I promise you that at many points, playing guitar felt like work to Jimmy Hendrix. Painting felt like work to Picasso. Muhammad Ali tried very hard to be the best. He also marketed the hell out of himself.

People who've never done something for a living that is a hobby for most participants think there's some clearly-defined line between work and passion. There's not. It's a continuum and you spend your life moving from one end to the other and back again if you're doing the right thing. If you're not you spend it all at one end.

Take advice, just don't view it as the gospel. Everyone here has probably been taking advice from PG, for instance, and is better off for it.

Endeavor to do things that you enjoy doing, and do them with feeling and quality. Chasing success, money, competition, or customer whims will not lead to happiness. Instead do things that you enjoy and do them in your own way that no one else can compete with. This will sidestep competition and lead to customers, money, and success. Think Apple.

Don't just absorb knowledge (reading, advice), but understand it from the author's point of view. His last point was to not blindly take advice, but to understand it and apply it to your own situation. To ignore and marginalize his advice as you have done is to ignore one of his most important points.

I'm not sure who this advice is targeted at. It's certainly not for ambitious people who want to build things people use.

"Do not market" and "do not try hard" is a surefire way to never being successful at anything.

This is universally bad advice, and I wonder about anyone who takes it seriously. Do you think Apple is successful because they don't worry about competition or marketing?

Nice job taking that statement out of context. I was saying that most advice taken 100% literally can be shown to be absurd. The submission itself reiterates that. Your (and mattmaroon's) comment reinforces it even more.

> What if chasing success makes me happy?

The point I took from the advice is to pursue your passion, as opposed to pursuing success for the sake of success. If your passion is pursuing success (if that's even meaningful or realistic), then chasing success would not be contrary to the advice.

> I'm not sure who this advice is targeted at. It's certainly not for ambitious people who want to build things people use.

The submission says exactly who the advice is targeted at: the advisor's daughter. The man wants his daughter to be happy; it is intended to help someone on the path to a happy life. Ambition is not happiness, so of course it's not advice on how to be ambitious. Then again, the advice implicitly defines work as activity that is not "reenergizing and reinvigorating." If making other people happy does that for you, then you can make the advice apply to your situation.

> Do you think Apple is successful because they don't worry about competition or marketing?

Yes, absolutely. The context of "do not market"* was "do not cater to other people's desires." Would you agree that the iPod was one of the biggest factors in elevating Apple to its current level? The iPod was designed to be a great MP3 player, with no concern for the competition or for what potential customers thought they wanted. Apple wasn't trying to compete with SanDisk (or whoever) by adding a few extra features or offering a lower-priced offering. They completely changed the game. They are a perfect example of:

  Quality has no competition. Only mediocrity has
  competition. If you do what you do at the highest quality 
  you have no competition. Quality creates a moat around
  yourself.

  Create your own demand. People are always on the lookout
  for the good. People seek out winners. Therefore be a
  winner all the time.

  Do not take advice
  Advice is what others did not take but wish to give. Your
  mind is your best guide. Certainly keep your eyes and ears
  open. Absorb everything but add your own pinch of salt.
  Filter out what does not suit you.

* A lot of people seem to conflate marketing with advertising. Marketing means to make a product to satisfy a market. Only recently (i.e. the last century or so) has its definition shifted to convincing the market to use your product. I suspect that, being from Bangladesh, the advisor is referring to the more traditional definition of marketing.

If chasing success is what makes him happy, then he'll alwys be happy, by your interpretation.

What it used to say was:

> What if chasing success makes me happy?

Then you'll never be happy. Your definition of success will keep changing, and you'll never get there. There's nothing inherently negative about success, but there's nothing inherently positive either. "Success" is a meaningless metric without a strict definition of what it means to be successful.

I wrote a longish essay called "How to get your Professors’ Attention — along with Coaching or Mentoring" in response to the ways I've responded to students and previous professors have responded to me: http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors%E2... . A chunk of the essay concerns the importance of reading and how people use reading to test your seriousness. I think it's much better advice than not to "read."

To grant him some benefit, in his last point he did say, to take his advice too with a "pinch of salt".

