TITLE: Find the Hard Work You're Willing to Do
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 21, 2018  9:53 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 I like this passage from
<A HREF="https://hmmdaily.com/2018/09/28/john-urschel-goes-pro/">
   John Urschel Goes Pro</A>,
 about the former NFL player who is pursuing a Ph.D. in math:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 The world thinks mathematicians are people for whom math is easy.
 That's wrong.  Sure, some kids, like Urschel, have little trouble
 with school math.  But everyone who starts down the road to
 creating really new mathematics finds out what Urschel did:  It's
 a struggle.  A prickly, sometimes lonely struggle whose rewards
 are uncertain and a long time coming.  Mathematicians are the
 people who love that struggle.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 It's clich&eacute; to tell kids to "find their passion".  That
 always seems to me like an awful lot of pressure to put on young
 adults, let alone teenagers.  I meet with potential CS majors
 frequently, both college students and high school students.  Most
 haven't found their passion yet, and as a result many wonder if
 there is something wrong with them.  I do my my best to assure
 them that, no, there is nothing wrong with them.  It's an
 unreasonable expectation placed on them by a world that, usually 
with good intentions, is trying to encourage them.

 I don't think there is anything I'd rather be than a computer
 scientist, but I did not walk a straight path to being one.  Some
 choices early on were easy: I like biology as a body of knowledge,
 but I <EM>never</EM> liked studying biology.  That seemed a decent
 sign that maybe biology wasn't for me.  (High-school me didn't
 understand that there might be a difference between school biology
 and being a biologist...)  But other choices took time and a little
 self-awareness.

 From the time I was eight years old or so, I wanted to be an
 architect.  I read about architecture; I sent away for professional
 materials from the American Institute of Architects; I took courses
 in architectural drafting at my high school.  (There was an
 unexpected benefit to taking those courses: I got to meet a lot of
 people were not part of my usual academic crowd.)  Then I went off
 to college to study architecture...  and found that, while I liked
 many things about the field, I didn't really like to do the grunt
 work that is part of the architecture student's life, and when the
 assigned projects got more challenging, I didn't really enjoy
 working on them.

 But I had enjoyed working on the hard projects I'd encountered in
 my programing class back in high school.  They were challenges I
 wanted to overcome.  I changed my major and dove into college CS
 courses, which were full of hard problems -- but hard problems that
 I wanted to solve.  I didn't mind being frustrated for an entire
 semester one year, working in assembly language and JCL, because I
 wanted to solve the puzzles.

 Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our
 passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me.  Maybe
 instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they
 like to work on.  Which problems do you want to keep working on,
 even when they turn out to be harder than you expected?  Which kinds
 of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while
 you figure things out?  Answers to these very practical questions
 might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and
 rewarding life.

 I realize that "Find your passion" makes for a more compelling
 motivational poster than "What hard problems do you enjoy working
 on?" (and even that's a lot better than "What kind of pain are you
 willing to endure?"), but it might give some people a more realistic
 way to approach finding their life's work.
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