How to Do What You Love

How to Do What You Love

Paul Graham/译：王亚辉

如何做自己喜欢做的事（其实文章表达的意思是“如何以自己的兴趣为生”）

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.

要把事情做好就得喜欢它，这一理念并不新鲜了。简单来说就是“做你喜欢做的”。但说起来容易，以自己喜欢的事为生并不简单。

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.

这一理念对于小时候的我们来说比较陌生。我小的时候，就被灌输“工作”和“有趣”从定义上来说好像就是对立的。生活有两种状态：大人们让你做的，这叫“工作”；剩下的时间你可以做你喜欢的，这叫“娱乐”。偶尔也会有大人要求你做的事也挺有趣、玩反而没意思的情况，比如你玩大了不小心摔伤了。除去这些例外情况，工作更多被定义为无趣的。

And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.

看起来好像没什么毛病。学校就是无趣的，因为学校是为以后长大工作做准备的。

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.

然后，这个世界就被分为两个种族，一种叫大人，一种叫小孩。大人，就像被诅咒一样，得工作。小孩不用工作，但他们得上学，可以模糊地认为上学就注定为工作做准备。就像小孩不喜欢学校一样，大人基本都觉得工作比上学更不爽，觉得小孩上学很舒服。

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.

老师们尤其认为工作没什么意思。这一点也不令人惊讶：对他们来说工作确实没啥意思。学生为什么得去背各个国家的首都在哪而不是去玩呢。同样的道理，老师们不得不照看一帮孩子而不能躺在沙滩上休假。反正你就是没法做你喜欢的事。

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. （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.）

我不是说我们应该让小孩子自由放任。他们可能不得不去从事一些工作。但如果我们让孩子们做很无趣的事，应该告诉他们单调无趣不是工作的本质属性，不得不做单调的工作的原因是可以以后做更有趣的事儿。（我们做的正好相反，当然孩子去做单调乏味的工作时，我们不是坦诚地说这就是很无聊，而是去美饰这件工作）

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.

在我九岁、十岁的时候，有一次，我父亲告诉我，只要我喜欢，我长大了就可以做任何我想做的事。我对这一次谈话印象深刻，因为这句话太反常了，就像让我用干的水一样（水就是湿的，哪里有干的水）。每次我回想他那句话是什么意思，我都不认为他是说工作可以被字面上理解为有趣的——就像玩儿一样有趣。我花了很多年才领悟其中的真谛。

Jobs

工作

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.

上高中就意味着快要工作了。大人们有时候会跟我们说说他们的工作，或者我们会去看他们在工作时是什么样的。我们总是觉得他们干一行爱一行。回想起来，我认为私人飞机飞行员可能会喜欢他的工作，但我不觉得银行经理也会这样。

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.

他们表面上表现得喜欢自己的工作，主要原因可能是上中产阶层的传统：你就应该干一行爱一行。如果你把讨厌自己的工作的想法说了出来，可能不仅不利于你的职业发展，更是一种社交上的失礼。

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.

为什么传统上人们都表面假装喜欢自己的工作呢？本文的第一句话已经解释了。如果传统上认为把事情做得出色的充分条件就是你得喜欢它，那照道理来说大多数成功人士都应该喜爱自己的工作。这就是中上阶层世俗的来源。就像几乎每个美国家庭都有很多仿造250年前法国国王座椅的椅子一样，但大家基本上都不知道这回事儿。传统上，对于工作的态度也是一样，人们甚至自己都不知道自己仅仅是在模仿成功人士对待工作的态度。

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."

这真是一个让人异化的方法。等到了该思考自己想做什么的年龄时，大多数孩子在工作兴趣的问题上已经完全被误导了。学校的训练让他们认为工作就是做那些不愉快的日常事务，工作比学校布置的作业更无趣。但所有的大人们都声称他们喜欢自己的工作。孩子们长大后不喜欢自己的工作，会产生“我跟这些人不一样，我不适合这个世界”的想法，这个时候你就不能怪他们这么想了。

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.

事实上他们被灌输了三个谎言：他们在学校里被告知的工作并不是真正意义上的工作；成年人的工作不一定比学校布置的作业更糟；身边的很多大人都在违心说自己喜欢工作。

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. （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. ）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.

最可怕的骗子可以是孩子的父母。就像很多人所做的那样，如果你用一份无聊的工作保障你的家庭有一个高的生活标准，你就得冒着让孩子觉得工作是无聊的风险。父母以身作则给孩子树立一个榜样要比给他们提供一套豪宅更能够帮助到他们。

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.

