Knowing and Doing

A few weeks ago, a Scott Galloway video clip made the rounds. In it, Galloway was saying something about "finding your passion" that many people have been saying for a long time, only in that style that makes Galloway so entertaining. Here's a great bit of practical advice on the same topic from tech guru Kevin Kelly:

Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don't know what you are passionate about. A better motto for most youth is "master something, anything". Through mastery of one thing, you can drift towards extensions of that mastery that bring you more joy, and eventually discover where your bliss is.

My first joking thought when I read this was, "Well, maybe not anything..." I mean, I can think of lots of things that don't seem worth mastering, like playing video games. But then I read about professional gamers making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, so who am I to say? Find something you are good at, and get really good at it. As Galloway says, like Chris Rock before him, it's best to become good at something that other people will pay you for. But mastery of anything opens doors that passion can only bang on.

The key to the "master something, anything" mantra is the next sentence of Kelly's advice. When we master something, our expertise creates opportunities. We can move up or down the hierarchy of activities built from that mastery, or to related domains. That is where we are most likely to find the life that brings us joy. Even better, we will find it in a place where our mastery helps us get through the inevitable drudge work and over the inevitable obstacles that will pop in our way. I love to program, but some days debugging is a slog, and other days I butt up against thorny problems beyond my control. The good news is that I have skills to get through those days, and I like what I'm doing enough to push on through to the more frequent moments and days of bliss.

Passion is wonderful if you have it, but it's hard to conjure up on its own. Mastering a skill, or a set of skills, is something every one of us can do, and by doing it we can find our way to something that makes us happy.

In a Paris Review interview, Fran Lebowitz joked about the challenge of writing:

Every time I sit at my desk, I look at my dictionary, a Webster's Second Unabridged with nine million words in it and think, All the words I need are in there; they're just in the wrong order.

Unfortunately, thinks this computer scientist, writing is a computationally more intense task than simply putting the words in the right order. We have to sample with replacement.

Computational complexity is the reason we can't have nice things.