如何才能去做喜歡的事情
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We"ve got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it"s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.
The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn"t—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.
And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.
The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn"t, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.
Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn"t fun for most of them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of kids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn"t just do what you wanted.
I"m not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later. [1]
Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn"t think he meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that.
喜歡一件事才能做好它，這可不是什麼新想法，用4個字概括："Do what you love."（「做你喜歡的事」）。然而，知易行難。
小時候沒有人告訴我們這些。當我還是個孩子的時候，以為工作和娛樂截然不同。生活分成兩部分：有時候大人給點活干；剩下的時間就去玩，隨心所欲。偶爾，大人讓做的事居然挺有趣，而玩也會有不開心的時候，比如摔倒受傷。但這種情況不多見，通常，幹活都沒啥意思。
既然上學是為了工作，那它肯定也很枯燥。
生活有工作和娛樂兩種狀態，相應地，人被分成兩種，大人和孩子。大人要辛苦地工作，孩子雖然不用工作，但他們得去學校學做一些簡單的事，為將來打基礎。就像孩子們不喜歡學校一樣，大人們也都不愛工作，這似乎顯而易見。
老師尤其相信工作沒有樂趣可言，這並不奇怪，因為絕大多數教師沒體會過教書的樂趣。就像孩子們不能玩躲球遊戲(dodgeball)，非要背各個省的省會一樣，老師也不得不看著這些孩子，不能躺在海灘。誰都不能想幹什麼就幹什麼。
這麼說並不代表我認為允許孩子自做主張是對的，他們總得學會點什麼。但是，如果大人告訴孩子「工作不都是這麼枯燥，現在之所以要做些很悶的事，恰恰是為了以後可以選擇能帶來樂趣的工作」[1]是不是效果更好呢？
在我9歲或者10歲的時候，父親曾告訴我，只要我喜歡，長大了幹什麼都行。這話我記得很清楚，因為聽起來好像有人告訴我水是乾的一樣怪異。雖然我不敢肯定父親想告訴我什麼，但肯定不是說工作能像娛樂一樣帶來樂趣。過了好多年，我才弄明白這一點。
Jobs
By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the private jet pilot. But I don"t think the bank manager really did.
The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you"re supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.
Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do. That"s where the upper-middle class tradition comes from. Just as houses all over America are full of chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who"ve done great things.
What a recipe for alienation. By the time they reach an age to think about what they"d like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one"s work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can"t blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."
Actually they"ve been told three lies: the stuff they"ve been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.
The most dangerous liars can be the kids" own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. [2] Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house. [3]
It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren"t identical.
The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit of so many years my idea of work still included a large component of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn"t literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.
If you think something"s supposed to hurt, you"re less likely to notice if you"re doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.
工作
很多人讀完高中就開始工作了，所以，大人會在孩子讀高中的時候向他們講些工作上的事，也允許孩子跑去看他們工作的樣子。那時我總覺得大人都很喜歡各自的工作，現在回頭想想，也許只有私人飛行員才真正喜歡，銀行經理肯定不喜歡他的那份工作。
有一種說法，中高層人士都喜歡自己的工作。於是，人們都裝模作樣喜歡自己的工作，彷彿自己是中高層人士中的一員，否則不僅會影響其職業生涯，而且顯得沒有教養。
本文第一句話可以解釋為什麼人們都要裝作喜歡自己的工作。如果一個人只能做好他喜歡的事情，那麼，有些人能成功，就是因為喜歡自己的工作。如同在美國，家家戶戶都有250年前法國國王用椅的不同程度的仿製品一樣（儘管主人可能並不太清楚），人們對工作的態度也是在不同程度上、有意無意地模仿成功人士。