直到我上大学，要走出象牙塔谋生了，才想起要工作这回事。这一重要问题不是如何赚钱，而是我该从事什么。理想的情况是既从事自己喜欢的又能赚到钱，但一些引人关注的边界案例（就像爱因斯坦也在专利局工作过一样）证明这两者并不是一致的。

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.

现在，工作的定义变成为世界做点小贡献，并在这个过程中让自己有口饭吃。但很多年后，我在理解工作时仍然认为工作包含很大一部分痛苦的成分在里面。工作仍然需要约束，因为只有很难的问题才能产生伟大的成绩，难问题几乎不可能是有趣的。所以毫无疑问，人们得强迫自己从事这些难题。

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.

如果你认为某件事就是受罪的，那你很难注意到自己是不是把这件事做错了。这是我在研究所的经历的真实写照。

Bounds

边界

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.

你应该对自己所从事的工作喜欢到什么程度呢？除非知道自己喜欢的是什么，否则你就不应停止寻找。就像大多数人一样，如果低估了寻找自己喜欢的事情的难度，你可能倾向于过早地停止寻找。最终，你将从事父母给你选的工作，或是受名、利、惰性所驱使。

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.

上界是：做喜欢的并不意味着去做此时此刻最想做的事儿。即使是爱因斯坦可能也有让自己应该先忙完手头上的事，去喝一杯咖啡的时候。

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.

一个问题曾经一直困扰着我：有时候人们有一件特别想从事的事情或工作，以至于其他任何事都不想去做。好像没有一份工作能让我爱到这种程度。考虑下面这两种选择：（a）花接下来的几个小时工作（b）神游到罗马，然后在罗马漫步。有这种工作能让我选a吗。摸着良心说，我没有。

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.

但事实是，在任何时候，几乎所有人都愿意到加勒比海漂流、更愿意做爱、更愿意吃好吃的，而不愿意去解决难题。我们的游戏规则是：这里有一定的时间限制。做喜欢的事并不是说做在当前这一时刻最让你高兴的事，而是做一些能够让你长时间开心的事，比如一个礼拜或者一个月。

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.

无所事事型的愉悦最终会让你感到无聊的。过不了多久，就对躺在沙滩上感到厌倦。如果想开心，你还是得做些事情的。

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.

下界是，你得喜欢自己的工作胜于喜欢无所事事型的愉悦。你得足够喜欢自己所做的事，以至于“休闲时间”这个概念好像出错了。也不是说得把所有时间花在工作上。在感到疲惫，开始把事情搞砸之前你只能做这么多了。然后想去做点别的——甚至一些不需要动脑子的事。但并未觉得这些时间是给自己的奖励，并未觉得这些时间是通过忍受工作之苦而赚到的。

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.

我把下界定在这里是有实际原因的。如果做的不是你喜欢的，你就会拖拉。当这样逼迫自己去工作的时候，工作质量一定不会很高。

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.

要想开心，我觉得得做一些自己不但喜欢而且欣赏的事。到最后，你能够说：哇哦，挺酷啊。这也并不意味着得做出来点什么。如果去学如何滑翔或是说一口流利的外语，也足够让自己至少在一段时间内觉得：哇哦，挺酷啊。寻找喜欢而又欣赏的事需要实验。

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.

我觉得有一件事缺少这种评判或是实验标准，那就是阅读。除了一些数学和高深科学类的书籍，并没有一些客观测试能够测验你把一本书读的怎么样，这也是为什么仅仅读书并不感觉像是在工作。你得把书中的东西转化为现实成果才能感觉得到有成效、有产出感。

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.

我觉得最好的一招是Gino Lee教我的一种方法：尝试去做一些让你的朋友们会说“哇哦”的事情。但这种方法可能得等到差不多22岁才能用的上，因为大多数人在这个年龄之前还没有遇到足够多的人来从这些样本从选择自己的朋友。

Sirens

警告

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] （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. ）

我觉得，不应担心你朋友圈外的人的看法。不应担心世俗名利。名望是朋友圈外的世界对你的看法。当能够寻求你尊重的人的意见时，干嘛要去考虑你压根都不了解的人的意见呢。（我不是说朋友就是你工作唯一的观众。观众多了也挺好的。但朋友才是你的指南针。）

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.

这个建议很容易给出，却很难实操，特别是当你还年少的时候。名利就像强磁场一样扭曲着你关于自己到底喜欢什么的判断。

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.

