My father wanted to open a butcher shop when he was 25, he was given a large loan by my grandfather to do so. He was already a master of his trade at this point and I am sure he had a deep insight into the industry and the practices of the time. However, I think that if my granddad had used the "Coffee Beans Procedure", there would have been a lot of questions that he would not have been able to answer.

My father is no longer a butcher, he sold the shop after ~25 years, working every day to afford our family a comfortable life and having enough money to pay for a restaurant that he wanted to run. Again, no one asked about where the coffee beans would come from, and after ~10 years he closed the restaurant after again working tirelessly to support himself, his children and his new grandchildren. He had the money to buy kitchen equipment for a newly built restaurant that he has now been running for 5 years.

To make a long story short, he is certainly crazy and he is doing what he wants and, on some level, is meant to do. But if your takeaway from this article is that you need to unpack everything and know everything to the smallest detail, you might get lost or discouraged by the complexity. You can't plan it all out.

> Wolff wrote “more than sixty” books between 2007 and 2018. That’s 5.5 novels per year, every year, for 11 years, before she hit it big.

> Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” but when you were actually doing them, did you want to stop, or did you want to continue?

I think people like Wolff like writing. Brandon Sanderson is another example. He can't stop. I think they'd do it even if they weren't able to make it as novelists. That's what separates a lot of those people from most others. Sure, some people have a goal and the grit to reach for it, to do that dribbling & shooting practice for six hours a day even if it's not actually fun. But some people have this sort of mania for their work. It's not really sensible to talk about being like them, unless you already are.

> Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”

> Most of those students would go, “Oh, no I would not like to do those things.” The actual content of a professor’s life had never occurred to them. If you could pop the tops of their skulls and see what they thought being a professor was like, you’d probably find some low-res cartoon version of themselves walking around campus in a tweed jacket going, “I’m a professor, that’s me! Professor here!” and everyone waving back to them going, “Hi professor!”

I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.

Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.

Also, grading was fun, just because you can be an unusually good grader by doing the barest-minimum and including, like, any notes at all (the students just want to know that you actually understood why you took their points away).

It strikes me that those are two spots that seem hardest to automate away, and involve satisfying the customer the most. But they don’t really seem to be central to the professor’ actual identities, or to the general perception of them.

Love the opening. I have always been interested in what people actually do hour-to-hour at their jobs and have always found it frustrating that a) they don't teach you about this in school AT ALL, b) people don't talk about it socially either. Even with social media I don't think we have a very good public repository of information of this kind. It would be a very interesting project to interview a few hundred people about what they actually do at work.

I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.

I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar.

I’m an unhinged lunatic who loves productivity software and user experiences. The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features. Watching videos about how the Ribbon was designed. Reading C++ for dummies even though I had untreated ADHD and couldn’t sit still long enough to get much past std::cout. Eventually daydreaming about walking into the office, tired from a hard sprint, getting coffee in corporate-sponsored coffee cups.

I wake up and reflect how profoundly lucky I am to have my dream job. Not just having the career I have, but having a dream at all and having a dream I could love in practice.

This is something I've started to notice as I've talked with artists on tour.

Like, I'm a hobby metal musician, and I do have a certain dream of being on stage with a band. Even if it's just a dive bar with 20 people. Gotta be realistic. And I have 15 - 20 years available for that, or even more if you look at Grave Digger or - rest in peace old chap - Ozzy. But I'm not certain if I have the passion to be a touring musician even if that happened (which most likely wont). Like what these people take on is entirely insane.

Brittney Slayes from Unleash the Archers had tours during which she worked full-time remote. 8 full hours of work, out of the hotel, soundcheck, gig, meet and greet, back into the bus, sleep, back to work. And from what I've heard they've also done that with a kid on top. That is just nuts.

And even without that, big tours are hell from what I've heard. The first one or two tours are an absolute test for bands because it's all a huge rush of adrenaline, excitement, nonsense, strange locations all at once without a second to breathe.

If you hear that, a 9-5ish tech job isn't that bad.

One of those articles that you'd love to share with certain people but it seems awkward when they receive a message from you with the link preview saying "Face it: you're a crazy person".

Funny quirk of the website: it says it needs JavaScript to work, but I can read everything and see everything just fine, and the formatting isn't even broken. Then I look at uBlock and 195 trackers are blocked. Yikes

I think this ties into like "observation farming"

When I was told to do this when I was like 14, and asked "waht did I want to do", I ran into all the exact traps that the article said in the form of overintellecutalization.