假裝喜歡自己的工作的做法必定把孩子弄得精神錯亂，等他們到了開始思考喜歡什麼工作的年齡，絕大多數人已經完全被這種「干一行愛一行」的觀點所誤導。一方面，學校教導他們工作是一種責任，但毫無樂趣可言，工作甚至比上學還辛苦。另一方面，身邊的大人卻口口聲聲說他們喜歡工作。孩子們會想：「我和他們不一樣，我不屬於這個世界。」這不是孩子的錯。
學校和大人們不一致的說法使孩子們錯誤地認為：學校里學會做的事情並不是真正的工作；工作不比學習更糟；要麼那些說喜歡工作的大人都在說謊。然而，三種說法全是錯誤的。
最危險的謊言來自孩子的父母。如果某人選擇無聊的工作是為了讓全家人生活得好一點――很多人也真的是這麼做的――那麼他的孩子很可能受其影響，也認為工作挺無聊的[2]。而如果父母能為自己多考慮考慮（選擇自己喜歡的工作，儘管以犧牲全家人的生活質量為代價――譯者注），教出來的孩子反而會好一些。熱愛工作的父母對子女的影響是昂貴的房子無法帶來的[3]。
讀大學時，我才明白養家糊口不是工作的唯一目的。選擇什麼工作要比賺多少錢重要。雖然人們一般認為工作就是為了生存，但也有特別值得一提的故事（比如說愛因斯坦在專利局上班）說明，事實並非總是如此。
如今，工作的目的是為世界做出貢獻，同時也要能夠生存。可是這麼多年來，我一直無法改變自己的錯誤想法，認為工作中令人痛苦的事情很多。工作中仍然需要不斷鑽研，所謂「天將降大任於斯人也，必先苦其心智，勞其筋骨……」。所以，人們不得不強迫自己做這些工作。
如果認為工作註定是件痛苦的事，當工作中出現錯誤就覺察不出來。這就是我在研究生院學習期間的思考所得。
Bounds
How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don"t know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you"ll tend to stop searching too early. You"ll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia.
Here"s an upper bound: Do what you love doesn"t mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.
It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they"d rather do. There didn"t seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I"d prefer? Honestly, no.
But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn"t mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.
Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.
As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don"t regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.
I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you"ll have terrible problems with procrastination. You"ll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.
To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that"s pretty cool. This doesn"t mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that"s pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.
So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there"s no test of how well you"ve read a book, and that"s why merely reading books doesn"t quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you"ve read to feel productive.
I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow. But it probably wouldn"t start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven"t had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.
界限
一個人能夠喜歡工作到什麼程度呢？如果他不知道這個問題的答案，就不知道該在什麼時候停止尋找。另外，如果他像其他人那樣，低估了對工作的熱愛之情，又會過早地停止尋找。他或者會聽從父母的安排，或者去追名逐利，又或者什麼也不做。
一方面，「做你喜歡做的事」不意味著做此時此刻最想做的事，即便是愛因斯坦也會有想喝咖啡的時候，但他會告誡自己先完成手頭的工作。
我總是無法理解有些人非常喜歡自己的工作以至於其它的事都不想做，因為我從來沒有如此喜歡過一份工作。如果我可以選擇(a)花一小時做點什麼，或者(b)瞬間轉移(teleport)到羅馬，然後在那裡閑逛一小時。我會更喜歡哪一個呢？說實話，都不喜歡。
然而，在某些特定的時刻，幾乎每個人都會傾向去Carribbean飄流、做愛、或者享用美食，而不是去解決難題。做自己喜歡的事是有時間範圍的。不能是只在某一刻特別想做的事，必須要持續一段較長的時間，比如一個星期或者一個月。
沒有成果的快樂是無法持續的，如果厭倦了躺在沙灘上，而又想保持快樂，就得做點事情出來。
另一方面，必須得喜歡工作多一點，喜歡享受少一點，要有不做點事就閑得難受的勁頭。當然也不能沒日沒夜地工作，可以堅持工作直到疲勞為止，然後可能想做點別的，甚至只是發獃。但不要把這種時刻當成一種獎勵，或者辛苦工作的補償。
我這麼說是有原因的，如果一個人在做著自己並不喜歡的工作，那麼不會有什麼成就，因為強迫自己工作不可能比別人做得好。
要想工作得快樂，不僅要做自己喜歡的事，而且是令人佩服的事，是那種做完可以說「哇，太酷了」的工作。不一定非得製造點什麼出來，學會開滑翔機，說一口流利的外語，都足以讓人感覺很酷，至少是那一刻。可以用這種方法來測試自己。
我認為讀書就不符合這一標準。除了某些數學書或者實用科學書籍，很難準確說讀完一本書後的感受，這也是為什麼讀書和工作不太一樣。只有在實踐中運用了讀到的知識，才會感覺有收穫。
Gino Lee告訴過我一個好方法――做一件能讓你的朋友說「哇」的事情。但這可能不適用於22歲以下的人，因為他們認識的人太少，碰不到真正的朋友。
Sirens
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. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don"t even know? [4]
This is easy advice to give. It"s hard to follow, especially when you"re young. [5] 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.