比如，名利是有些人去写小说的动因。他们喜欢读小说，注意到有人写小说得了诺贝尔奖，觉得还有什么能比成为一名小说家更棒的了呢。但仅仅有成为一个小说家的想法还不够，如果想擅长，你还得喜欢写，你得喜欢编一些复杂的精心设计的情节。

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.

名望是一种僵化的激励。如果能把所有事情做得足够好，自然会实至名归。很多我们觉得听上去很好听的东西其实一无是处。所以去做你喜欢的事，让虚名自己玩去吧。

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.

虚名对于那些有雄心壮志的人来说尤其危险。如果想让雄心勃勃的人把时间浪费在琐事上，方法就是用个人名望去诱惑他。名利会诱使人们去作报告、写书序、在委员会供职、做部门的头头。一个好的建议是避免去做看起来体面的事。

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.

相似地，如果你对两份工作的偏好相同，但其中之一是比较徒有虚名的，你可能应该选择另外一个。你对什么事情更加赞赏的判断总会或多或少地受到名利的影响。所以如果两份工作对你来说同等喜欢，你或许在内心深处更偏好于那份不太显赫的工作。

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.

另外一个让人迷失方向的东西是物欲。钱财本身并不那么危险。当收益挺好但却被鄙夷，就像电话推销、卖淫、人身伤害诉讼一样，有抱负的人不会受到这些东西的引诱。这些工作是那些仅仅为了活着而被迫谋生的人才去做的。当利和名搅合在一起时危险才真正出现，比如说在法律或医学界。一个能带来虚名、相对来说安稳、浮华的职业危险地诱惑着年轻人，因为他们图样图森破，还没真正考虑过自己到底喜欢的是什么。

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?

一个判断你到底是不是真心喜欢一件事的标准是：如果不给钱你愿不愿意干——即使你得做另外一份工作来谋生。如果不给钱的话，有多少企业律师愿意做他们现在的工作，宁愿在空余时间做服务员来养活自己。

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.

这一测试方法在决定从事哪一种学术工作的时候特别有帮助，因为在这个方面不同的领域差异很大。很多优秀的数学家们即使不做数学教授也愿意去研究数学。另一个极端是驱动因素为一份教职。有些人宁愿当语文教授也不愿意在广告机构工作，体现教授竞争力的方式是论文发表情况。即使没有数学机构，数学也仍然存在。但正是语文专业的存在，以及语文类教职的存在，才催生了数千篇研究Conrad小说中关于性别和身份的无聊论文。没有人愿意以此为乐。

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.

父母的建议容易受到金钱的驱使。我敢说：那些想成为小说家却被父母要求去做医生的孩子肯定要比想成为医生却被要求去写小说的孩子多很多。孩子们认为他们的父母都是很物质的。但也不一定。所有的父母在对待孩子上都比对待他们自己更偏向于保守一些。原因很简单：对于父母来说，他们承担的风险超过了回报。如果你八岁的儿子要去爬一棵大树，或者你宝贝女儿去和一个坏小子约会，你肯定不会感受到孩子的兴奋，你只会想：万一孩子摔下来了，或者闺女怀孕了，你得给他们承担后果。

Discipline

约束

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.

有这么多强大的因素诱导，也难怪我们很难从事自己喜欢的事情。大多数人在小的时候就会被灌输一个“真理”：工作就是痛苦的。有一些没被洗脑的幸运儿后来几乎都被名利带跑偏了。甚至于，又有多少人能够找到他们喜欢的事情去做呢？可能十亿里有几十万个就不错了。

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.

只有这么少的人能够从事自己喜欢的事情，找到自己喜欢从事什么一定很难。所以不要低估寻找自己喜欢从事的工作的难度。而且如果你现在还没找到，也不要灰心。事实上，如果你承认自己现在并不满意，那你已经好于大多数人啦，因为大多数人不愿意承认自己处于不满意的状态。如果你身边很多同事都声称喜欢自己所从事的工作，而你又特别不喜欢他们的工作，他们很有可能是在自欺欺人。不敢打包票一定是这样，但很有可能是这样的。

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.

尽管做出伟大的成绩并不需要人们想象中那么多约束——因为只有喜欢才可能做出如此伟大的成绩，由于你喜欢，所以并不需要过于强迫自己去做——但寻找自己喜欢的事情的过程通常是需要有约束的。一些人很幸运，12岁就知道自己想要做什么了，一路走得都很顺。但这只是特例。大多数情况下能够做出伟大成就的人的职业生涯就像乒乓球的轨迹一样来回变化。在学校学的是A，辍学或者毕业后做的是B行业，然后在C领域一炮成名。

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.

