 September 2024 2024 年 9 月 There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer with a simple yes or no. Sometimes you should and sometimes you shouldn't, but the border between should and shouldn't is very complicated. The only way to give a general answer is to trace it. 有人爭論是否跟隨自己的熱情是一個好主意。事實上，這個問題無法用簡單的是或否來回答。有時候你應該，有時候你不應該，但應該和不應該之間的界線非常複雜。給出一個一般性答案的唯一方法是追蹤它。 When people talk about this question, there's always an implicit "instead of." All other things being equal, why wouldn't you work on what interests you the most? So even raising the question implies that all other things aren't equal, and that you have to choose between working on what interests you the most and something else, like what pays the best. 當人們討論這個問題時，總是隱含著一個 “而不是” 的前提。其他一切條件相同的情況下，為什麼不去做自己最感興趣的事情呢？因此，提出這個問題甚至意味著其他一切條件並不相同，你必須在做自己最感興趣的事情和其他事情之間做出選擇，比如追求最好的薪水。 And indeed if your main goal is to make money, you can't usually afford to work on what interests you the most. People pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. But there's an obvious exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if you love football, and you're good enough at it, you can get paid a lot to play it. 的確，如果你的主要目標是賺錢，通常就無法負擔得起從事你最感興趣的事情。人們付錢給你是為了讓你做他們想要的事情，而不是你想要的事情。但也有一個明顯的例外：當你們雙方都想要同一件事情時。例如，如果你熱愛足球，而且在這方面表現出色，你就可以得到很多報酬來踢球。 Of course the odds are against you in a case like football, because so many other people like playing it too. This is not to say you shouldn't try though. It depends how much ability you have and how hard you're willing to work. 當然，在像足球這樣的情況下，你的勝算並不高，因為有太多其他人也喜歡玩。這並不是說你不應該嘗試。這取決於你的能力有多高，以及你願意付出多少努力。 The odds are better when you have strange tastes: when you like something that pays well and that few other people like. For example, it's clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a software company. He didn't just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed, but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it. 當你有奇怪的品味時，成功的機會就會更高：當你喜歡一些報酬豐厚且少數人喜歡的事物。例如，很明顯，比爾・蓋茨真心熱愛經營一家軟體公司。他不僅僅喜歡編程，這是很多人都喜歡的。他熱愛為客戶撰寫軟體。這確實是一種非常奇怪的品味，但如果你擁有這種品味，你可以通過滿足它來賺取很多錢。 There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can't help noticing when something is mispriced, and can't help doing something about it. It's like a puzzle for them. [1] 甚至有些人對賺錢有真正的智識興趣。這與純粹的貪婪是不同的。他們只是忍不住注意到某些東西被定價錯誤，並且忍不住要採取行動。對他們來說，這就像一個解謎。 In fact there's an edge case here so spectacular that it turns all the preceding advice on its head. If you want to make a really huge amount of money — hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars — it turns out to be very useful to work on what interests you the most. The reason is not the extra motivation you get from doing this, but that the way to make a really large amount of money is to start a startup, and working on what interests you is an excellent way to discover startup ideas. 事實上，這裡有一個非常引人注目的特例，它顛覆了所有先前的建議。如果你想賺取一筆巨額的金錢 — 數億甚至數十億美元 — 那麼專注於你最感興趣的事情將會非常有用。原因不在於從中獲得的額外動力，而是賺取大筆金錢的方法是創辦一家新創企業，而專注於自己感興趣的事物是發現新創企業點子的絕佳途徑。 Many if not most of the biggest startups began as projects the founders were doing for fun. Apple, Google, and Facebook all began that way. Why is this pattern so common? Because the best ideas tend to be such outliers that you'd overlook them if you were consciously looking for ways to make money. Whereas if you're young and good at technology, your unconscious instincts about what would be interesting to work on are very well aligned with what needs to be built. 