I thought this would be a dream experience, sitting at my computer and creating beautiful prose for hours a day, my creativity flowing like a river.
After about 20,000 words (a debut novel should be between 70-100k words), it turned into hard work. One thousand words a day becomes quite tedious, especially when the initial steam wears off.
Great, so I pushed through for months, putting in the daily grind. Draft complete at 90k words! First round of edits, cutting almost 20,000 words (about a month of work, all for "nothing"). Back at the writing grind again to get the word count and story aligned to be more marketable.
Edit number two complete. Edit number three complete. Beta readers telling me there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This character sucks, this character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc. Just now wrapping up edit number four, and I'm actually quite happy with how it reads.
But now... onto the business end of this deal, querying agents. Agents reject about 99% of the pitches that come into their inbox. The 1% gets a full manuscript request. Of those 1%, about 10% get offers of representation.
An offer of representation often turns into several more rounds of edits before the agent will sell it to a publisher. So if I'm lucky enough to get an agent, it'll be even more editing (my least favorite part of this process so far).
THEN, the agent has to successfully sell the book to a publisher. The odds that this happens also pretty low. And since I'm a first-time writer, I'd be looking at a pretty small five figure advance for what will end up being about two years of work.
Anyways... writing, my favorite form of art, has become a roll-of-the-dice grind. I'm not sure I would go back in time and do this again, but regardless, I've come this far so...
I think chasing a "dream career" whatever that is can be a tough lesson in setting realistic expectations in what it means to make money.
> Beta readers telling me there are big holes here, there, everywhere, This character sucks, this character doesn't make sense, etc etc etc.
I think what makes a great story, and novelist for that matter, are some of those rough edges and you should ignore the critics just like an opinionated CEO might be advised to do. Those people may be looking out for you, but you're the artist and can use your vision to create your world with your unique voice!
And you're right, it's important to only take beta readers' opinions as just that, opinions. It is super helpful though to get their take, as I've been so close to the project where sometimes I can't see the forest for the trees.
Definitely noticeable though, sometimes authors get too attached to the smell of their own farts to realize their writing is suffering under the weight of their own hubris.
But if you find your work fundamentally painless, you can put any amount of passion in on top: you're still getting it done on your lowest days, and on your good ones you will cruise into exceptional output.
As such you can derive the well-known market preference for "bandaids over vitamins" from the sum total of all individuals looking for a way to take more of the pain out of their work. But the biggest optimization you can make is simply in choosing which work to do.
There’s a reason why people take pride in being “a professional” or “tough”. You need to suck it up and push through sometimes.
“Find your passion” is trope, but it’s also true, because that obsessive passion that people have about the ordinary is what allows them to create the extraordinary.
I will teach you to be rich does this really well. I don't have a good analogy for fiction but I'm sure they exist.
Or go up to the top of a mountaintop at just the right time for the sky god to make an appearance and hand you the third testament.
Or, go back in time again, choose different parents and become a record scoring footballer. By adopting this strategy you would have the slight challenge of creating a time machine but you will also not have to write those 90000 words, a ghostwriter would be able to just magic out of thin air whatever you bark out loud. They would sort out the plot holes and the movie deal too.
Or you could go back to startupsville again and scratch this itch. It should be possible to crowd-source decent novels in a way that is not so humiliating and nigh on impossible. I know this has been attempted before but the nearest we have to it at the moment it self publishing on Amazon where people do reviews and people buy on the basis of those reviews. There have been success stories with this. But we know those reviews are bought and everything is corrupt.
Joking aside I do think that there is another way of getting published - write the book that needs to be written. Not a rehash of ideas, something new. A new story that does not fit into the existing pantheon of beginnings/middles and endings. Something that people must read and must get their friends to read, no publicity needed. You could make this free and entirely web based, no ISBN number or dead trees. Much like how musicians do stuff for free on YouTube and then a publisher courts them to do something for money. However, even this is not strictly easy and the stories you hear of this often involve a musician who happens to have chosen the right parents, e.g. Lily Allen and how she started on Youtube, only later do we learn of the famous and well connected dad.
Writing a book that has to be written might not be passion though. If you discovered some unjustice going on and were compelled to write then that would not be passion, more of a moral question of not staying silent.
Anyway, regarding the original article, why is it that 87% of people in the workplace are clock watchers, as if serving an eight hour school detention on a daily basis? Clearly they are not following their passion. But, of the 13% that don't clock watch and do have some passion for what they do, these people can be in any department, office or factory. They are not necessarily writing novels, making music, teaching yoga or directing films. Passion is more of a transferable skill that should be taught.