It takes a certain kind of maturity to just sit down and really try and observe, non-judgementally. Just what happened.

(then the intellectuals among y'all will say stuff like, "well perception isn't objective truth yada yada" this is also a big thought loop trap I had to get rid of. Just like, put it on hold, just say your thought, even if you think it's stupid, or it's some kind of "self strawman" and you want to elaborate more and justify etc.

Just say it.)

I've been able to do it for things I've really cared about, but often times I don't get into this state.

I should practice. I only even observed this thought pattern when I got good at math, and the whole thing was just sitting down, contemplating honestly pretty dumb thoughts, but if you thought loop yourself you get nowhere. Gotta say seemingly stupid stuff and just contemplate. Words are both the thing you should observe but not treat as truth, just... try to observe. idk.

> Which kind of coffee mug is best?

I don't want to open a coffee shop. But I have put some thought about the type of cup I like (not what is scientifically the best).

All this is in context of plain ceramic cups.

First, it shouldn't be too wide. It is an uncomfortable feeling holding such a cup. Relatively taller cups feel nicer to hold. Not sure if that helps with heat retention due to less wide mouth, if you don't have a cover.

Secondly, the handle should be just slightly wider than your fingers wrapped around it. Stupid fancy creative ones are the worst. Overly circular ones are terrible. If your fingers are going over each other while holding it, avoid it like plague.

Thirdly, the inner seam shouldn't be sharp but bevelled. That avoids buildup of deposit. I prefer black but white might be preferable for those particular about cleaning (also see last point).

Extension to previous point: glazed is better than matted - stuff doesn't stick so much.

Fourthly, avoid ones with uneven top/lip. Because you want to be able to put any available plate/cover without the steam escaping that much.

Tip for cleaning cups for lazy people: squirt some dishwasher liquid, fill it up to the brim with water and leave it until your next round. Make sure to hold it low so that the tap water generates some foam due to impact, basically avoid the soap lumped sitting at the bottom. It'll practically wash itself by the time you are back for your next cup and will be much more clean compared to having to clean a dirty cup that has been sitting for a while.

The first few questions almost have me convinced I should open my own business. Surely there must be other difficult things?

I assume the main difficulty isn't that -- I assume it's the lack of comparative advantage, so competition eats into your margins until you're fighting a race to the bottom, not only making your customers happy, but doing it cheaper than someone else could, and I assume the stress from that makes it hard?

And also not being in control of your suppliers, so unpredictable events can affect your profit.

I received both the worst and the best pieces of career advice when I was an undergraduate.

The worst advice was that writing software, after the dotcom bust, was dead as a career. This taught me a lot about the value of "conventional wisdom" vs looking at the underlying supply and demand dynamics of a career. Sort of adjacent to the theme of the essay, I think the best careers are those that you can tolerate and those that have favorable supply-demand curves.

The best advice was from a pre-med advisor, who asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who were old, sick, dying, and - not in so many words - decrepit. At that moment I realized I was not a healer, I found most bodies to be gross, and I had no business considering a medical career.

If I had one piece of advice for someone trying to pick a career, it would be to require that they shadow someone actually in the professions they're considering.

Doctors: you may spend many many hours in front of a mobile computer entering notes, medications, etc. You may also spend a good deal of time fighting insurance companies via email and/or phone. It's likely you feel you are rarely "helping people"; sometimes you have to help people in spite of themselves. Also patients rarely do what you tell them to, contrary to what you judge to be in their best interests.

Lawyers: you may never see the inside of a courtroom or even a client. You likely will spend the mass majority of your time using Microsoft Word redlining documents. Trial drama is the exception of the exception.

Many jobs are not what people think they are.

You have to love what you're serving. I produced over 70 public events for people wanting to learn voiceover. We had a feature roadmap and wishlist, and we worked our way through it over the years. Many (talent, recording, and advertising) studio owners came and coached at minimal cost because we had such a great reputation for doing it right at low cost to attendees. The great people who wanted to be associated with it, and the enthusiasm of everyone involved was incredibly fulfilling.

We expanded to the point that we recorded 350 sessions in a single day, each with a coach with decades of experience, a professional studio engineer (usually), a studio room, and short lectures throughout the day. We had to move to bigger and bigger conference hotels to get enough rooms until Covid shut everything down. There were tons of "unknown unknowns" that had to be solved over time.

