Do you what love

Do what you love? March 11, 2012 7:32 am We’ve all either given or received the career advice: “Follow your dreams.” “Do what you love.” “Love what you do.” Recently, there have been anincreasing number of counterarguments making the case that if we were all going to “do what we love,” we’d starve doing it. I came across a 2006 post by Paul Graham: “ How To Do What You Love ” that offers what may be the best thought-leadership on the subject that I have read. Graham is an essayist, programmer, and investor. In 1995, he co-developed the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. Graham’s blog is one of the most followed in the blogosphere. It is an essay (longish for those of us with ADD) but I would encourage you to readit in its entirety as my excerpts below don’t give hiswork its due: “To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactlynovel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you loveis complicated.” …How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don’t know when to stopsearching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you’ll tend to stop searching too early. You’ll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia. …Here’s an upper bound: Do what you love doesn’t mean, do what you would like to do most this second . Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first…Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something… …As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of “spare time” seems mistaken…I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you’ll have terrible problems with procrastination. You’ll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior. …To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that’s pretty cool. …What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of therest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgment you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don’t even know?…This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow, especially when you’re young. Prestigeis like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like….Prestige isjust fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough,you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself…Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige….Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what’s admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one. …The test of whether people love what they do is whetherthey’d do it even if they weren’t paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, intheir spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves? …With such powerful forces leading us astray, it’s not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand,perhaps, out of billions. …It’s hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don’t underestimate this task. And don’t feel bad if youhaven’t succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you’re discontented, you’re a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you’re surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they’re lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably. …”Always produce” is also a heuristic for finding the workyou love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you’re supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in yourroof. …But it’s harder than it looks.Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems. …Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it’s rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you’ll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you’re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you’re practically there.

Zona waktu

Peta Indonesia TERKAIT: Penyatuan Zona Waktu Tak Selesaikan Masalah Logistik Hatta Rajasa: Jangan Berpolemik soal Zona Waktu PLN Kaji Penghematan dari Penyatuan Zona Waktu Pimpinan DPR Dukung Penyatuan Zona Waktu BI: Penyatuan Zona Waktu Ide Bagus JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com - Ekonom EC-Think Telisa Falianty memandang positif rencana pemerintah untuk menyatukan zona waktu yang ditargetkan berlaku pada 17 Agustus mendatang. Tetapi, menurut dia, pemerintah perlu mengkaji lebih dalam apa saja kendala- kendala yang mungkin dihadapi dalam penerapannya."Tolong dikaji lebih dalam pasti ada suatu perubahan, ada kerugian dari diberlakukannya satu zona waktu," ujar Telisa kepada Kompas.com, di Jakarta, Jumat (16/3/2012). Ia menerangkan, pemerintah harus melakukan kajian yang komprehensif dengan melibatkan seluruh pemangku kepentingan terkait rencana penyatuan zona waktu. Jangan sampai kajian hanya dilakukan satu arah yakni hanya dari pemerintah saja. "Itu kan ada impact -nya dan penyesuaian-penyesuaian yang (harus) kita lakukan," tambah Telisa. Menurut dia,pemerintah jangan terburu-buru dalam memberlakukan hal ini demi, salah satunya, meningkatkan pertumbuhan ekonomi. Karena, kata Telisa, pasti ada penyesuaian dan biaya yang harus dikeluarkan. Masyarakat pun harus bisa beradaptasi dengan perubahan zona waktu yangdirencanakan akan memakai waktu Indonesia bagian tengah (Wita) sebagai patokan. " Cost penyesuaian pasti ada, seperti menu cost perubahan menu di restoran," tegas Telisa. "Mungkin bisa saja (meningkatkan pertumbuhan ekonomi) tapikita musti lihat kendala- kendalanya," pungkasnya. Untuk diketahui saja, pemerintah berencana menyatukan dari tiga zona ekonomi (WIB, Wita, dan WIT) menjadi satu zona yang mengacu pada Wita atau GMT+8. Dengan acuan tersebut, maka waktu Indonesia menjadi sama dengan Singapura dan Malaysia. Kadiv Humas dan Promosi KP3EI (Komite Percepatan dan Perluasan Pembangunan Ekonomi Indonesia), Edib Muslim, mengatakan penyatuan zona waktu di Indonesia bisa berdampak baik bagi pertumbuhan ekonomi."(Penyatuan zona waktu) mudah-mudahan bisa mengangkat 20 persen PDB (Produk Domestik Bruto)," ujar Edib, di Bogor, Sabtu (10/3/2012). Sumber :