What's doesn ' t Seem like work? --Paul Graham

Original

January 2015

My father is a mathematician. When I was a kid, he worked at Westinghouse for a long time, modeling nuclear-weapon reactors.

He is one of the few lucky ones who knew what he wanted to do in childhood. When you talk to him about your childhood, you will find a watershed in the age of 12, when he became interested in maths. He grew up on the coast of Poole Helley, England. We traced his way to school from Google Street View, and he said it was nice to grow up in that country.


"Do you feel bored when you grow up to be 15 years old?" "I asked.


"No," he said, "At that time, I was very interested in maths." "


In another chat, he told me that he was really interested in solving the problem. For me, the last exercise in every chapter of a math book means a task, or a little bit better, means a way to strengthen the knowledge you've learned in class. For him, those exercises are like rewards. The content of each chapter is like a hint to let you solve these problems. He said that whenever he got a textbook, he would immediately do all the exercises-a little annoying to the teacher, because the teacher wants students to follow the teaching progress to gradually complete the problem.


Only a few people are so young and so sure of what they want to do in the future. But talking to my father, I thought of a way that we could all use. If something is a task for others and not for you, then it means that you are fit to do this kind of thing. For example, most of the programmers I know, including me, actually like debugging. This is not what people want to do spontaneously; like this, some people like to pinch pimples. Considering the proportion of debugging in programming, you like to write code, preferably also like debugging.


The more you like the average person, the more you show that it should be what you are doing. When I was in college, I used to write essays for my friends. It's really interesting to write a paper for a course that I haven't had in class. In addition, they are really relaxing.


This is really curious: the same task is so painful for some people, so interesting to others, but I didn't realize what the imbalance meant, and didn't think much at the time. I didn't realize that it was so difficult to decide what I should be doing. So sometimes you need to look at some tiny signs to find out what you're fit for, like a detective looking through a case while watching a mystery novel. So I believe that it is clear to ask myself that this question will help a lot of people: what does it look like in the eyes of others is not a task for you? (What seems-like-work-to-other people that doesn ' t seem-like work-to-you?)

What doesn ' t Seem? --Paul Graham