That"s what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you"re going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.
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 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.
Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what"s admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.
The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren"t tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.) The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn"t thought much about what they really like.
The test of whether people love what they do is whether they"d do it even if they weren"t paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kinds of academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect. Most good mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobs as math professors, whereas in the departments at the other end of the spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver: people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies, and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs. Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun.
The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. It seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors and whose parents want them to be novelists. The kids think their parents are "materialistic." Not necessarily. All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won"t get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you"ll have to deal with the consequences.
誘惑
我認為，一個人不應該在乎別人的看法，除非是他的朋友。不要想著出名，不必太在意眾人的意見。能夠得到尊敬的人的意見就夠了，何必在乎那些根本就不認識的人呢？[4]
說起來容易做起來難，對孩子來說更是如此[5]。出名極具誘惑力，甚至可以讓人放棄其所愛，轉而去做一些他渴望喜歡的事情。
比如，有些人之所以寫小說，是因為他們喜歡讀小說，而且發現寫小說可以得諾貝爾獎，於是乎他們會想，難道還會有什麼工作比成為一名作家更好嗎？但是，渴望成為一名作家還不夠，還要喜歡寫作，喜歡編故事。
精誠所至，金石為開。把一件事做到最好，就能贏得聲望。然而，做某些工作會帶來聲望是後來才有的，爵士樂就是一個例子，其它成熟的藝術形式也是如此。所以，儘管去做喜歡的事吧，聲望自會隨之而來。
聲望對於雄心勃勃的人來說是最危險的誘惑，想讓這種人辦事，只需向其保證一定的聲望即可，比如讓其做演講、作序、服務於某個委員會、以及做個部門頭頭，等等。所以最好的建議就是不要做這類工作，如果它有趣的話，人們就無需使其聽上去很美了。
同理，如果同樣喜歡兩種工作，其中一種會帶來更大的聲望，那麼就選擇另外一個。聲望會一點點地改變人們的愛好，所以如果自己無法區分的話，那麼很可能真正喜歡的是不引人注目的那個。
金錢同樣使人墮落。錢本身並不危險，有些工作雖然可以掙很多錢，卻被人瞧不起，比如電話推銷、賣淫、或者人身傷害訴訟。做這種工作的人最終會是那些「只求生存」的人（建議：如果某個行業的從業者這麼說，不要做這個行當），有追求的人才不會被其誘惑。真正的危險來自於名利雙收的職業，例如從事企業法律或者醫學工作。一份既有保障又有前途的工作，再加上一點可以不勞而獲的聲望，才是對青年人最大的威脅，因為他們還沒開始思考什麼是他們真正喜歡的。
要想知道一個人是否喜歡他正在做的事，就看他會不會無償地工作，即使不得不做另一份工作以求生存。究竟有多少企業律師願意在非工作時間免費做他們正在做的工作，而以日常工作糊口呢？
這種方法對於選擇從事哪種學術研究工作特別有幫助，因為不同領域之間的差別非常大。大多數優秀的數學家即使當不了數學教授也願意從事數學研究，另一種情況恰恰相反，有人發表論文，就是想做英語教授，而不是在廣告機構工作。即使沒有數學系也會有人研究數學，但是如果沒有英語專業，以及教學職位的存在，又怎麼會有人長篇累牘地發表論文，研究Conrad小說中人物的性別和身分呢？沒人會覺得研究這些東西很有趣。
做父母的往往會看重金錢。可以放心地說，孩子想當作家而父母想讓其當醫生的多，孩子想當醫生而父母讓其當作家的少。孩子認為父母太「實際」，其實未必。所有的父母對待孩子要比對待自己更慎重，因為作為父母，他們承擔風險，卻得不到好處。如果八歲的兒子打算爬樹，或者10來歲的女兒要和壞男孩約會，父母無法體會孩子的興奮，但是如果兒子從樹上掉下來，或者女兒懷孕了，卻要父母出面收場。
Discipline
With such powerful forces leading us astray, it"s not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.