有时候跳槽是活力的象征，有时候却是懒惰的表现。你是偷懒还是勇敢开拓新的人生轨迹呢？可能自己也不知道答案。很多做出伟大成就的人在一开始寻找自己的定位时好像都会感觉到失望。

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.

有什么方法测试你是偷懒还是勇于进取呢？我这里有一个方法：尝试去把任何你手头上的事情做好，即使并不是很喜欢它。这样你至少会知道你不是在用对现状的不满来作为偷懒的借口。或许更重要的是，你会养成一种认真做事的好习惯。

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.

另外一种方法是：要有产出。举例来说：如果你因为想成为一个小说家而对目前从事的工作马马虎虎，就该问问自己有没有在写小说。尽管写的并不好，你在写吗？只要有产出，你就会知道自己并不是在用成为小说家的想法来迷惑自己的双眼，掩盖自己的懒惰。你会被自己写出来的烂小说搞的失去了成为小说家的憧憬。

"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.

“行动起来，保持产出”是找到喜欢的工作的一种启发式方法。如果你得不断做出一些东西出来，这种压力就会驱使你去做一些喜欢的东西，自动把你从被要求从事的工作中剥离出来。“行动起来，保持产出”会帮助你找到自己喜欢的愿意从事的工作，就像水在重力作用下会找到房子在哪里漏水。

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]

当然，弄清楚喜欢从事什么并不意味着你就能真正去做了，这是两个概念。如果你真的有想法有抱负，就得把这两者区分开：你得保持理性的思考，努力区分开“什么是你想要的”和“什么是可行的”这两个概念。

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."

把这两者区分开还挺痛苦的，因为发现这两者之间的差异就很令人难受。所以大多数人提前降低了自己的期望，退而求其次。比如，你可以在大街上随机采访一个路人，问问他想不想成为像达芬奇一样的画家。你发现大多数人会说：“啊，我不会画画”。这更像一个倾向性的陈述而不是一个事实，他们实际上是说：“我不想去试”。事实是，如果你在大街上随机挑一个人让他在今后的20年内尽自己最大努力练习画画，他们肯定会讶异地跑得远远的。但是需要付出巨大的努力，意味着得在数年内每天都面对失败。所以人们为了保护自己，会说：“我不行”。

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.

你还会经常听到另外一种声音：不是每个人都是能做他们喜欢做的事情的——不开心的工作也得有人做啊。真是这样吗？你怎么强迫他们？在美国，唯一一种强迫他人做不喜欢的事的机制就是强制征兵，而且这一机制30年没用过了。我们能做的就是鼓励人们做不喜欢的工作来赚钱、扬名立万。

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.

如果还有什么是人们不愿意做的，那就是即使没有这些，社会也不得不去做的事。佣人就是一个例子。千百年来，佣人就是一个典型的“有人必须得做”的工作。然而在二十世纪中叶，富裕国家中奴仆实际上消失了，没了佣人，有钱人得自己去做一些内务。

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.

好像存在某件有人不得不做的事情，其实是那些持有这种认识的人被误导了。如果没人愿意去做，大多数令人生厌的工作就会自然而然地得以解决。

Two Routes

两条路

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:

然而，还有另外一种看起来特别像那么回事的解释：“不是每个人都能够做他们喜欢的事情的，人得吃饭糊口啊，做你喜欢做的事又不挣钱”。达到那个终点有两条路可走。

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.

根本路径：你会在你喜欢的领域逐渐变得卓越，而在你不喜欢的领域变得相对生疏。

The two-job route: to work at things you don't like to get money to work on things you do.

双工作路线：做不喜欢的事来挣钱养活自己，为自己去做喜欢做的事提供经济和物质支撑。

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.

根本路径更普遍更自然一些。这一路径自然而然地发生在那些工作出色的人的身上。一个年轻建筑师什么活都得接，但是如果他做的足够好，渐渐地能力得到提升就会达到一种境界，他就有了选择项目的能力。这条路的缺点是缓慢且有不确定性。甚至于终身职位也并不是真正的自由。

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.

双工作路线根据你一次能工作多长时间分为几种不同的衍生路线。一种极端的路线是：“白天专职工作”，在固定时间做一份工作来挣钱，下班后做一些自己喜欢的。另一种极端路线是拼命挣钱达到财务自由。

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.

