What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. What Doesn't Seem Like Work by Paul Graham. My father is a mathematician.

For most of my childhood, he worked at Westinghouse, modeling nuclear reactors. He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they wanna do. When you talk to him about his childhood, there's a clear watershed at about age 12 when he, quote, got interested in maths. He grew up in a small Welsh seacoast town. As we retraced his walk to school on Google Street View, he said that it'd been nice growing up in the country.

Didn't you get bored when you got to be about 15? I asked. No, he said. By then I was interested in maths. In another conversation, he told me that what he really liked was solving problems.

To me, the exercises at the end of the chapter in a math textbook represent work, or at best, a way to reinforce what you learned in the chapter. To him, the problems were the reward. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook, he'd immediately work out all the problems, to the slight annoyance of his teacher since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually. Few people know so early or so certainly what they want to work on.

But talking to my father reminded me of a heuristic the rest of us can use. If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for. For example, a lot of programmers I know, including me, actually like debugging. It's not something people tend to volunteer. 1 likes it the way one likes popping zits.

But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it. The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do. When I was in college, I used to write papers for my friends. It It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking. Plus, they were always so relieved.

It seemed curious that the same task could be painful to one person and pleasant to another, but I didn't realize at the time what this imbalance implied because I wasn't looking for it. I didn't realize how hard it can be to decide what you should work on and that you sometimes have to figure it out from subtle clues like a detective solving a case in a mystery novel. So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you? This is another article that's kind of along the same lines of don't follow your passions, follow your efforts.

And I really like this one because it so closely mirrors my own experiences. When I was working at the accounting firm, there were a lot of things that I just didn't like doing. But there was one thing that I really liked doing that most other people seem to not like doing, and that was working with Excel. I absolutely loved it, and most other people didn't wanna deal with it. They saw it as kind of a necessary evil that they had to face to do their job.

So I wouldn't make up excuses to use Excel and to use complicated formulas and to write macros and to do things that were pretty much just overengineered. Because it turns out I wanted to actually be a programmer and not an accountant. So this thing that felt like work to everybody else didn't feel like work to me. That that felt like a lot of fun. It was all the other stuff surrounding accounting that felt like work and was terrible, and so I left there to become just a programmer, where I get to feed that portion of what I loved doing at the firm.

Now you may be thinking, okay. Well, I love watching Netflix, and I love eating donuts. So is that what I'm supposed to do? When it doesn't work exactly like that, you have to find something that you really like doing and that you really enjoy doing that other people, for the most part, don't like doing. What is something that you love that other people consider work?

And, you know, it doesn't even have to be love. What is something that you enjoy or something you don't mind that other people hate? Because if you don't hate it, if you kind of enjoy it or you even love it, then you're going to be able to stick with it longer than people who hate it and actively avoid it. And because you stick with it longer, you're gonna get better at it, and then you're gonna like it even more because people love things that they're good at. We like to do things we're good at.

We don't like to do things we're bad at. I feel like that's pretty straightforward. If you can find that little thing that most people hate, except for you, then you can nurture and grow that into an area of expertise. And like the author said, the stranger and weirder your tastes seem to other people, the better the odds are that that's something you should probably pursue or at least look into. And for those of you thinking, well, I've already been at my job 5 years, 10 years, or I've been I've been in this career for 5 or 10 years, and I'm not gonna switch at this point.

I was listening to a podcast recently called Chasing Product. And I'm gonna play a little bit of one of the recent episodes where he had a guy on there named Josh Doody. And Josh quit his job that he'd been working at for a long time to write a book because he wanted to be a writer. I'm gonna play a little clip of him talking.

Yesterday was the best time to do this thing, and today is the 2nd best. Right? Yes. Yes. And so back to my example where I said, you know, I'm I'm 10 years or so into a career.

And I said, you know what? I'm gonna try this on my own, and if it works, that's fantastic. And I'll spin it up, and if it doesn't work, then I can always go look for my next career move. I also kinda look ahead at while I've got, what, let's say 30 years left in my career, It seems sort of silly in that. If I'm looking at that kind of timeline, I'm I'm, let's say, a quarter of the way through my career or less, to use that quarter of the way in as a sunk cost that keeps me from trying anything different for the next 30 years seems really foolish.

He said to use that as a reason to not try anything new for the next 30 years seems a little bit foolish, and I totally agree. That's a long time. Because you've been doing something 5 or 10 years doesn't mean that's what you have to do for the next 30 years. You can still change it. Take a step back and consider, what do you not consider work that other people do consider work?

And that can point you in the right direction. The Music Makers is released every Monday at 9 AM CST. You can find show notes online at musicmakers.fm, or please send me an email and tell me what you think. Aaron@musicmakers.fm. I would love to hear from you.