It"s hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don"t underestimate this task. And don"t feel bad if you haven"t succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you"re discontented, you"re a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you"re surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they"re lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably.
Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don"t have to force yourself to do it—finding work you love does usually require discipline. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they"re 12, and just glide along as if they were on railroad tracks. But this seems the exception. More often people who do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A, drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after taking it up on the side.
Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it"s a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can"t tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they"re trying to find their niche.
Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you"re doing, even if you don"t like it. Then at least you"ll know you"re not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you"ll get into the habit of doing things well.
Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don"t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you"re producing, you"ll know you"re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you"re actually writing.
"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you"re supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life"s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.
Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn"t mean you get to work on it. That"s a separate question. And if you"re ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible. [6]
It"s painful to keep them apart, because it"s painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they"d like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you"d find most would say something like "Oh, I can"t draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I"m not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they"d get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can"t."
Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do work they love—that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs. Really? How do you make them? In the US the only mechanism for forcing people to do unpleasant jobs is the draft, and that hasn"t been invoked for over 30 years. All we can do is encourage people to do unpleasant work, with money and prestige.
If there"s something people still won"t do, it seems as if society just has to make do without. That"s what happened with domestic servants. For millennia that was the canonical example of a job "someone had to do." And yet in the mid twentieth century servants practically disappeared in rich countries, and the rich have just had to do without.
So while there may be some things someone has to do, there"s a good chance anyone saying that about any particular job is mistaken. Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if no one were willing to do them.
慎重
面對如此危險的誘惑，很難找到喜歡的工作就不奇怪了。大多數人從小就相信工作是受罪，不信邪的人也都栽在了名利的誘惑上。那麼到底有多少人最終找到了他們所熱愛的工作呢？10萬，或者10億。
找到自己愛乾的工作是很難的。大多數人做不到的事肯定很難，所以，不要低估它的難度，同時，也不要因為暫時沒有找到而氣餒。其實，只要敢於承認自己對工作的不滿，就比很多人更可能成功了，那些人還在自欺欺人呢。如果周圍的同事都說工作得很開心，而自己卻對這份工作一點也看不上眼，那也許是同事在自己騙自己，雖然未必都是，但可能性很大。
做大事不像人們想像的那樣艱苦，因為只有喜歡自己工作的人才能成就大事，他們根本不需要勉強自己，但是，尋找愛好的過程卻得非常認真。有些人特別幸運，他們12歲就知道自己想做什麼，然後沿著這條路茁壯成長。但這樣的人畢竟是少數，對於更多成就大事的人來說，其職業生涯就像乒乓球的軌跡，他們在學校里學A，工作後做完全不相關的B，最後成名於C。
有時候，更換工作是精力旺盛的表現，但也可能是因為懶惰。通常，你無法區分自己究竟是掉隊了，還是在另闢蹊徑，即使許多成就大事的人，在最初尋找人生定位時往往很失望。
有什麼方法可以讓自己保持誠實嗎？一種方法是無論做什麼都要做好它，即使不喜歡。這樣至少知道自己不是在為懶惰找借口。更重要的是，往往會養成把事做好的習慣。