You can enjoy what you do most of the time though. Thanks to your brain also. I find it harder when working for somebody because money is not necessarily a good enough motivator. But when working on my own project and faced with a tedious task (writing tests, fighting dependencies or whatever it is that you despise), I think why do I want to do it (e.g. I want my project to succeed it and it needs it). You can try to achieve your goal without the thing that you don't like. If you think that this is not possible, then wanting your project to succeed and wanting to do this task are the same thing. They are connected.
Once you realize this it makes things much more simple. Most of suffering seems to come from some semi-conscious story in your brain: I want A but without doing B. Either it's possible to do that or it's not. If it's not then it's just wishful thinking that is only bringing you misery.
The way you think and wire your brain really matters. Instead of "I must do X even though I don't want it". Think "If I want A then X comes with it - do I still want A?". Or find a way to A without X.
For me at least, having that stated explicitly in my mind alters my perception of X. Because it really is hard to hold two logically inconsistent beliefs in your mind when you bring them both into focus. Your brain quick fix is usually some "but..". That's where you need to eliminate wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is imagining reality in some other way than it really is and only leads to frustration.
Accepting things that already are should come pretty naturally though. You may want to change something. But you can't change the past.
But you're coming at it from a different angle, I feel. Instead of "finding your passion", I hear you advising a different way of looking at it such that one can find fulfillment (for lack of better phrasing) in whatever job by matching the story in one's head to reality. I'm on board. Hell, I've been happy doing janitorial work. Was it my passion? Well, no. But it needed to be done, and I could do it, they're paying me, and in the end there's something satisfying about a clean floor. That was enough for me at the time.
I feel like that with coding a lot of the time. I get paid to deal with all the crap work, but those times I get to code something novel or unique are times I would still want even if I didn't have to work.
corollary that should be equally well-known: "because nobody is hiring in that field"
I have a lot of friends in the audio field, and something I've noticed is that doing your passion for a living can take the fun out of it.
For instance, my friends in the audio world don't sit around listening to new loudspeakers, or designing new loudspeakers. They mostly spend their time marketing products and filling orders. Working in audio isn't a whole lot different than working in any other retail field.
But when I work on audio projects? I can do whatever I please, because I'm not doing it to pay my mortgage.
I think this is really a corrupt idea that floats around, and many times influences younger people away from trying to find a career and instead landing themselves in crappy jobs.
For example, some people like to work on cars, but they don't get a job in that because their dumb uncle said this to them, so they spend their time grinding away at a fast food joint and going nowhere in life. Maybe they can poke at their 15 year old car once in a while, but overall their quality of life is not very good, and they basically never get to work on cars. If they had instead gone into professional car service, they would have a decent paying job and be able to reach a comparatively higher standard.
Does that mean that it's not work? Of course not. You will always have to do work and it's not always pleasant, but at least you can leverage your interests and strengths. If you get bored or annoyed at working on something you used to think was fun, then take a vacation or find something else do to over the weekends to get your mind off it. If you are annoyed that it's not fun anymore, then -- welcome to adulthood.
That is truly the difference between having a job and setting yourself up for a successful career.
To give an example, two of my passions can be said to be writing code and playing music. Of the later passion, it is really difficult to make a career out of it that is anywhere comparable to any coding job, and (knowing what it's like in a local band) it's actually more work than a coding job in most cases; the best bands execute a lot on the sales / marketing / promotion side in any case, a side that I'm personally weak at. So music has becomes the "hobby passion", while the "code passion" pays the bills.
(Granted, in some cases it is actually possible to combine the two and do even better. DSP engineers for instance are in pretty high demand as far as I know.)
For example, if you have a passion for say writing and computer science, I would recommend to get a job in CS, since money/time ratio is usually higher there.
Or perhaps the size of the hit varies - for some people / passions it's small or zero, for others it's big, with the peak of the curve being "some but not too much"?
I drew another consequence and quit the field instead and in turn rescued my passion from fizzling out. And while I'm only passingly interested in what I'm doing now, for me, it was worth taking my hobby back.
It's not an entirely hollow phrase, but something to consider at least and maybe one should ask themselves if they're ready to be passionate about something for 8+ hours a day.
I think the dumb uncle is correct. Although, if you like something well enough, then you usually become good at it, which in some cases means that someone will pay you for it.
It's up to you if you want to extract the fun and convert it into cash. It may be worth it, or it may be not.
I can split my friends into two groups: those that followed their passions and are happy, and those that did not and have loans for silly things, egos that depend on their career, and a consistent need for validation by society.
Following your passion isn't about instant gratification, perhaps people are disappointed by this.
Would it be more fair to divide your peers into people who searched for their passion, and those who just went with the flow?
When people say "find your passion", I think they mean to say "stumble upon your passion". "Find" is too passive a word, perhaps "search" is better.
Edit: Just noticed SilasX below has a fuller example of 'yak shaving'. Thanks.
"Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem."
That sounds like necessary mundane tasks to me. Definitely mostly hear it used that way.