許多最大的新創企業，如果不是大多數，都是創辦人出於興趣而開展的項目。蘋果、谷歌和臉書都是這樣開始的。為什麼這種模式如此普遍？因為最好的想法往往是如此的異數，以至於如果你有意尋找賺錢的方法，你可能會忽略它們。而如果你年輕且擅長技術，你對於有趣的工作內容的無意識直覺很好地符合了需要建立的內容。 So there's something like a midwit peak for making money. If you don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're most interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you can't usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again. 所以在賺錢方面有一個類似中等智商的高峰。如果你不需要賺很多錢，你可以從事你最感興趣的事情；如果你想變得中等富裕，通常負擔不起；但如果你想變得非常富有，而且你年輕且擅長技術，再次從事你最感興趣的事情就成為一個好主意。 What if you're not sure what you want? What if you're attracted to the idea of making money and more attracted to some kinds of work than others, but neither attraction predominates? How do you break ties? 如果你不確定自己想要什麼怎麼辦？如果你對賺錢的想法感興趣，對某些工作比其他工作更感興趣，但兩者都沒有佔優勢呢？你該如何打破僵局？ The key here is to understand that such ties are only apparent. When you have trouble choosing between following your interests and making money, it's never because you have complete knowledge of yourself and of the types of work you're choosing between, and the options are perfectly balanced. When you can't decide which path to take, it's almost always due to ignorance. In fact you're usually suffering from three kinds of ignorance simultaneously: you don't know what makes you happy, what the various kinds of work are really like, or how well you could do them. [2] 關鍵在於要明白這些關係只是表面上的。當你在選擇追隨興趣還是賺錢之間遇到困難時，從來不是因為你對自己和你所選擇的工作類型有完全的了解，以及選擇之間的選項完全平衡。當你無法決定要走哪條路時，幾乎總是由於無知。事實上，你通常同時受到三種無知的困擾：你不知道什麼讓你快樂，各種工作的真實情況如何，以及你能做得有多好。 In a way this ignorance is excusable. It's often hard to predict these things, and no one even tells you that you need to. If you're ambitious you're told you should go to college, and this is good advice so far as it goes, but that's where it usually ends. No one tells you how to figure out what to work on, or how hard this can be. 在某种程度上，這種無知是可以原諒的。預測這些事情通常很困難，也沒有人告訴你需要這樣做。如果你有抱負，人們會告訴你應該上大學，這是一個好建議，但通常就到此為止。沒有人告訴你如何找出應該做什麼，或者這有多困難。 What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty. And probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you're interested in. That will get you more information about how interested you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they offer for ambition. 面對不確定性時，你會怎麼做？獲得更多確定性。也許最好的方法是嘗試從事你感興趣的事情。這將為你提供更多關於你對它們的興趣程度、你在其中的表現以及它們提供的野心空間的信息。 Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring out what to work on is a problem that could take years to solve, the sooner you start, the better. 不要等待。不要等到大學結束才弄清楚要從事什麼工作。甚至不要在大學期間等待實習。你不一定需要一份從事 x 領域的工作才能從事 x 領域；通常你可以自己以某種形式開始做。而且，找出要從事什麼工作是一個可能需要幾年時間才能解決的問題，越早開始越好。 One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people? 判斷不同類型工作的一個有用技巧是看看你的同事是誰。你會變得像與你一起工作的人一樣。你想變得像這些人嗎？ Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring. [3] 確實，不同類型工作的特性差異被放大，因為其他人都在面對與你相同的抉擇。如果你主要選擇一種工作是因為薪水高，你將被其他出於同樣原因選擇該工作的人包圍，這將使其比從外部看起來更加令人心靈枯竭。而如果你選擇你真正感興趣的工作，你將主要被其他真正對此感興趣的人包圍，這將使其額外具有啟發性。 