On Motivation and Vocation
Kinda strange, when I was a kid, people said that I was good at drawing and painting stuff, and if I put some efforts into it, I could achieve something big, like, I dunno, poverty, death from starvation or something. And I kinda played with this ability, without ever getting far. Like, I drew and painted for a while, then I got bored and stopped doing that. But probably I had talent, and people told me that I had talent, and even when I show something now that I painted back then, people say, like, yes there’s a glimpse of talent in it and stuff.
So, now and then, I think, why — even though everything pointed at the fact that I should’ve been drawing, moving in that direction so to speak — I never took it seriously. Instead, I’ve chosen electronics, math, programming, basically the things I sucked at the most. And I kinda never regretted it, although, it wasn’t the most optimal choice apparently. Like, if I’ve chosen art, like my intrinsic inclination suggested, maybe, after years of practice, I would surpass the level of mediocrity, and my name would become big. But I probably wouldn’t be able to cover the whole distance. Because I didn’t care.
Some people think I’m lazy or lack the determination required to stick with something for long. That’s not true. Because I spent years perfecting my skills in programming, studying math and electronics and stuff, although I sucked at all that, like essentially probably I’m a humanitarian after all. But I got through and achieved results I’m proud of. But I didn’t become the next John Carmack or Linus Torvalds or something, probably because, despite all of my efforts, I never really had a real talent in this area.
Still, I don’t regret it, and, at the same time, it makes me wonder, how on earth we make our choices and stick with them, even when those choices seem irrational and somewhat counterproductive.
I think it’s related to the process itself. Like, I somewhat enjoyed the process, or rather it always satisfied something inside of me, soothed some irrationality or something. Which allowed me to do it day after day, month after month, year after year. And I somewhat didn’t care about immediate results; I knew that they would become better gradually, and the temporary fuckups didn’t bother me. I was able to find satisfaction in whatever I was able to come up with at the moment.
And it was a completely different situation with drawing pictures. I wanted to make something really cool immediately, but I didn’t like the process. It was slow, mundane, and mechanical, and I didn’t think of experimentation, or how all this was magically unfolding and stuff; I just wanted to arrive at the finish line as quickly as possible. And usually, despite all my nonchalance towards the whole endeavor, what came out wasn’t that bad. But then again I always looked at it and felt dissatisfied. Like, I wanted it to be cool, and those pictures never looked as cool as I wanted them to be. And I didn’t have the patience to repeat that process, time after time until I would reach the perfection that would satisfy me. Because the process itself frustrated me. And the results frustrated me as well, although they weren’t that bad, to think about it, considering how little effort I put into them. So this was all about talent combined with an almost complete lack of motivation.
I thought about it, and it occurred to me that maybe this is how it should be. Like, yes, we have natural talents and inclinations, but it doesn’t mean that there’s any reason to chose a path, based solely on this fact. Like, life is not a sprint after all. It’s a marathon, and, in the end, the winners are those who have the best shoes. Like, the shoes that suited them well from the beginning and kept them all the way down the road. So they didn’t develop festering blisters, and muscle cramps, and whatever.
By shoes, I mean the routine. Like, the difference between me drawing pictures and me writing programs was that in the former case I didn’t really enjoy the process, and in the latter case I did. Or rather, enjoyment is the wrong word probably. Like, work is never a pure enjoyment, hedonistic shit, like sex, eating, bungee jumping, etc. It’s more like, does it feel organic and natural or not? Or even you can ask yourself a question: would it still feel like it makes any sense, even if I don’t get results I expected?” With programming I could always say, “Yes,” it always felt like the process itself made a lot of sense — the whole sequence of actions, experiments, studying algorithms, and libraries, and APIs, and stuff.
Probably, because it was always somewhat related to learning new stuff, and learning new stuff always felt organic to me.
To the contrary, drawing pictures is rarely about learning, and always about intuition and perfecting mechanical skills, the latter I somewhat hate.
So, yes, trying to choose something, some profession, it’s important to consider whether the routine related to this activity satisfies you, feels natural and organic, and all that. Because this is what you are going to do for thousands and thousands of hours, and the results will be just rare glimpses, scattered checkpoints along this road. This all is more about the road and less about the checkpoints. Do you like the road? If you don’t like the road and only like the checkpoints, maybe you should choose something different, because, if you choose this, the road is essentially what you’ll be seeing most of the time. And the checkpoints will be so rare that eventually, you’ll stop caring about them. Like, several times I celebrated major successes in my work in programming, but I didn’t care that much. It was cool, but the whole process was much more interesting. Like, what are those results? Something flashy and impressive for uninitiated. While I know the whole internal mechanics of the thing. Internal mechanics is more interesting for somebody who does something that is probably right for him/her. And, on the other hand, when you are preparing to hit the road, and right from the start you feel uncomfortable in your shoes, I can guarantee that just after a few hours, this discomfort will increase to the degree when it will be hard to endure it. That’s the key thing.
So what am I getting at? Some people might think “You drew pictures, you quit drawing pictures. You did programming, you quit doing programming. Now you’re writing stuff, probably gonna quit as well. Like, you cannot stick with anything, and you ain’t good at anything.” I don’t think so. I didn’t quit drawing because I never even started. And I didn’t quit programming, I’d rather say, I finished it. It was a sustainable thing. I achieved the results I’m proud of, but I reached the point, where I felt that digging any deeper would turn me into a machine myself. Or rather, it would forever cut me from the world of other things, and ideas, and knowledge, forever burying me in a bubble of purely technical stuff. And I began to feel the boundaries of what I could learn there. So it wasn’t because I didn’t like programming, or I stopped liking programming. It’s more of a need to break outside that bubble somehow.
And writing is not that far away from programming; it just deals with a wider range of things, and concepts, and ideas in more subtle ways. So I think it’s sustainable for me as well. Because the process is similar though more difficult, which is also cool. So, this is probably, what I wanted to say.