We were focused initally on protecting the people who probably shouldn't be spending money on training (very frustrating to watch them be ripped off), and produced the event both as a place they could learn a bit at low cost, as well as serving the mission of providing bite-size workshops for people who didn't want weeks or months (or years) or training.

I didn't want to be an "event provider". I wanted to figure out how to do something for people I saw being served poorly in an industry I loved, and then to find ways to give more and more to the people who were showing up.

People aren't bad at "unpacking". They haven't made any effort to think about things.

I had a coworker ask a nephew in high school to sit with me at work to show them a software job. They said they wanted to be a game developer. It turned out they had never seen software code in any form, and had no idea what programing was generally. I asked them if they had any art skills, and they were baffled why that was relevant.

They had no concept of the job at all. They just liked video games. Apparently, I crushed their dreams.

> Well, you know how when you move to a new place and all of your unpacked boxes confront you every time you come home? And you know how, if you just leave them there for a few weeks, the boxes stop being boxes and start being furniture, just part of the layout of your apartment, almost impossible to perceive?

No, I do not know this. I've moved ~29 times in my life. I've never once had a problem unpacking. I packed up shelves and drawers and dressers and closets. When I get to the new place I open a box, see what's in it, "oh, this was the stuff in bedroom drawers" so I go put the stuff in there in just a few seconds. In a few hours I'm 100% unpacked.

I've never really understood why it would be any different for anyone else except if maybe if they moved to a much smaller place.

Is it really that common of an experience?

More to the point of the article though - I'm not entirely sure I want to unpack my job - I feel like lots of people would not "do the thing" if they knew how hard it would be. But, looking back, they're proud they "did the thing". I know for me, I started some companies and projects years ago. I was able to do this because I didn't know how much work it would be. Now that I know, I find it extremely hard to get started again. I wish I could go back to my old naive self.

Maybe a better example, all though one I have unfortunately not experienced, would anyone have kids if you "unpacked" what having kids is actually like? I think you could list 100s or 1000s of "unpleasant on paper" things but I don't really think you could write the positives in a compelling way against that list of negatives. And, yet I believe the majority of parents would tell you having children was the most fulfilling thing in their lives. I think many of the things mentioned in the post might also have a similar issue.

> people who like Hawaiian pizza probably think their opinion is more common than it is (false consensus)

I supposed I just got called out -- is this actually a rare thing? I thought it was like, a meme to hate pineapple on pizza? Obviously some people do, but I have never thought of my opinion (liking the combination) as especially rare.

Reminds me of a quote from the Projection Lab success story that got posted a few weeks ago: https://projectionlab.com/blog/we-reached-1m-arr-with-zero-f...

> But luckily, success indexes less on IQ and more on consistency. The willingness to doggedly show up every single day can take you to some really suprising and amazing places.

"Do you want to be a surgeon? = Do you want to do the same procedure 15 times a week for the next 35 years?"

Compared to trying to implement vague feature requests with no clear solutions under arbitrary deadlines and for probably a lot more pay and respect in general? Yes.

> This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one

Does everyone (or even most people) have a "right" career? I actually think this framing itself is harmful. If comparison is the thief of joy, then what could be worse than believing that there is some yet to be discovered perfect-for-you career out that you are missing.

I never wanted to open a coffee shop, but was able to answer all of the questions. I guess I should consider opening a coffee shop?

Joke aside, this is particularly relevant for people who think they want to be entrepreneurs (most just want to not have a boss), and particularly those who think they want to build a VC-backed business (most just want to get rich magically)

We see this a lot in startup communities.

"I want to be a successful startup founder", or even worse "I want to have a successful app!" (though that was more prevalent 10-15 years ago).

This is usually accompanied by no relevant industry experience, tech knowledge, or skills. So obviously doomed to fail, but there's so much bullshit around the community about just believing in yourself and your idea that they'll persist regardless (usually this is perpetrated by the various bits of the ecosystem that feed off newbie clueless founders).

The good ones quickly realise that they're in way over their head, and either learn fast or get out fast.

As TFA says, the focus is always on the perceived status of being a "successful startup founder" and never on the actual work of building a business from scratch and what that actually involves (usually 5-10 years of grinding poverty and stress).

I think the direction of this is awesome, though I'd also say there's a reverse argument to be made that I'm more sympathetic to.

