Marc Andreessen (@pmarca)’s tweetstorm — passion vs contribution

Wish there is a better way to storify @pmarca’s tweetstorm via IFTTT or similar service. His tweets are relevant, to the point, prescient — and brings out thoughtful reaction from his followers. Some disagree with him, of course (they may be smart, but @pmarca is frequently right. If you read his musings when he was actively blogging around 2006-2009 or watch his presentation* at the first ever Internet Conference 1994, much of what he said has come true, some earlier than others).

One of his recent tweetstorm was about “doing what you love” vs “doing what contributes”. What follows is his stream of thoughts, 140 characters at a time:

1. Thesis: “Do what you love” / “Follow your passion” is dangerous and destructive career advice.
2. We tend to hear it from (a) Highly successful people who (b) Have become successful doing what they love.
3. The problem is that we do NOT hear from people who have failed to become successful by doing what they love.
4. Particularly pernicious problem in tournament-style fields with a few big winners & lots of losers: media, athletics, startups.
5. Better career advice may be “Do what contributes” — focus on the beneficial value created for other people vs just one’s own ego.
6. People who contribute the most are often the most satisfied with what they do — and in fields with high renumeration, make the most $.
7. Perhaps difficult advice since requires focus on others vs oneself — perhaps bad fit with endemic narcissism in modern culture?
8. Requires delayed gratification — may toil for many years to get the payoff of contributing value to the world, vs short-term happiness.

Or perhaps, a corollary to @pmarca’s tweet is as simple as this: Reality bends to effort*, therefore, optimize accordingly?

And, his thought experiment on what our future might hold is equally fascinating. Given that technology (drones, apps, 3D printers, automation) is abstracting labor(& skill) from much of what used to be under human’s domain, its not surprising that our definition of what we think of as “career” is changing faster than ever. In many ways, this phenomena parallels how programming/software functions at a higher level of abstraction.

1. Thought experiment: Posit a world in which all material needs are provided for free, by robots and material synthesizers.
2. Housing, energy, health care, food, transportation — All delivered to everyone for $0, by machines. Zero jobs in those fields remaining.
3. What would be the key characteristics of that world, and what would it be like to live in it?
4. First, it’s a consumer utopia: Everyone enjoys a standard of living that kings and Popes could have only dreamed.
5. Fifth, all human time, labor, energy, ambition, and goals reorient to the intangibles: the big questions, the deep needs.
6. Human nature expresses itself fully, for the first time in history. Without physical need constraints, we will be whoever we want to be.
7. The main fields of human endeavor will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, adventure.
8. Rather than nothing to do, we would have everything to do: curiosity, artistic and scientific creativity, new forms of status seeking (!).
9. Imagine six, or 10, billion people doing nothing but arts and sciences, culture and exploring and learning. What a world that would be.
10. The problem seems unlikely to be that we’ll get there too fast. The problem seems like to be that we’ll get there too slow.
11. Utopian fantasy you say? OK, so then what’s your preferred long-term state? What else should we be shooting for, if not this?
12. Finally, note thought experiment nature of this stream — this is an extrapolation of ideas, not a prediction for the next 50 years!

Exciting times to be a happy dreamer!

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
- The Road Ahead, Bill Gates, 1996

* Update (6/13): Marc Andreessen has posted long form blog on the same subject here. Its a must read.

*His presentation was published via Google video, but it has since been deleted from the entire web.

*Bob Metcalfe — Direction 14