

Don’t follow your dreams: A commencement speech for the mediocre - acqq
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/22/dear_graduates_dont_follow_your_dreams_commencement_speech_for_the_mediocre/

======
ryukafalz
Reading things like this makes me kind of sad, because I feel like it really
shouldn't be this way. Hopefully, with the advent of more sophisticated
automation, many of our more tedious jobs won't need humans to do them.

I tend to be of the opinion that creating jobs for the sake of creating jobs
is a bad thing. If we get to the point where society can persist without
everyone having a job, why make people work to survive?

There's an interesting article along these lines here:
[https://medium.com/career-pathing/463ff6dfec1b](https://medium.com/career-
pathing/463ff6dfec1b)

The point here is that this would enable people to follow their dreams if they
chose to, and not die of starvation in the process. If you still wanted to
work, that's not a problem, and you'd make more money that way - but you
wouldn't die if you chose not to do so.

For that matter, we might be able to achieve this now with a basic income
system.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income)

Discussion at
[http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/](http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/)

~~~
plg
"many of our more tedious jobs won't need humans to do them"

We live in such a warped society here in North America.

Whatever happened to pride in craftsmanship, pride in an honest day's work,
pride in contributing to the community?

I bet there will be (perhaps google will lead with this) driverless taxis
soon, because after all "who wants to drive a taxi around all day?". Go to
Japan. Get in a Japanese taxi. You will see someone who takes the utmost pride
in their appearance, their interaction with the customer, the state of the
car, the ride, etc etc. It is an experience, to say the least. I believe there
is value in that... both to the community and to the individual.

Somehow in North America we have convinced ourselves that some jobs are
"beneath us" (and I'm not just talking about taxi driving here). It's puzzling
to me and it doesn't have to be that way.

~~~
rosser
_Somehow in North America we have convinced ourselves that some jobs are
"beneath us"..._

I'm sorry, but there _are_ kinds of labor that are "beneath" human beings. We
don't yet live in a world where people don't have to do those things, but that
doesn't change one whit the fact that some basic, minimum level of human
dignity, and some of the kinds of work humans have to do are fundamentally
incompatible.

~~~
sciguy77
I think the OP was talking more about woodworkers and other craftsmen than
poop-shovelers and toilet cleaners.

------
agorabinary
There's going to be a lot of developers on here who went the traditional high
school -> CS degree route and think that this alternative life anecdote offers
some real insights about the Other world of "passion-seekers", but it really
doesn't. The take-away is to stay curious and keep learning even if, most
likely, you will never find excitement in your life of corporate monotony,
which is of course how many people view paths like CS. From the article, "Most
people will have to choose between 'doing what they love,' and pursuing the
more mundane promise of a stable paycheck and a promising career path." I
think this is a false dichotomy common to a lot of college aged students.

I was like this for a while, working in restaurants and the sort before going
back to school, and in these jobs you find a lot of people who are afraid to
place a bet on a career so they can focus on some wholly non-unique set of
"interests". I noticed that few of these people actually pursue these supposed
passions to any real extent, and most of these interests were strictly of the
creative, non-pragmatic category.

I figured that such jobs offered flexibility from the rigid 9-5, and would
allow one to pursue these "interests" more freely. This is not the case.
Working a developer job you have mental stimulation from learning new things
and getting things done. This is normalized of course, and so it's important
to remind that working odd jobs while you "write your novel" is entirely
devoid of such stimulation, and I believe, actually and actively kills brain
cells. And this is the path the author suggests many of our "undecided"
college graduates will go? Say it ain't so! If you want to write a novel or
learn to paint, and if these are genuine passions, you will make time after
work and on the weekends.

It's less about "finding your passion" than it is developing a discipline to
work on big projects that is completely absent from high school and non-STEM
college education. Take your average "undecided" and finance them for a year
to follow their passion. A few will make something of their time. Harper Lee
did, writing To Kill a Mockingbird uninterrupted for a year thanks to
donations from friends. But most will not for the same reason many of us
developers (mundane corporate drones) struggle with our own interests and side
projects--- because we all lack the discipline. Bukowski summarizes this "myth
of creativity" well:
[http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/04/charles-
bu...](http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/04/charles-bukowski-air-
and-light-and-time-and-space/)

It feels good to solve hard problems and challenge yourself. Doing so at work
acts as a momentum towards your other goals and interests, and with
persistence, lead to a discipline of continued creativity.

In case you have not read PG's high school graduation talk, I highly recommend
it. Very relevant:
[http://paulgraham.com/hs.html](http://paulgraham.com/hs.html)

~~~
EdwardDiego
> This is normalized of course, and so it's important to remind that working
> odd jobs while you "write your novel" is entirely devoid of such
> stimulation, and I believe, actually and actively kills brain cells.