Rather than figuring out the less glamorous side (i.e. coffee bean suppliers) and wondering if you'd like doing that thing, I think the opposite could be a good question too:

Do I love the upside enough to deal with the downside?

No cafe owner will enjoy getting permits rejected because your bathroom sink is too high to be wheelchair accessible, replacing a supplier because they no longer carry the butter you like or having a barista not show up for work (all real examples from cafe owner friends).

But they love it enough to go through with it anyway because they care about the result. I think we should view it more that way.

Ask an aspiring software engineer if they would like to do daily 9am standups, spend hours in Jira and be lectured by a product manager who last wrote code in 2012 and they'll say no.

Experienced software engineers don't enjoy that either. They do enjoy building software enough to put up with that stuff though.

> For example, in grad school I worked with lots of undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors. Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”

I’m a professor, and I’d only add gesturing to represent teaching and banging head on a table to represent committee meetings.

But I freaking love my job.

An issue I have with this, is that it poses two rather contrary hypotheses.

1. When considering a career, people do a bad job of unpacking the detailed day-to-day activities that make it up.

2. When shown these detailed day-to-day activities people can do an excellent job of assessing whether they would be "happy" doing it or not.

Why would a person who is so bad at making the leap from the vague notion of being a professor to imagining the real-world actualities of that job, suddenly gain 100% detailed insight into whether or not those actual tasks would make them happy?

I know exactly what I want to do, if I had the money to retire today: I'd build instruments for a living, which is something I already do as a side gig/hustle, and is something I have done for years now.

It is one of those things that fall under the category "very enjoyable, but financially difficult". If you're already set financially, living a FIRE lifestyle, you can run a shop at a scale that:

- Doesn't burn you out

- Doesn't force you to cut corners

- Keeps it somewhere between a hobby and a "job"

Me and my partner are both both chasing FIRE, and I think we should get there within 4-5 years. So-called "Fat FIRE" in 10-12, if we decide to push on. We have both our dreams of focusing on the things we care most about. We both also know very well that the things we love to do, don't pay much.

Is literally nobody going to bring up this 8 hours per day 5 days a week not being needed for most jobs? A coffee shop could sell more coffee in that time but for majority of engineers it just means we can work slower and spread work over time because we are forced to fill 8 hours

I've found this extremely tedious, for three reasons:

(1) So many words to say "the devil is in the details".

(2) There are jobs that are not detail-oriented. Yes, there are some nuances to them, but they are not detail-oriented. Some people are irritated to death by having to fuck around with details, yet they excel at other jobs. There's nothing "nuts" about either group of people

(3) "Unpacking", as in, dumping all the details of a job on someone up-front, is silly. It's OK to have a plan, but it's unrealistic to expect to know everything in advance. "One step a day", "Rome wasn't built in a day". Uninformed choices and risk-taking are inevitable.

> When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked.

Strongly disagree. It's because financial pressure and time pressure do not let them experiment and test themselves at various studies and jobs. "Unpacking-as-you-go" should be the standard. Instead, we force people to commit to something particular when they're in high-school, and changing course later is prohibitively costly. Whenever someone pulls that off, it always counts as an exception, a big feat to write news articles about.

> Why is it so hard to unpack, even a little bit?

I think a major part of the reason is we like thinking about the packed thing. I'm sure that most people who fantasize about owning a coffee shop will never do so and probably deep down know they'll never do so. But the fantasizing itself is a pleasurable activity. Unpacking the job bursts that bubble and ends the enjoyable fantasy.

It takes a lot of self awareness to be mindful and deliberate about when you are planning (which requires unpacking and can be unpleasant but may be ultimately useful) and when you're fantasizing (which is deliberately low stakes and enjoyable but will not materially affect your life).

It's very easy to get stuck in the trap of fantasizing while falsely believing you are planning.

Humans are amazingly adaptable, even managing to eke out survival under the worst circumstances. You think slaves didn't make jokes about the boss as part of helping them get through the day/week/month?

The craziness is in finding ways to vary the experience within what tolerances you have, with whoever you have with you.

Workplace colleagues can make or break a "this is a good place to work" assessment.

To focus on one very small part of this article:

> For instance, shortly after college, I thought I would post a few funny videos on YouTube and, you know, become instantly famous2. I gave up basically right away. I didn’t have the madness necessary to post something every week, let alone every day, nor did it ever occur to me that I might have to fill an entire house with slime, or drive a train into a giant pit, or buy prosthetic legs for 2,000 people.

