Upwind
"If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do"
"But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is
doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years
didn't exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast,
and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a
world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans."
"I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead
of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations.
This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be
in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there?
I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future,
but just look at the options available now, and choose those that
will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting
your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your
options, and worry later about which you'll take."
Curiosity
And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart,
your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things
to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly,
what are you interested in? The word "aptitude" is misleading,
because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of
aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests
are often acquired tastes.
Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class.
Now
If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now,
at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear
suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes
them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is
not to search for them — not to wander about thinking, what great
discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd
have made it.
The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for
big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you,
and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can
take roost. Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe.
They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So
when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to
notice it.
Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems
interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something,
or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less
than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish.
Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially
at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever
seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat
till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes
self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This
could take years.)
A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is
to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are
bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever
book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for
the tiny number of good books.
The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of
waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
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