另一種方法是「堅持實踐」。例如，如果想成為一名作家，又不想因為日常工作而浪費精力，那麼，就要堅持練習寫作。儘管寫得不好，但還是要堅持寫。只要堅持實踐，就會知道想成為作家是不是想想而已。如果寫的東西實在糟糕，選擇這份工作就不現實。
堅持實踐是一種啟發式的方法，可以幫助找到喜愛的工作，甄別出那些本以為會做好的工作，最終選擇真正喜歡的，就好像水在地球引力的作用下可以找到屋頂的漏洞一樣。
當然，明白喜歡什麼工作並不意味著能夠以它為工作，這是兩碼事。有追求的人更要把兩者分清楚，喜歡做什麼和能做成什麼是不一樣的。[6]
這一點看得越清楚，內心就會越痛苦，很多人因此降低標準。例如，如果在街上隨便找人問問，他們能否和Leonardo畫得一樣好，就會發現很多人說他們根本不會畫畫。這更像是一種心理暗示，而不是事實。他實際想說，我不會去干那個。因為如果想方設法讓他做畫20年，他會為自己獲得的成就而吃驚。當然那需要非常刻苦，可能要在頭幾年每天都得面對失敗。所以如果有人說「我不行」，不要相信他。
另一個經常聽到的說法是，不能每個人都做自己喜歡的事，總得有人做令人討厭的工作。真的嗎？這個結論是如何得出的呢？在美國，唯一強迫人的方式是徵兵，但我們已經30年沒有這麼做過了，而是一直利用名利吸引人工作。
如果仍然有些事沒人願意做，那麼人們就不得不自己做，過去發生在家奴身上的事就是這樣。家奴的工作是經典的例子，在公元10世紀時，似乎那份工作總得有人來做。然而在20世紀中期，發達國家已經沒有僕人了，有錢人得自己幹活。
所以，也許有些事情總得有人做，但是談到具體的某項工作時這麼說就不合適了。糟糕的工作可以自動化完成，或者根本就不做，如果沒人願意做的話。
Two Routes
There"s another sense of "not everyone can do work they love" that"s all too true, however. One has to make a living, and it"s hard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes to that destination:
The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don"t.
The two-job route: to work at things you don"t like to get money to work on things you do.
The organic route is more common. It happens naturally to anyone who does good work. A young architect has to take whatever work he can get, but if he does well he"ll gradually be in a position to pick and choose among projects. The disadvantage of this route is that it"s slow and uncertain. Even tenure is not real freedom.
The two-job route has several variants depending on how long you work for money at a time. At one extreme is the "day job," where you work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on what you love in your spare time. At the other extreme you work at something till you make enough not to have to work for money again.
The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It"s also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it"s easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. And the best paying jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.
The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over obstacles. The landscape of possible jobs isn"t flat; there are walls of varying heights between different kinds of work. [7] The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music. If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you have more freedom of choice.
Which route should you take? That depends on how sure you are of what you want to do, how good you are at taking orders, how much risk you can stand, and the odds that anyone will pay (in your lifetime) for what you want to do. If you"re sure of the general area you want to work in and it"s something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don"t know what you want to work on, or don"t like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.
Don"t decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it"s wrong.
A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don"t do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way—including, unfortunately, not liking it.
Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.
When you"re young, you"re given the impression that you"ll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work. When you"re deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information. Even in college you get little idea what various types of work are like. At best you may have a couple internships, but not all jobs offer internships, and those that do don"t teach you much more about the work than being a batboy teaches you about playing baseball.
In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media. So unless you"re fairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose a type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job career. That was probably part of the reason I chose computers. You can be a professor, or make a lot of money, or morph it into any number of other kinds of work.