That's not the hard part.

The hard part is dealing with all the negative comments. My buddy posted a few videos on Tiktok a few weeks ago. Would any of you like to guess how many comments are straight up telling him to kill himself? Here's a hint: whatever you guess, it's likely much lower than the actual number.

I did work experience in high school with the state department for the environment.

Got to go out with one of the rangers for a day which was actually a lot of fun.

I still remember what he said as we pulled into the car park for one of the parks they manage, "most of my time is actually spent making sure the toilets haven't run out of paper".

> “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”

That sounds great actually ... but you didn't mention the constant grant-writing and chasing funding, which is what universities actually value.

I think one thing that this article misses out on is that people are more and more likely to have many careers over a lifetime. In my case, I was a teacher, then a technical writer, then a teacher again. And now I'm shifting into curriculum development. The skills built in my different careers all have complemented each other, and I don't feel as if any of them are my one and only "dream job."

Can concurr. Writing code is a minority activity when you are running a small software business (if you want to make any money at it, anyway).

This substack is the best rabbit hole of references I come across in a long while. Thanks!

If i was to sit down and unpack every potential job like that, then I dont think I'd be able to find a single job I would actually want to do

My realization about work is that 90% of all one's job is crap (give or take). You'll always have to do ton of really shitty stuff, so trying to minimize that is a lost cause. Focus on what the good parts are. You have to do crappy stuff, do you at least sometimes get to do stuff you really like? The article seems to be literally the opposite framing.

Not sure how much unpacking most founders do beforehand. "We do these things not because they're easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy."

People should unpack what a software developer does before jumping in.

Do you enjoy reading tables of letters and numbers from some dusty ISO standard in order to displays strings to a user who literally doesn't care and will never look at it? Under time pressure? With threats of getting replaced every few years by the new technology that will replace you?

Enjoy getting paged at 9pm in the middle of your kids' school play to put out the massive... oh the login to the intranet portal that only the one sales guy uses... not a fire.

Do you want to sweat bullets solving algorithms puzzles on a whiteboard in front of a bored reviewer... algorithms and data structures you will never use and will get chastised for writing on the job?

Enjoy letting others take credit for your work and ingenuity (yay team!) then taking the blame when you don't meet their impossible deadlines that they made up (how could you)?

Like getting angry emails from corporate shills that use code you write in your free time to release a new version with their requested features yesterday or else!?

Want to be able to remember op-codes from the data sheet of some processor nobody even uses anymore instead of your mothers' birthday?

Sure the money is good but they don't tell you that you're going to get hemorrhoids, astigmatism, carpal tunnel, a bad back, type-2 diabetes and a life long partnership with a therapist.

... and yet I still can't stop programming.

I feel like there is another angle to this which is largely glossed over in our modern world, which is: there are at least several viable reasons to pick a job or career. One, of course, is that you need the money. Two is that you enjoy it. The third is often left out, which is the moral angle: that it's the work you want to do in the world. You can do something everyday because it feels important to you, without enjoying it, per se, as long as it's not too stressful or abusive. It's a difference sense of "enjoyment", that it gives a deep satisfaction to do, even if the minute-to-minute experience isn't fun or entertaining or anything like that.

For instance (a bad example because I haven't done it yet, but it's illustrative:) I don't really think I'd enjoy the minutiae of running a coffee shop. But I do frequently imagine that I'm eventually going to quit everything else and try to open one. Not cause I fancy myself a cafe owner, but because I'm drawn to the project of creating a certain kind of space in the world, and having control over it so that it can stay close to my vision. Some of my favorite spaces in the world were cafes that have since disappeared or lost their charm and I'd like to try to bring some of that back. I suspect that I can survive and embrace the daily work if it is part of that overall vision.

This feels like a different angle than "you can do it because you're crazy". Actually you can do it because you really want to do it, no crazy required.

But this only works, I feel, if you're truly morally motivated by the thing you're trying to do. Very hard to pull off with modern jobs: corporate jobs seem to go as far out of their way as possible to destroy any sense of fulfillment; academic jobs (I'm told) subject you to torturous competition and bureaucracy as if to drain any inspiration you had left; menial jobs treat you as disposable and you're disempowered from effecting change. Probably this trend of making work unmeaningful is one of the great tragedies of our society. It is like the only acceptable way to be is for your meaning to come from "take your money and use it to do hobbies and buy things for your family", and it's much harder for the meaning in your life to come from the work itself, because there are so many things waiting to punish you if you try to live that way. But there are still certainly ways to do it.