"Tying your shoes" is for mundane but necessary tasks. "Sharpening your saw" is for tangential work that indirectly makes your output better.
I wouldn't call it yak shaving to review a help file for accuracy.
My characteristic example of yak shaving would be, "I want to add a radio button (mutually exclusive pick-one option) to this form, but the framework's docs don't say how, so I'll implement it with the checkbox list and require only one to be checked, so I look up how to enforce input validation, but that requires installing an extra module in the build, which then installs a different version of one dependency we're already using, which the framework doesn't like, so I need to install another extension that lets you use two different versions of the same library in the build, but has an occasional bug..."
Those steps are necessary in the sense that the current system forces you to do them, but (like technical debt), they're completely artificial steps that shouldn't be necessary (in that sense) to begin with.
"I need to shave a yak," I explain. "That's the only way I can get yak hair."
I'm in a deeply absurd situation, purely as a consequence of perfectly normal and understandable desires that just got completely out of control. I take in a deep breath, the smells of fresh air and yak manure and whatever the hell they feed yaks, gazing upon miles upon miles of gently rolling hills before rugged mountain peaks in the distance, awkwardly shaking my can of shaving cream. The rancher squints at me. I imagine him as an old man, his face weathered and wrinked, wearing suspenders and a red flannel shirt. "Why do you need yak hair?", he asks. I sigh. "It's a long story."
I was very into photography as a hobby at one point (still am to some degree) and I even toyed with the idea that maybe this is something I could do professionally. But the reality is that I would have unlikely become a staff photographer for Life or National Geographic and would much more likely have ended up as the photographer for the college news service--who was actually quite good but mostly took photos of rich alums shaking hands with the president.
Everyone differs of course. But, in general, one good strategy is to do something that you like well enough most of the time, you're good at, pays well and use your spare time and money to pursue things you like as hobbies.
Your passion is drinking beer, so you are going to open a pub...
I hope your passion extends to cleaning vomit from hard to reach places, and the smell or beer mildew early the morning.
I think the upshot of the quote is supposed to be something like this:
Figure out the set of interests which pique your curiosity. Know the difference between that set and the set of interests that society irrationally deems respectable through peer-pressure, propaganda, and other FUD. Pick something from the first set (possibly intersecting the 2nd set) and you are unlikely to feel like every day is filled with a sense of dread and drudgery.
But here-- as in the original quote-- there is a hidden premise that the audience already has interests in the first set. I think there's also a premise that the audience also has the tools to investigate a particular topic and grow in knowledge, skills, and self-awareness.
That last part is key. If nobody in an audience has the will or ability to investigate the world around them, it doesn't matter what platitude you feed them.
But then again, this can also become a highly enjoyable thing. I hated it for the first months but after a year, I actually enjoy the business side as well. It challenges me as an engineering person to leave my comfort zone, and provides for a chance to learn something new.
To find what you love is a good thing, always. The path taken may sometimes be unpleasant but in the end it will be rewarding if you stick to your goals.
There is so much truth in the Nike claim :-) "Just do it."
It's called "work" because it needs doing, not because it's inherently unpleasant. Your boss won't make a penny more just because you don't happen to like doing it.
(I see the same thing with relationships. There are people I'd be miserable to be with, but that certainly doesn't mean everyone would. Likewise, many people pick a mate in high school and then discover 10 or 20 years later that their teenage self wasn't such a great decision-maker, or simply that they've changed as they've grown.)
I switched careers recently, after many years in software, and now I adore going to work -- every day, every task. I cannot believe they pay me for this. How would you know if all other jobs would also be "crap work" for you if you haven't tried any of them yourself?
EDIT: I'm glad I used a throwaway for this comment! Are people so offended by the concept of needing to try something to discover if it's pleasant or not? Or that another job might be a better fit for them?
That is probably the biggest load of crap foisted on pop culture in a while. I love what I do, and I work every day. This morning's task is reviewing a help file for accuracy. Hol-ee shite, that's not why I got into programming computers when I was 12. But it needs to be done, and I'm one of the ones that can knowledgeably review it. I really should write that test plan, but I keep putting it off for obvious reasons. Oh, sure, I get to play Puzzle Solver by shuffling some bits around, and it's what I spend most of my days doing, but it ain't all fun and games.
And that's just Working for The Man(tm). Gonna start a brewpub? Maybe an online SaaS business? Oh, my friend, your crap work has just begun; so much so, you might have to leave the fun stuff to your employees. You will work every day, and hard.
Don't get the wrong idea, I look forward to going to work most days, and I've been doing this for a long while. But there's a reason they call it "work", and there's a reason they pay you. Enjoy the hell out of the enjoyable parts, and when the less enjoyable work comes, remember that you are (if of the average HN demographic) paid handsomely for it.