It"s also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like. Conversely, the extreme version of the two-job route is dangerous because it teaches you so little about what you like. If you work hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you"ll quit and write novels when you have enough money, what happens when you quit and then discover that you don"t actually like writing novels?
Most people would say, I"d take that problem. Give me a million dollars and I"ll figure out what to do. But it"s harder than it looks. Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.
Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it"s rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you"ll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you"re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you"re practically there.
兩條路
有一種情況確實不是每個人都可以做他喜歡做的工作。人首先要生存，做自己喜歡的工作會很難賺到錢。這時有兩條路可以走：
成長漸進法：隨著能力的增強、名氣的增大，逐漸放棄不喜歡的工作，選擇喜歡的工作。
齊頭並進法：做不喜歡的工作賺錢，以便做自己喜歡的事情。
成長漸進法更常用，工作做得好的人一般選這種方法。年輕的建築師開始時不得不什麼活都干，等到他做得很好之後就可以挑選項目了。這種方法也有不好的地方，就是太慢，而且不確定，即使是終身聘用也無法做到真正的自由。
齊頭並進法有多種做法，取決於需要用多少時間賺錢。一個極端是白天上班，靠一份工作時間固定的工作賺錢，而在閑暇時光做自己喜歡做的事。另一個極端是先拚命賺錢，直到不再為錢發愁。
齊頭並進法用的人比較少，因為需要事先做好周全的打算，而且這種方法更危險。隨著年齡的增長，對生活的要求也越高，所以為了賺到足夠的錢，可能需要比預期更長的時間工作。更糟的是，人可能會被工作內容改變。如果做無聊的事情太久，腦子可能就銹掉了。錢給的越多的工作越危險，因為需要付出全部的精力。
齊頭並進法的好處是可以讓人擺脫障礙[7]。職業發展不都是一片坦徒，不同工作之間的差距變化很大。從結構設計工作轉行到產品設計工作還有可能，要轉向音樂方面就不太可能了。有兩份工作的人多一分選擇，儘管其中一份只為賺錢。
到底該選哪條路走呢？這取決於你是否明確想做什麼，是否擅長分清主次，能承擔多大的風險，以及是否有人願意為你喜歡做的事情付錢。如果知道自己想幹什麼，也知道有人願意為此付錢，那麼就選擇成長漸進法。如果還不了解自己想幹什麼，或者不喜歡非黑即白的二元邏輯，那麼可以選擇齊頭並進法，只要你能承擔由此帶來的風險。
不要太早下決定。很小就知道自己未來做什麼的孩子似乎讓人印象深刻，就像他們比其他孩子更善於做數學題目一樣。可惜，他們得到的答案往往是錯誤的。
我有一位非常成功的醫生朋友，她不停地抱怨自己的工作。當有人向她諮詢申請醫學院事宜的時候，她很想握著他們的手說「不要去」（但是她從沒這麼做過）。她怎麼會這樣呢？她在高中的時候就想成為醫生，而且她雄心勃勃信誓旦旦，克服了所有的困難，令人遺憾的是，她甚至克服了對這份工作的厭煩。
結果，她現在的生活實際上是一名高中生為她做出的選擇。
年輕的時候，我們相信有足夠的信息事先做出選擇，工作卻是個例外。試圖做出選擇時，手上只有少得可憐的信息。即使上了大學，我們也很少知道工作到底是個什麼樣子。最好的情況也就是做過幾次實習生，但不是所有的工作都提供實習機會，而那些提供實習的工作，也不會教你太多東西，就好像做球童不可能學會打棒球一樣。
人生規劃和其它規劃一樣，多嘗試會有更好的結果。所以，除非十分確定，最好還是選擇一份可以應用成長漸進法或齊頭並進法的工作。這也是我選擇計算機行業的部分原因。在這個行當，做教授也行，想賺很多錢也行，也可以向一些相關專業轉行。
儘早從事涵蓋面較廣的工作也是很明智的，這樣就可以很快知道各種工作都是做什麼的。相反，極端的齊頭並進法很危險，因為無法得知自己喜歡什麼。如果一個人做了十年的債券交易商，當他攢夠了錢決定不再繼續而轉行寫小說時，卻發現自己並不是真得喜歡寫小說，卻已為時已晚。
多數人都會說，這好辦，給我一百萬，我就能弄明白該做什麼。但是說起來容易做起來難，環境塑造人，離開了自己生活的環境，多數人都會不知所措，看看那些中了彩票或繼承了大筆財產的人就知道了。就像每個人都說他們在意財務安全，然而最快樂人不是那些擁有它的人，而是那些喜歡他們在做的事的人。這麼看來，有一份明確的計劃未必是件好事情。