In my opinion it should be a major goal of society to remove as many barriers to doing meaningful work as possible. Fulfillment ought to be seen as equally important to health. (As far as I am aware nobody has any idea how to fix this at a systemic level. The... cult? ... of capitalism opposes it too strongly.)

What I’d like to do doesn’t pay money. What I do is the most buck for the effort that I have to put in.

I know I’d be extremely happy doing what I want to do. Unpacking that might be uncomfortable for the unpacker, because you’ll realize that you hate your economic activity too.

Add to that all the bullshit jobs that don’t make any difference whether they exist or not.

That’s the tragedy. The money is already being wasted. I could take it and be happy. But I can’t. I have to put my time in on the job.

Interesting, but i feel like it kind of assumes that people are more intentional about their job choices then they are.

For a lot of people, they do the job they have because they have limited choices and need money to live.

We often picture this for minimum wage jobs, but i think its also true for more high status jobs.

I'm a computer programmer. Sometimes i like it and sometimes i don't, but at the end of the day its the only job i have the skills for. Sure i could learn to do something else if i was so inclined, but it took a long time to get good at computer programming, im not exactly eager to start that process over.

On days where im feeling frustrated, i might say i want a different job. If someone asked me what, i'd probably give some bullshit answer like run a coffee shop (except i hate customer service, so my go to fantasy is tree planter). But at the end of the day its a fantasy. I know i dont really want to do that. Nobody needs to unpack that for me to know that. I just am having a bad day and want to fantasize about the literal opposite.

I think this is substantively correct, if misguided: people are going to stick metaphorical fingers in their ears and go LA LA LA LA LA when you explain what doing <x> actually involved, rather than wake up to how being an <x> is different to their dreams.

And very probably, it's a good thing. Otherwise, we'd still be banging the rocks together.

If you enter this comments section without having read most of the article: I advise to read it till the end, no regrets.

>Otherwise you run into Borges’ map problem—if you want a map that contains all the details of the territory that it’s supposed to represent, then the map has to be the size of the territory itself.

Is this what everyone describes as “the map is not the territory”, or something else? I can imagine some other subtleties of being within a territory that an exact projection might not provide.

My wife sees what I do as "sitting in a chair all day" and tells me all the time she could not do what I do.

A succinct way to put this as career advice is: do the job with the tedium you love. Doing what you love is nice and all but most jobs aren’t just the top line work so finding a job where you love the tedious parts and might not even consider them tedious is what you want.

Two things:

> In my experience, whenever you unpack somebody, you inevitably discover something extremely weird about them. [...]

I've spoken to ca. 300 people through the Say Hi page on my site. All of them, without a single exception, and I am not exaggerating, were beautifully weird people.

(When a random person calls me, I usually start the call with "So, who/why the fuck are you?". It's cheesy, even for my standards, but it works really well for what I'm getting out of these calls.) God, I wish I had the ease of photographers like Mary Ellen Mark, being able to approach people like that more often, being able to tap into that weirdness with even more people.

> Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” [...] > These questions sound so stupid that it’s no wonder no one asks them, and yet, somehow, the answers often surprise us.

In my experience (including the calls I've had in the past), that's not necessarily true -- I ask those questions myself all the time, sometimes to the point of overthinking instead of just trying things out. For me, a better question is: what is the specific thing that attracts me to the idea of doing x/becoming x. What is the feeling I'm looking for/getting when thinking about this? It's not that much different from the question mentioned by the author, but (to me) it feels more productive and leads to more actionable results.

I got into game engine development knowing full well that it’s “applied linear algebra” and not at all like playing a game… except when you need to test something a hundred times in a row.

Lots of my colleagues dropped out of the industry in their first year because they didn’t like maths at all.

What really drove the point home for me though was that a decade later I got more satisfaction out of developing ETL pipelines for multidimensional analytics.

Think about how “nuts” that is! Everyone likes playing games but nobody installs SQL Server Analysis Services on their home PC for “fun”! Yet… it is, for a certain very select subset of the population…

Never even once thought that running a coffee shop would be fun, but then that example kind of made it seem interesting. I mean, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't actually want to do it, but also it does seem interesting to just sit there and explore different coffee beans and mess with the parameters and see what happens. There is an unloved page in my Obsidian notes somewhere where I have a table of grind size vs amount of water where I attempted to figure out the best trade-off for my drip coffee maker. (I have honestly been too lazy to actually do coffee at home for a little while now, but for a while I got sucked in.)

