Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That’s why he’s so good.
If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell’s equations and said, what the hell is going on here?
It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about....The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost
The very first part of this article discusses the value of knowing your options, and I’m beginning to feel that this is a key missing ingredient for productive self-determination and motivation.
I tend to systematically under-invest in the discovery of options. I chose an undergraduate major which I believed would provide me the broadest range of options upon graduation. What I had actually done was chosen an undergraduate major which provided a range of parentally approved, high paying, high status job options. I did not know that such a thing as a National Lab existed. I thought that professors just taught courses. Actually, I don’t think I had the faintest idea of what Academia was, or even what /science/ actually was. So obviously when I was trying to “broaden my options” I was not thinking about those options. I was thinking about the options that I already knew a lot about.
That said, it is impossible to know all the options. The linked article also points out that the job you’ll be doing in ten years probably hasn’t been invented yet. But I think that you can still find out the /types of work/ that exist. It took me a long time to realize that I hate being told what to do. Some people love being told what to do, and find it comforting and secure to do a clearly delineated job, and to become very good at that job. Sometimes I wish I was like that, but I’m not. I require creative freedom or I lose all motivation. You could call this a character flaw, but I see it simply as a useful fact to know about myself, and something I wish I had known when I was younger.
I went to college with a lot of people who fully intended on working just long enough to save enough money to retire, and then they would do what they really wanted to do. I do not possess the amount of discipline and/or delusion required to live my life this way. It sounds like AmagicalFishy doesn’t either. Maybe you can self-modify to become someone who enjoys something different than you do now, if you think the problem is that you enjoy the wrong things. I think it would be more realistic to first find out the type of things that you enjoy doing and thinking about and the way you interact with people, and then do a broad search for options that might fulfill those needs, attempting to avoid anchoring on the ones you currently think of as viable options.
This is similar to “You don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.” from xkcd.
I suggest reading this Paul Graham essay:
The very first part of this article discusses the value of knowing your options, and I’m beginning to feel that this is a key missing ingredient for productive self-determination and motivation.
I tend to systematically under-invest in the discovery of options. I chose an undergraduate major which I believed would provide me the broadest range of options upon graduation. What I had actually done was chosen an undergraduate major which provided a range of parentally approved, high paying, high status job options. I did not know that such a thing as a National Lab existed. I thought that professors just taught courses. Actually, I don’t think I had the faintest idea of what Academia was, or even what /science/ actually was. So obviously when I was trying to “broaden my options” I was not thinking about those options. I was thinking about the options that I already knew a lot about.
That said, it is impossible to know all the options. The linked article also points out that the job you’ll be doing in ten years probably hasn’t been invented yet. But I think that you can still find out the /types of work/ that exist. It took me a long time to realize that I hate being told what to do. Some people love being told what to do, and find it comforting and secure to do a clearly delineated job, and to become very good at that job. Sometimes I wish I was like that, but I’m not. I require creative freedom or I lose all motivation. You could call this a character flaw, but I see it simply as a useful fact to know about myself, and something I wish I had known when I was younger.
I went to college with a lot of people who fully intended on working just long enough to save enough money to retire, and then they would do what they really wanted to do. I do not possess the amount of discipline and/or delusion required to live my life this way. It sounds like AmagicalFishy doesn’t either. Maybe you can self-modify to become someone who enjoys something different than you do now, if you think the problem is that you enjoy the wrong things. I think it would be more realistic to first find out the type of things that you enjoy doing and thinking about and the way you interact with people, and then do a broad search for options that might fulfill those needs, attempting to avoid anchoring on the ones you currently think of as viable options.
This is similar to “You don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.” from xkcd.