existed on iOS (like I mentioned, TocaBoca is a powerhouse
there).

My associate has a kid, and some of his friends has kids too, and they bought
Android tablets, and quickly ran out of games to install.

Only this year TocaBoca started porting their games to Android for example.

------
alextingle
"Anecdote" is not the singular form of "data".

This guy has had one bad experience, and from it immediately derives a general
rule that applies to everyone. How narcissistic!

~~~
johnward
Isn't that kind of where "do what you love" came from?

------
D9u
Serial killers "love" killing...

------
6d0debc071
Do whatever makes you happy is an ideal, and pragmatic in so far as you'll
have an advantage in that area as compared to someone who doesn't have any
passion for what they're doing.

Of course someone with passion and some other edge like a superior education,
or fewer ethics (in some areas,) or who just started earlier than you - is
still going to beat you if you're in a particularly competitive area.