That said, unfortunately as much as it is depressing, the thing that I go Mr. Beast levels of obsession with is definitely software. I almost wish it could be drawing or something else that is a little more interesting, because while it is a great career that I probably would've been screwed without, it does feel pretty thankless at the end of the day. I don't think people who make software are really that valued by anyone but their own. You rarely hear people rave about software when it merely just works, even though sometimes it really is doing crazy things to make that happen. The ultimate end goal for software is to make it look and feel effortless, and if you truly win, the reward is that people will think it actually is.

That's also why I'm both terrified and excited by the prospect of machines writing competent code. I am not sure I will find the jobs left for me as interesting as actually writing the code itself. But also, if I really could have an army of even junior engineers running locally on a GPU cluster, the possibilities that would unlock feel pretty extensive. I'll just have to figure out how many GPUs I can afford while I'm waiting in the unemployment line. (Or that future may never actually come, if we're really hitting as hard of a wall as it looks like, but I'm not a believer in the meat brain being some sacred piece of matter whose functions can't possibly be replicated by logic gates. So I think it's probably a matter of time, it's just that maybe we're not actually sure how many, in part because people treat it as such an inevitability that they look at you funny if you suggest it might not be tomorrow.)

I think most people (especially software engineers) who fantasize about leaving their office jobs and running a small retail or restaurant business are not upset with having to write code all day - they're upset with the people they work with/for and fantasize about independence, even if that means a more difficult day to day job. Or, they're unhappy with the sterile environment they work in and are disillusioned with the abstract nature of B2B products (what am I selling? Whose life am I improving by selling it?) and want to work with something whose value is more easily demonstrated.

I think that when someone tells you they fantasize about starting a small local retail business, that we shouldn't just shit on their naivite; we should listen to what they're really trying to say and help them find something that checks the boxes for them:

1. Something in the real world, preferably with physical products/services on physical products

2. Something with a larger degree of independence

3. Something whose value to the customer is obvious

4. Something which improves the world or their community in some way, and is not just extracting value from others.

Personally, I love writing software, but I hate Software companies

I love this podcast and substack. He is an artist in many ways : revealing from common observations into something revelatory, curious, and funny

That's... why I'm here.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/weird-4

> The goal in life isn't to find something you love, it's to find something you can get realllll weird about.

This is a great piece. My biggest takeaway is that next time if you find someone's job fascinating -- ask them how do you spend their day doing it?

LOTS of thoughts here:

> If you think no one would answer “yes” to those questions, you’ve missed the point: almost no one would answer “yes” to those questions, and those proud few are the ones who should be surgeons, actors, and wedding photographers.

In "What Should I Do With My Life", Po Bronson has a great quote:

"Everyone thinks their dream job will be smooth sailing. But let's face it: EVERY job has shitstorms. Thing is, in the jobs you love the shitstorm is part of the 'fun and excitement' of that dream job."

I can 100% attest to this with a personal example: having been an SRE for many years I LOVE managing outages. I don't love that there ARE outages but I do love running them. I can imagine a librarian or other similar field that loves peace and quiet and predictably recoiling in horror at this statement. But that's the point. People are different and have different preferences. As patio11 said "everyone's preference space is n-dimensional".

> This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one: they don’t understand the craziness that they have to offer, nor the craziness that will be demanded of them

This is why the advice of "pick the job that involves the thing you can't stop yourself from doing" is good advice. In my case, it's writing documentation. It's an urge I can not stop. And it's been great in my FinTech SRE career as it saves future me and other people lots of time during outages.

> You’ll discover all sorts of unexpected things when unpacking, like how firefighters mostly don’t fight fires,

My wife's cousin is a firefighter and he was mentioning that due to improvements in smoke detectors, fire alarms etc, it's becoming rarer and rarer to actually fight a fire. He seemed sad when he said it.

I want the same thing I've always wanted. To be a software engineer in the 1990's.

I want to come to work and see pyramids of Jolt Cola on the desks.

And for lunch, we'll go out as a team in our Honda Civics to get some $3 Chinese food.

In the lobby, we'll have back issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal stacked up on the side tables.