Could this be intentionally evil advice designed to prevent the recipient from ever amounting to anything? Infants let their feelings flow unabated. "Jimmy" worked his ass off.

I played basketball for years and even the drills never felt like work.

I guess it's the difference between work and play.

I don't know what the psychological underpinnings are for the subjective qualitative difference, but I think this may relate to the "effortlessness" of Taoism vs. the "effort" of Buddhism. Just hypothesizing.

I can read for hours and research subjects of interest and it's never "work".

I can practice something on the piano that I like, which is difficult to play, and it's not "work"; but doing contrived exercises with the same finger-movements feels like work.

I not only find it totally believable that playing guitar was subjectively NOT work to Jimi Hendrix, but I would go further and say he NEVER would have gotten to where he got if it DID seem like work.

If you only love the glory, and not the process, how will you even persist long enough to get there?

A few further examples -- Kobe Bryant LOVES basketball. There are a lot of talents who go into the NBA for the paycheck and then underachieve; it's just a job to them. Kobe isn't the best athlete in the NBA -- many can jump higher or run faster. But he is the most skilled, and the best seemingly-impossible shot maker in the history of the game. Kobe, 13, joins the Sonny Hill summer league in Philadelphia, where a counselor scolds him for listing the NBA as his future career. "The guy said NBA players are one in a million," Kobe says. "I said, 'Man, look, I'm going to be that one in a million.' "

Lance Armstrong LOVES riding his bike. It was his route to personal freedom in football-loving Texas, and he would go for a ride any time he needed to think.

Adam Lambert LOVES performing. He was always performing and singing since he was a child. He would drive his little brother crazy by always singing and dancing to things on the radio and making up his own versions of songs.

And these are just people with a high level of COMMERCIAL success. All of them would have had their own success of some sort, by doing what they loved, even if they didn't become millionaires.

So it kind of depends on what you mean by "amount to anything". By whose standards?

I remember some story, which was a true story, possibly from Outliers, I don't quite remember; it was about parents making their kids do something that the parents wanted. Something like: A surgeon had wanted to be a dancer but he was forced to be a doctor; he received some prestigious award that all his fellow surgeons coveted, but he was miserable. "But you've been recognized by all your peers as being the best surgeon!" "Yes," he responded dejectedly, "but I'm the worst dancer!"

A further example was of two parents who had been forced into respectable professions; the mother had wanted to be a pianist instead. So she decided that wouldn't happen to HER daughter; she hired private music tutors. Except the daughter had no interest in piano... she was being forced into it!

Even if you get what you want, you have to have the capacity to enjoy it, or it won't mean anything to you. Depending on the state of your hormones and neurotransmitters, this can vary drastically even over the course of a single day.

The biggest dichotomy I see now is between Creators and Consumers. Most of our socialization has the effect of turning us into the latter. How many stories have we seen of people making a million dollars off something that ANY of us COULD do, but they actually went and DID it?

Unlike the school and work system, which reward conformity, there is a huge amount of real-world success from being DIFFERENT. If you get really good at ANYTHING, you can probably make a living from it. Even just being weird.

Society serves a very useful purpose, though, because the more it turns everyone into consumers, the less you have to CREATE in order to make a living. Just look at Mob Wars or Reddit.

So whichever angle you approach it from, personal satisfaction or commercial success, it seems the way to go is to do whatever is subjectively RIGHT for you.

Her father asked him, "What will you do with your life?"

"Pray," he replied.

"And how do you intend to provide for my daughter?"

"God will provide for us."

Later, when the man's wife asked how his meeting with his prospective son-in-law went, he replied, "Very well. He already thinks I'm God.

I declare being cought in the notion that your mind is a (pure) function of input to be self-deception, which will ultimately lead to a path of misery.

If this were not true, how come that many people experience a change in themselves when they meditate? If you haven't been exposed to Buddhism yet, for example Zen meditation (Zazen) has the ultimate goal just to sit and breathe. Thoughts and external input are to be dismissed during Zazen.