The other thing you do in the face of uncertainty is to make choices that are uncertainty-proof. The less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this "staying upwind." If you're unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math. 在面對不確定性時，另一件事情是做出不受不確定性影響的選擇。你對該做什麼越不確定，選擇那些未來給你更多選擇的選項就變得更加重要。我稱之為「逆風而行」。例如，如果你不確定是專攻數學還是經濟學，選擇數學；從數學轉換到經濟學比從經濟學轉換到數學更容易，這就是數學在逆風方向上的意義。 There's one case, though, where it's easy to say whether you should work on what interests you the most: if you want to do great work. This is not a sufficient condition for doing great work, but it is a necessary one. 有一種情況，很容易判斷你應該專注於最感興趣的事情：如果你想要做出優秀的工作。這並不是做出優秀工作的充分條件，但卻是必要條件之一。 There's a lot of selection bias in advice about whether to "follow your passion," and this is the reason. Most such advice comes from people who are famously successful, and if you ask someone who's famously successful how to do what they did, most will tell you that you have to work on what you're most interested in. And this is in fact true. 在關於是否應該「追隨自己的熱情」的建議中存在著很多選擇性偏見，這就是原因。大多數這類建議來自於那些出名成功的人，如果你問一個出名成功的人如何做到他們所做的事情，大多數人會告訴你你必須專注於自己最感興趣的事情。而這實際上是真的。 That doesn't mean it's the right advice for everyone. Not everyone can do great work, or wants to. But if you do want to, the complicated question of whether or not to work on what interests you the most becomes simple. The answer is yes. The root of great work is a sort of ambitious curiosity, and you can't manufacture that. 這並不意味著這是對每個人都適用的正確建議。並非每個人都能做出優秀的工作，或者想要這樣做。但如果你確實想要，關於是否要從事你最感興趣的事情的複雜問題就變得簡單了。答案是肯定的。做出優秀工作的根本是一種雄心勃勃的好奇心，這是無法人為製造的。 Notes 筆記 [1] These examples show why it's a mistake to assume that economic inequality must be evidence of some kind of brokenness or unfairness. It's obvious that different people have different interests, and that some interests yield far more money than others, so how can it not be obvious that some people will end up much richer than others? In a world where some people like to write enterprise software and others like to make studio pottery, economic inequality is the natural outcome. 這些例子顯示，假設經濟不平等必然是某種破碎或不公平的證據是一個錯誤。顯而易見，不同的人有不同的興趣，有些興趣帶來的金錢遠多於其他興趣，那麼一些人最終比其他人更富有難道不是顯而易見的嗎？在一個有些人喜歡寫企業軟件，而另一些人喜歡製作陶器的世界裡，經濟不平等是自然的結果。 [2] Difficulty choosing between interests is a different matter. That's not always due to ignorance. It's often intrinsically difficult. I still have trouble doing it. [2] 在不同利益之間做出選擇是一回事。這並不總是由於無知。這通常是內在困難。我仍然有困難做到。 [3] You can't always take people at their word on this. Since it's more prestigious to work on things you're interested in than to be driven by money, people who are driven mainly by money will often claim to be more interested in their work than they actually are. One way to test such claims is by doing the following thought experiment: if their work didn't pay well, would they take day jobs doing something else in order to do it in their spare time? Lots of mathematicians and scientists and engineers would. Historically lots have. But I don't think as many investment bankers would. [3] 在這方面，你不能總是相信別人說的話。因為專注於自己感興趣的事情比被金錢驅使更有威望，那些主要受金錢驅使的人通常會聲稱對工作的興趣比實際上更大。測試這種說法的一種方法是進行以下思想實驗：如果他們的工作報酬不高，他們會不會找一份日間工作做其他事情，以便在空閒時間做這份工作？許多數學家、科學家和工程師會這樣做。從歷史上看，許多人都這樣做過。但我認為投資銀行家不會有這麼多人這樣做。 This thought experiment is also useful for distinguishing between university departments. 這個思想實驗對區分大學部門也很有用。 Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this. |