We'll merge our code by copying it onto floppies and handing it to that one dude.

At some point we might setup a machine with a modem so you could dial in, telnet to a machine and check your email with pine.

When you leave work at 5:30pm, you're done for the day.

OP is asking questions related to opening a coffeehouse, an establishment that focuses on coffee and where you can order a wide range of coffee drinks.

OP's friend might very well want to open a coffee shop, a small diner where you can perhaps order two kinds of coffee - caf or decaf. Nobody cares where the beans come from.

Oh damn, it turns out I don't like anything. Maybe it's time to get my meds adjusted.

I agree with the point of the post tho. It is something I repeatedly keep stressing: many people confuse the goal ("having a nice shop") with the way (everything you need to so to get there and maintain its existence once it is there).

You can be good at a thing you don't enjoy, but if it is your dream you should better make sure it is a thing you enjoy. A thing everybody should understand is that enjoying the consuming of a thing, be it coffee, videogames, music, films or books is a vastly different experience from making them. I don't say worse, I don't say better, I say different.

And only a minority of those who love consuming a thing also love making it and having to deal with what comes with making it. But I suggest to everybody to try this for themselves.

Bunch of smug questions.

The mundane is a part of every job, and you could reduce every job to it, if you really wanted to. Do you want to chop vegetables for the rest of your life? Well that's what being a cook is. True only if you focus on it because that's what you hate.

The thinking is interesting, and I agree that the question "what to do with my life" is a modern phenomenon. But on the other hand, if you know how difficult and challenging something is, you will never do it. There are parallels to analysis paralysis here.

So yes, be prepared and think things through, but if I have learned one thing in life, it's that the problems you will run into are not the ones you imagined in the beginning. Instead you will get some you never thought of, and the ones you did will not happen or will not be a big deal. How many people here worked on software changes, and had to estimate and got it all wrong?

> The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner.

If we spent time overthinking everything, nothing would get done because circumstances are seldom perfect. A lot of it is about making stuff up as you go. Of course, reality almost never matches our imaginations either and there unpacking might help. At the same time, not everyone is passionate about the details of every job and as long as it puts food on the table (or something in the retirement account), it's good enough.

> High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack because the upsides are obvious and appealing, while the downsides are often deliberately hidden and tolerable only to a tiny minority. For instance, shortly after college, I thought I would post a few funny videos on YouTube and, you know, become instantly famous.

Most people who try at anything won't see much success, especially when that depends on standing out from others.

Most actors won't be in box office hits. Most content creators will be relatively obscure. Most software devs will write boring CRUD apps in sub-optimal environments and it will sometimes be a bit scrappy. Most employees won't be employee of the month or whatever. Same for trying to run your own business, it being profitable in any sense is already more of a success than one might think. Actually same for various creative pursuits, e.g. when people spend months working on a video game of their own, release it... and realize that they've spent thousands of dollars worth of time and won't even make that back... while something seemingly simplistic like Vampire Survivors blow up and inspire an entire genre overnight. It's the same with having a YouTube channel - you might do ten uploads and see no success. Hundred uploads and see no success. Even a thousand videos and no success yet. Meanwhile, there's someone else who seems to get 10x-100x more views or whatever, after starting building a channel at a similar time to you. You might be able to learn from them... or it might just be some inherent characteristics that you don't have and that's that.

Long story short, maybe there is something you excel at and you just have to find it. Statistically (for a general population), probably not. I think a big problem of our time is being exposed to the very best wherever you look - from the highlights of the lives of attractive people on social media, to YouTube videos produced to a crazy high degree of quality, to completely mismatched expectations of what the mediocrity of real life will look like for most folks.

Jensen Huang has mentioned something like this similarly before: (iirc) When asked if he would change anything about his life if he could do it all over again, he says something like: if I had to do this all over again knowing what I know now, I wouldn't. If you actually knew the sacrifice and difficulty of that path upfront, deeply knew it and understood it fully in a way only having experienced it can create, essentially no one would walk that path, not even if it meant becoming one of the richest people in the world at the end.

The flip-side of that is a quote from DHH on a recent Lex Friedman podcast: "I wouldn't go back and say a thing to my younger self. I would not rob my younger self of all the life experiences I have been blessed with due to the ignorance of how the world works."

Ctrl-F "Profit"

Face it: you've missed the point of business.

This article presents FOMO as a decision making strategy. Completely bizarre.

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

[flagged]