Telling from personal experience, this practice changes people. Without any external input whatsover. Hence: The human mind cannot be a pure function of external sources.

If you read one his biographies containing details of his bouts and you'll know what I mean.

Jimmy Hendrix might have loved to play the guitar but his gimmick was playing it competently with his teeth and I guarantee you that's something he had to work hard to be able to do right.

Einstein did say Imagination is more important than Knowledge but he also said...

knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continually threatened with burial by the shifting sand. The hands of service must ever be at work, in order that the marble continue to lastingly shine in the sun. To these serving hands mine shall also belong.

So clearly he thought it important to "read what is written" too.

Or are you just saying teeth aren't that important in the grand scheme of things?

effort comes first, effortlessness comes later.

"Create your own demand. People are always on the lookout for the good. People seek out winners. Therefore be a winner all the time."

Now if I were giving advice on this sort of thing I'd say just the opposite. Here would be my advice.

"It's not enough to be good at what you do. George Washington was turned down when he requested a commission in the British army. Abraham Lincoln lost 2 elections before becoming President. Einstein was 40 before anyone recognized him as a leading scientist. So it is not enough to be a winner you must also work to get people to notice how good you are and that can take time."

Now if I'm right than his advice is irresponsible because he's setting people up for disappointment. People taking his advice will expect the world to form a line to their door. When that line doesn't form they'll have to assume they just aren't good enough and that's not the desired result.

Do not try hard -> for things to be easy (or look effortless) you have to try hard first for quite a while.

Do not ever work -> interest always fades at some point, some times permanently and other times temporarily, but sticking to it is often necessary and not doing it sounds like a recipe for a path littered with unfinished things.

The problem is simply that you first have to be able to recognize what is quality and what is not. And that's the greatest difficulty of all. If you make something of really great quality that everyone thinks is quality, then it will work well. But what if it's really good for you, but not for anyone else?

Take for example all these YC companies. ALL of them are working on something they are constantly trying to make great. But a number of them just don't end up with something that people regard as being quality, and so they fail.

Before you can make something of great quality, you have to recognize what is of quality to other people. And that is an extremely difficult task that, dare I say this, most people cannot do.

Most people cannot properly place themselves in another persons shoes. They cannot look at their products from the outside. And so long they cannot do that, they cannot guage when something is of high quality, and will forever be unable to take that advice.

See http://lesswrong.com/lw/yp/pretending_to_be_wise/ for an explanation -- the post above is a clever take on that. Instead of refusing to pass judgement, it's giving advice that, as the people who did think of it as wise said, "is bullshit if you take it at face value" -- it's meant to serve as a counter-balance to the exact opposites of those, which are obviously also good advice, often given.

By saying a thing, and implying you also believe its opposite, you can never be wrong.

I don't really affiliate myself with the rationalist movement, but I think they have developed a number of useful tools to learn to call people out on trying to bullshit you.

Not that I would pretend to know what that means!

Interestingly, most people I personally know who've achieved any amount of "success" have all worked their asses off, tried harder than everyone around them, competed fiercely, marketed better than their competitors, read often, chased their dreams (whether it's money, happiness, adventure, "success," etc.), and were always open to advice (especially at 22).

Regardless of age, status, profession, passions, goals, or anything else - life can be a bitch and failure happens. Though I've never spoken to Picasso, Moore, Hendrix, or Ali, I'm almost positive they had struggles. They probably even had times when they wanted to leave it all and quit. They didn't have beautiful, easy, careers. But they kept fighting, continued their craft, and persevered.

This letter is a cute romanticization of life and work, but it's likely terrible, harmful advice.

To live happily, you must understand what 'love' means to you and what you want to 'do' with your life.

Then do it with endless passion.

As a programmer, there is nothing that I like more than coding to solve a problem. I've spent 30 years of my life doing it and it still feels like my first love.

If I had enough money to cover all my worries I'd spend the rest of my life coding.

As I always say, I code to make money to be free to do what I want: coding.

OK, I won't take your advice. But you just said "do not take advice", so does that mean I should take your advice about not taking advice? (stack error, brain explodes)

"no pain, no pain" :)