選擇哪條路，是要經歷一番思想鬥爭的。找到喜歡做的工作很難，大多數人都沒能做到這一點。即使能做到，也要等到三、四十歲。但是，只要有這個願望，就很可能會實現。如果知道自己會喜歡工作，就勝利在望了，如果知道自己具體愛做什麼工作，就已經實現了這個目標。
Notes
[1] Currently we do the opposite: when we make kids do boring work, like arithmetic drills, instead of admitting frankly that it"s boring, we try to disguise it with superficial decorations.
[2] One father told me about a related phenomenon: he found himself concealing from his family how much he liked his work. When he wanted to go to work on a saturday, he found it easier to say that it was because he "had to" for some reason, rather than admitting he preferred to work than stay home with them.
[3] Something similar happens with suburbs. Parents move to suburbs to raise their kids in a safe environment, but suburbs are so dull and artificial that by the time they"re fifteen the kids are convinced the whole world is boring.
[4] I"m not saying friends should be the only audience for your work. The more people you can help, the better. But friends should be your compass.
[5] Donald Hall said young would-be poets were mistaken to be so obsessed with being published. But you can imagine what it would do for a 24 year old to get a poem published in The New Yorker. Now to people he meets at parties he"s a real poet. Actually he"s no better or worse than he was before, but to a clueless audience like that, the approval of an official authority makes all the difference. So it"s a harder problem than Hall realizes. The reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to impress are not very discerning.
[6] This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of that.
[7] A more accurate metaphor would be to say that the graph of jobs is not very well connected.
[1] 現在，我們做的恰恰相反：當我們讓孩子做無聊的事情，比如算術練習，我們沒有坦白地說它很無趣，而是假裝它很有趣。
[2] 有位父親告訴我一個相關的現象：他特意向家人隱瞞有多愛自己的工作，當他周末想去工作時，發現說一些不得不去的借口很容易，而不原意承認自己更原意工作，而不是和家人待在一起。
[3] 郊區的情況也差不多。父母搬到郊區，為了他們的孩子生活在安全的環境，但是郊區索然無味，不夠自然，十幾歲的孩子會以為整個世界都是這個樣子。
[4] 我並不是說只能跟朋友說這些事情，幫忙的人越多越好，但是朋友的意見最重要。
[5] Donald Hall說，那些有望成為詩人的年輕人錯誤地執迷於發布作品。但是你可以想像，如果一個二十四歲的年輕人在「紐約客」雜誌上發表一首詩，那會是什麼情形，他會在聚會上被當成真正的詩人，儘管他和從前沒什麼兩樣。但是，對於其他不知情的人，能不能在權威雜誌上發表文章是有很大不同的。所以說，實際情況比Hall認為的要困難。年輕人之所以特別在乎名氣，是因為他們想打動的那些大人往往搞不清楚狀況。
[6] 就像我們要警惕，事情不會因為我們希望它發展成什麼樣子就會成什麼樣子，這是同樣的道理。很多人分不清兩者之間的區別，宗教越來越受歡迎就是證據之一。
[7] 一個更形象的隱喻是，以各種工作為節點的圖，並沒有連通得很好。
翻譯: 王亮