Hmm. I'm a developer now _because_ I had a brain-numbing government employee
job - I had developed an interest in programming as a young child, but it
never went anywhere, and I'd largely forgotten about it.

Fast forward, I'm stuck in an underpaid overworked dead-end job which I'm
resigned to because I have a wife and child to support, and I'm borrrrred. I
then stumble across a website discussing how fun and accessible Python can be
for newbies, and I give it a crack, and I'm hooked.

I get a new government job, better pay, less work, still boring. But the
boredom at work gives me a huge amount of mental capacity for my learning at
home. My sleep admittedly suffered because of my programming, but my work
didn't. In my downtime at work, I'd write programs. I spent a lot of time
learning JS because it was available to me for hacking on in my locked down
work environment.

After five years of government schlepping by day, and programming by night, I
met a man who could overlook my lack of qualification and who would give me a
chance to prove myself. And all that boredom finally paid off.

Now that I'm a developer, my work is so intellectually challenging and
interesting that I could not replicate the same learning that I did in my
duller days. I just don't have enough mental capacity left at the end of the
day, these days.

In summary - my boring day job gave me the capacity and impetus to learn to
code.

~~~
agorabinary
Thanks for sharing!

------
restless
I worked as bartender,eventecnician, MTB Guide, Skiing Instructor and a lot of
other part time jpns. Before I started study with 27 and finished something
like a year a ago. Working in software industry is a DREAM, you get a safe
job, good money and good working time. Yes good working time compared to
eventec it is insanly good. I financed my studys also with part time jobs in
the beginning and soon (2 semester) could start programming for a local
company, I needed to learn C# which just heard of in a GUI course and boy I
was working hard, everything I couldn't do in the company I did at home, this
brought me in the got position I am in today and that't what I would suggest
to students. Learn, work, learn harder, work harder. Learn what 1 dollar or
euro is worth. My role model Henry Rollins
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbnFJVgBcw0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbnFJVgBcw0)

~~~
gambiting
I have finished my BSc degree in Software Engineering and then did postgrad
MSc in Games Engineering from one of the best universities in the country for
such courses(literally 99% of people on the course get into the games industry
afterwards), as it has always been my dream job to work in games. Since I
started programming(vb at the age of 12) I always wanted to work as a games
programmer - that was my passion and my dream job. So I studied really hard at
school, obtained all certificates needed to study abroad, got really good
grades at uni,and got my dream job on the first try. It's exactly like you are
saying - safe job, good working time, nice benefits - there's only one
problem. The pay is literally half of what I could be getting in any other
computer science related industry with an MSc title here in the UK. My
girlfriend didn't do an MSc but went straight to work after her BSc in
Computer Science and she makes 12k more per year than I do.

But hey, I absolutely love what I am doing,and I always wanted to do it. So
should I just shut up and not complain about the money? Probably. But I am
just saying this here,that even with a software engineering degree, fantastic
grades and full portfolio, if you follow your passion you might end up making
less than you would like to.

------
jacquesm
I guess I dodged a bullet there. Not graduating meant not having a graduation
speech which meant I had nobody to discourage me about what I would/could not
achieve.

Sure I got lucky, and timing is everything. Even so, I think that it isn't
quite as bleak as this speech makes it out to be. There is a very large number
of solutions for the 'success' question, and it all starts off with how you
personally define it. By all means, follow your dreams, but keep a balanced
view and don't let your dreams mess up your life. At the same time, don't let
your life kill your dreams.

~~~
tzakrajs
Schools without graduation would be a better model for encouraging a life of
learning. The culture around graduation seems to be that of, "just get it over
with so you can get on with your life."

------
eabraham
Whenever I read articles like this I am surprised how people without a
technical background balance work and fulfillment. I am so happy that I can
find a developer position where I can be involved with such creative,
fulfilling work and not have to compromise for money. I'm amazed and humbled
by pieces like this and acknowledge the difficulty non-developers face when
building a career and life.

~~~
acqq
Have you ever tried to speak to people who aren't software developers? For
them, if you're a software developer, you're just a boring guy spending all
his wake time doing the most boring thing imaginable, sitting in front of the
computer, looking at the screen, typing something completely and utterly
uninteresting.

If they imagine doing this for their whole life, they'd say "I'd rather die."
And they certainly don't see any trace of possibility of what they consider
"creativity" in your job (my other comment here elaborates this claim).

(I work as a software developer myself, but I'm also aware of my biased view
of the world. And I've spent enough years doing that that I'm also at the
point of "I'd rather do something else... maybe becoming a lion tamer"
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMOmB1q8W4Y](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMOmB1q8W4Y))

~~~
lukasm
For those who have wrong mental model based on excel or something similar.

