Beyond Passion: The Science of Loving What You Do

<i>In several earlier posts, I argued that mastering a rare and valuable skill is the key to generating a remarkable life</i><p>I'm a passionate proselytizer of this. So many many of my peers have made major choices about what to pursue with little to no critical analysis of what they want out of life and how the chosen path will get them there.

Argument doesn't make sense. Author asserts that goal is "autonomy", "competence", "relatedness," as opposed to "passion" or "personality." You don't have to "care" about your work as long as you self-manage and are good at it.<p>However, then the author defines:<p>"Autonomy" as "you endorse [your] actions at the highest level of reflection." This implies work that satisfies your own human values, which seems like part of "passion" or "personality," more than simply freedom of choice.<p>(Also, what's the point of making your own choices if it's not for pursuing of goals you either care about or enjoy, which again seems like "passion" or "personality.")<p>"Competence" as "mastering unambiguously useful things." I don't know about you but I have never been able to master anything that I did not in some way have some "passion" or "personality" for.<p>There is the Carol Dweck argument that if you decide you can learn anything, and put in enough hours of deliberating practice, then you can be good at anything. Given that the amount of deliberate practice people are citing is 10,000 hours required or approximately 10 years, then doing this without passion seems like a hideously painful waste of your life.<p>"Relatedness" as "to love and care [about people], and to be loved and cared for." Again I don't see how this is independent of passion or personality. Passion is loving and caring about something, e.g. people. Personality I think has some definite non-zero correlation with whom you love, care for, enjoy spending time around.<p>Autonomy, competence and relatedness seem like fine things to seek in your work, but I'm not convinced of the author's argument that these things are independent of passion or personality.<p>(Also it's worth pointing out that the author does not provide a "have an awesome experience of work" example so much as he provides a Tim Ferris-style 4 Hour Work Week example of "make a bunch of money quickly and then go spend your free time." The example person in the post, despite having "mastered" database optimization, doesn't actually care to go optimize a database more than once every few _months_.)

Pro Tip: Reading self-help blogs is not a rare and valuable skill, no matter how good you are at it.

I agree, it's important to master something useful.<p>But the hidden lesson in this blog post is to always apply that mastery to problem environments. The bigger the problem, the better.<p>When things are going along smoothly nobody cares what you've mastered.<p>In other words, if you want autonomy, relate to someone who genuinely needs help with the things you've mastered.

I found this blog post to be far more useful than (the cited) Daniel H. Pink book, Drive.