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Page 1: How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love

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How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Loveby Maria Popova

Why prestige is the enemy of passion, or how to master

the balance of setting boundaries and making friends.

“Find something more important than you are,” philosopher

Dan Dennett once said in discussing the secret of happiness,

“and dedicate your life to it.” But how, exactly, do we find

that? Surely, it isn’t by luck. I myself am a firm believer in

the power of curiosity and choice as the engine of

fulfillment, but precisely how you arrive at your true calling

is an intricate and highly individual dance of discovery.

Still, there are certain factors — certain choices — that

make it easier. Gathered here are insights from seven thinkers who have

contemplated the art-science of making your life’s calling a living.

PAUL GRAHAM ON HOW TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE

Every few months, I rediscover and redevour Y-Combinator

founder Paul Graham’s fantastic 2006 article, How to Do What

You Love. It’s brilliant in its entirety, but the part I find of especial

importance and urgency is his meditation on social validation and the false

merit metric of “prestige”:

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 the rest of the world.

[…]

Prestige is 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 is just 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. That’s the recipe

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for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on

committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a

good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck,

they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.”

More of Graham’s wisdom on how to find meaning and make wealth can be

found in Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age.

ALAIN DE BOTTON ON SUCCESS

Alain de Botton, modern

philosopher and creator of the

“literary self-help genre”, is a

keen observer of the paradoxes and delusions of our

cultural conceits.

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, he takes his

singular lens of wit and wisdom to the modern

workplace and the ideological fallacies of “success.”

His terrific 2009 TED talk offers a taste:

One of the interesting things about success is that we think

we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about

what it would mean to live successfully are not our own.

They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in

messages from everything from the television to advertising

to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that

define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I

want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas

of success, but that we should make sure that they are our

own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we

own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.

Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s

even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find

out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you

wanted all along.”

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CULTURAL ICONS ON THE MEANING OF

LIFE

HOW TO FIND YOUR PURPOSE AND

DO WHAT YOU LOVE

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OGILVY

THE BEST BOOKS OF 2012

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WRITERS

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AND WRITE BETTER

HUGH MACLEOD ON SETTING BOUNDARIES

Cartoonist Hugh MacLeod is as

well-known for his irreverent

doodles as he is for his opinionated

musings on creativity, culture, and the meaning

of life. In Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to

Creativity, he gathers his most astute advice on

the creative life. Particularly resonant with my

own beliefs about the importance of choices is this

insight about setting boundaries:

16. The most important thing a

creative person can learn

professionally is where to draw

the red line that separates what

you are willing to do, and what you are not.

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The

more you need the money, the more people will tell you what

to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you

will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and

plan accordingly.”

Later, MacLeod echoes Graham’s point about prestige above:

28. The best way to get approval is not to need it.

This is equally true in art and business. And love. And sex.

And just about everything else worth having.”

LEWIS HYDE ON WORK VS. LABOR

After last year’s omnibus of 5

timeless books on fear and the

creative process, a number of

readers rightfully suggested an addition: Lewis

Hyde’s 1979 classic, The Gift: Creativity and the

Artist in the Modern World, of which David Foster

Wallace famously said, “No one who is invested in

any kind of art can read The Gift and remain

unchanged.”

In this excerpt, originally featured here in

January, Hyde articulates the essential difference

between work and creative labor, understanding

which takes us a little closer to the holy grail of

vocational fulfillment:

Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we

do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is

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JOHN CLEESE ON THE 5 FACTORS TO

MAKE YOUR LIFE MORE CREATIVE

JOAN DIDION ON KEEPING A

NOTEBOOK

HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU

HAVEN’T READ

100 IDEAS THAT CHANGED GRAPHIC

DESIGN

7 MUST-READ BOOKS ON THE ART &

SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS

work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds

in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus — these are work.

Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid

for it, but it’s harder to quantify… Writing a poem, raising a

child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis,

invention in all forms — these are labors.

Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the

will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing

the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly

prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.

There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter

the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is

expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is

automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the

technology of work.”

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a term for the quality that sets labor

apart from work: flow — a kind of intense focus and crisp sense of clarity where

you forget yourself, lose track of time, and feel like you’re part of something

larger. If you’ve ever pulled an all-nighter for a pet project, or even spent 20

consecutive hours composing a love letter, you’ve experienced flow and you

know creative labor.

STEVE JOBS ON NOT SETTLING

In his now-legendary 2005 Stanford commencement address,

an absolute treasure in its entirety, Steve Jobs makes an

eloquent case for not settling in the quest for finding your

calling — a case that rests largely on his insistence upon the power of intuition:

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5 MANIFESTOS FOR LIFE

7 ESSENTIAL BOOKS ON OPTIMISM

JOHN STEINBECK ON FALLING IN

LOVE: A 1958 LETTER

CREATIVE CARTOGRAPHY: 7 MUST-

READ BOOKS ON MAPS

ISAAC ASIMOV ON SCIENCE AND

CREATIVITY IN EDUCATION

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only

way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great

work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you

do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As

with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better

as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t

settle.”

ROBERT KRULWICH ON FRIENDS

Robert Krulwich, co-producer of WNYC’s fantastic Radiolab,

author of the ever-illuminating Krulwich Wonders and winner of

a Peabody Award for broadcast excellence, is one of the finest

journalists working today. In another great commencement address, he

articulates the infinitely important social aspect of loving what you do — a kind

of social connectedness far more meaningful and genuine than those notions of

prestige and peer validation.

You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of

affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you

back. This is the era of Friends in Low Places. The ones you

meet now, who will notice you, challenge you, work with you,

and watch your back. Maybe they will be your strength.

If you can… fall in love, with the work, with people you work

with, with your dreams and their dreams. Whatever it was

that got you to this school, don’t let it go. Whatever kept you

here, don’t let that go. Believe in your friends. Believe that

what you and your friends have to say… that the way you’re

saying it — is something new in the world.”

THE HOLSTEE MANIFESTO

You might recall The Holstee Manifesto as one of our 5 favorite manifestos for

the creative life, an eloquent and beautifully written love letter to the life of

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7 OBSCURE CHILDREN’S BOOKS BY

FAMOUS AUTHORS OF ADULT

LITERATURE

WHY WE LOVE: 5 BOOKS ON THE

PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE

7 MUST-READ BOOKS ON MUSIC,

EMOTION & THE BRAIN

BERTRAND RUSSELL'S 10

COMMANDMENTS OF TEACHING

5½ TIMELESS COMMENCEMENT

SPEECHES TO TEACH YOU TO DEFINE

YOUR OWN SUCCESS

purpose. (So beloved is the manifesto around here that it has

earned itself a permanent spot in the Brain Pickings sidebar, a

daily reminder to both myself and you, dear reader, of what

matters most.)

This is your life. Do what you love, and do it often. If you don’t

like something, change it. If you don’t like your job, quit. If you

don’t have enough time, stop watching TV. If you are looking

for the love of your life, stop; they will be waiting for you

when you start doing things you love.”

The Holstee Manifesto is now available as a beautiful letterpress print, a 5×7

greeting card printed on handmade paper derived from 50% elephant poo and

50% recycled paper, and even a baby bib — because it’s never too early to instill

the values of living from passion.

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TAGS: BOOKS CULTURE PHILOSOPHY PSYCHOLOGY

 

This Is Water: David

Foster Wallace on Life

Ray Bradbury on

Libraries, Space

Exploration, and the

Secret of Life: The

Lost Comic-Con

Interview

5½ Timeless

Commencement

Speeches to Teach

You to Define Your

Own Success

Sir Ken Robinson on

How Finding Your

Element Changes

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