~~~
acqq
But I can be extremely creative in Excel! It can be programmed from the inside
and from the outside in more complex programming languages. But that's my
biased view where finding a way to implement something is perceived as
creative. For non-programmers, I'm implementing something boring in
fundamentally the only possible and utterly boring way: the program will get
some boring input and produce even more boring output. Whatever you do, you're
just making the connection between the two, which everybody can explain in a
few sentences, in general. Duh! Everything else are boring details needed
because the boring computers need them. And I, they observe, am earning my
salary because I'm stupid enough to spend my time on _that._ Somebody has to
do that too.

And don't think the people who claim that are stupid. A quote from Richard
Feynman himself, describing events in 1940-ties:

"Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the
computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a
very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble
with computers is you _play_ with them. They are so wonderful. You have these
switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do
that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are
clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any
attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very
slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator
automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print
columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent
automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one
operation.

Absolutely useless. We _had_ tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked
with computers, you understand the disease - the _delight_ in being able to
see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor
fellow who invented the thing."

[http://benjaminjcousins.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/richard-
fey...](http://benjaminjcousins.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/richard-feynmans-
computer-disease/)

(Of course, finding a best way to calculate arc-tangent on a given platform is
a serious task. We know that. Somebody has to do that too. Naive approach will
get a lot of errors, and also be to slow compared to the good investigated
approach. That, it can be said, is an engineering problem, not a problem for a
"developer." But still, we're just moving towards the "only" effective and
correct way. But if we consider it "fun", well, poor we).

~~~
jacquesm
But the playing is essential! Without the playing you'd never get past first
base. If I wouldn't actually enjoy this stuff I would have stopped doing it
long ago.

------
jt2190
The article wastes a lot of time on "stay curious" (not very useful advice
either!) and skips over _the_ most important tidbit:

    
    
      > [My girlfriend] made me accountable.
    

Accountability is absolutely the key difference between "going through the
motions" and "making progress". It is the way you put "deliberate" into your
10,000 hours of deliberate practice. It's the thing that tells you if you're
actually making any progress toward your goal.

------
mercer
Sam Spurlin wrote an interesting article that really resonated with me, and
this article reminded me of it. In particular this bit:

> I think there is an underlying metaphor that we can examine between values
> and passion. I'm not sure I can go a day without hearing or reading the
> advice about "finding a passion." I used to be a purveyor of this piece of
> advice as well. Until I figured out it's basically pointless. The belief
> that everybody has a particular passion waiting for them somewhere in the
> world and it just needs to be uncovered like a treasure under a rock is not
> helpful. Therefore, the dominant activity when trying to uncover or find
> this passion seems to be flitting from activity to activity, from rock to
> rock, looking for that elusive passion that will fix all your ills. There's
> a driving force that if you don't like your situation then you just haven't
> found your passion yet. I've since decided that this line of thinking is
> mostly fallacious and that "finding" is the wrong verb to use when
> describing passion. Instead, we should talk about "developing" passion. The
> focus is on action and practice. I feel the same way about values. The
> traditional way of thinking about value places little emphasis on actual
> action, just like the quest for finding a specific passion. Values shouldn't
> be discovered but developed over time, like passion. Both of these
> constructs need a radical overhaul.

It's worth a read: [http://samspurlin.com/blog/2012/2/12/values-dont-make-
your-l...](http://samspurlin.com/blog/2012/2/12/values-dont-make-your-life-
better.html)

------
Aloha
I've always told the soon to enter the job force something - "Pick two things,
one is your passion, you should always follow it, the other is a practical
skill you can always use to pay the bills - so yeah, go to school for game
design, but pay close attention to those IT classes too, and you'll always
have a job."

------
Tycho
A few thoughts:

\- good point about the selection bias of graduation speakers and now they
probably downplay the role of luck

\- what makes people even think they know what their dream job is? After
working for an interesting company for a few years their perception might
change dramatically

\- is it the job that is the dream, or is it the fame, esteem and wealth? Jobs
like being an author or a musician or an artist are probably less pleasant
than working in a nice office with a team you like

\- most of your heroes... Did they learn to be great in their field by
studying it in college?

\- on the other hand, advice to follow your dream might be good as long as you
give yourself a healthy dose of optionality/convexity

\- my advice to people would be don't settle for a job that bores or
distresses you, but prepare to be surprised just how fulfilling certain jobs
can be

------
thothamon
I'd say if you feel you can be happy in typical or standard career path, then
by all means save yourself a lot of trouble and do that. Some people really
are happier that way. If you're one of those who can't be happy in that
lifestyle, you probably know who you are. If you're one of those people, then
I think you have to keep trying for what you really want. Nothing else will
ultimately satisfy.

------
grifpete
If it is your dream to be truly exceptionally good at something then - if at
first you don't succeed, give up.