双工作路线不如根本路线那样自然、普遍，因为它需要你做出刻意的选择，这样也很危险。随着年龄的增长生活成本会逐渐上升，所以很容易被禁锢在一份比你预期要工作更久的以赚钱为目的的工作当中。更糟的是，你从事的任何工作都在改变你。如果在充满冗长琐事的工作上耗费过多时间，大脑会被侵蚀的。赚得多的工作也是最危险的，因为需要你全身心地保持关注。

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.

走双工作路线的好处是能够跳过一些障碍。通往理想工作的道路不是一帆风顺的，各式各样的工作像不同高度的障碍墙一样阻挡你的去路。最大程度地从事自己喜欢的工作能够让你从建筑设计改行做产品设计，可能不一定是做音乐。做一个工作用来挣钱，然后再利用空闲去做你喜欢的事，你会有更多选择上的自由。

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.

你该选哪条路呢？取决于你有多清楚自己想要什么，取决于你有多擅长接受命令，取决于你的风险偏好，取决于人们愿意偿付你愿意从事的工作的可能性。如果大概清楚自己想要什么，也确定想要做的这件事可能会有人愿意给你钱，那你应该走根本路线。但如果不知道自己想从事什么，或是不喜欢接受命令，能够承受双工作路线风险的话，可以走双工作这条路线。

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.

不要匆匆做决定。早早知道自己想要什么的孩子让人印象深刻，就像他们早于其他孩子搞懂了一些数学题一样。他们肯定有了自己的答案，但可能是错的。

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.

我有个很成功的医生朋友，总是抱怨工作。当有人想学医向他征求建议时，她恨不得扇他们一巴掌：“别学医！”（她实际上从没这么做过）。怎么回事呢？她在高中的时候就已经想做一名医生了。她很有抱负，有毅力，克服了一路上的重重困难——也很不幸，这些困难也包括她自己实际上并不喜欢这份职业。

Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.

现在她的生活被她上高中的儿子限制住了。

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.

年少时，你好像觉得自己得到了足够的信息来让你在做职业选择前就明白自己想要做什么。但工作却肯定不是这样的。当决定从事什么的时候，你得从相当不完整的信息中做出抉择。即使在大学里，你得到的关于各种类型的工作是什么样子的信息也少得可怜。你可能顶多会做几份实习，但并不是所有工作都有实习岗，有实习岗的也不见得能够比一个玩棒球的球童教会你更多关于工作上的东西。

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.

在规划生活的时候，就像给其他事情做计划一样，最好用一些灵活的媒介来得到更好的结果。所以除非特别清楚自己想要什么，最好的选择是从事一份要么能走根本路线要么能走双工作路线的职业。这也是我选择从事计算机领域的部分原因。你可以做教授，或是去赚钱，或是转换为任何其他类的工作。（WYH：我理解这里说的是工作可移植性和可延展性）

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?

最好早早地找一份能够让你做许多不同事情的工作，这样你就能了解到各类工作是什么样的。相反，双工作路线的极端情况是危险的，因为你还是不了解自己喜欢什么。如果辛辛苦苦做了十年的证券交易员，想要在挣到足够多的钱的时候辞职去写小说，但当辞职之后却发现自己其实并不喜欢写小说该怎么办？（这时，你并未找到自己喜欢什么，却只会做证券交易，而这份工作你又不喜欢）。

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.

大多数人会说，这也好办。给我一百万美金我就知道该怎么办了。但其实比看起来要困难。束缚塑造了你的生活，刻下烙印。移开束缚，大多数人会感到无所适从：看看那些中彩票的或是飞来一大笔遗产的人吧。虽然每个人都想财务自由，但活的最开心的并不是最有钱的，而是做自己喜欢做的事的人。所以无所适从的自由并不像看上去的那么好。（像之前所说的，你很快会对无所事事型的短暂愉悦感到厌倦。）

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.

不管走什么路，都别指望很轻松。找到喜欢的工作很难。大多数人都失败了。即使你现在做到了，但在三四十岁还能自由从事自己喜欢的工作的人就太少了。但如果心中有目标，就更有可能达到理想的彼岸。如果你知道自己还能喜欢做事，那你就在直道上了。如果你知道自己喜欢什么工作，实际上你离目标也就没多远了。

（有些地方译得可能不是很准确，读起来拗口的话可以对照原文看）