How to Do What You Love

如何做你热爱的事

January 2006 2006 年 1 月

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.
要想做好一件事，你必须真心喜欢它。这个道理并不新鲜，我们把它浓缩成四个字：“做你热爱的事”。但仅仅告诉人们这个道理是不够的。做你热爱的事其实很复杂。

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.
这种观念与我们大多数人从小接受的教育截然不同。在我小时候，工作和娱乐似乎天生就是对立面。生活只有两种状态：有时大人会安排你做事，这叫做工作；其余时间你可以做任何你想做的事，这叫做玩耍。偶尔，大人安排你做的事也很有趣，就像偶尔玩耍并不有趣一样——比如摔倒受伤的时候。但除了这些少数例外情况，工作几乎都被定义为不好玩。

And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.
这似乎并非偶然。言下之意，学校生活之所以枯燥乏味，正是因为它要为将来的成人工作做准备。

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.
那时的世界被分为两类人：大人和孩子。大人仿佛被诅咒了一般，必须工作。孩子不用工作，但他们必须上学，那不过是工作的简化版，目的是让我们为真正的工作做好准备。尽管我们讨厌上学，但大人们都一致认为大人的工作更糟糕，而我们轻松多了。

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.
尤其是老师们，似乎都心照不宣地认为工作一点也不好玩。这并不奇怪：对他们大多数人来说，工作确实不好玩。为什么我们非得背诵各州首府，而不是去玩躲避球？原因和他们非得照看一群孩子，而不是躺在沙滩上一样。你不能随心所欲。

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. ¹
我并不是说我们应该放任小孩子为所欲为。他们或许需要做一些事情。但如果我们让孩子们做一些枯燥乏味的事情，那么明智的做法是告诉他们，枯燥乏味并不是工作的本质特征，事实上，他们现在之所以要做这些枯燥乏味的事情，是为了以后能够去做更有趣的事情。¹

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.
大概九、十岁的时候，我父亲跟我说，长大后我可以做任何我想做的事，只要我喜欢就行。我之所以记得这么清楚，是因为这句话当时让我觉得很不可思议。就像被告知要用干水一样。不管我当时怎么理解他的意思，我都没想过他竟然说工作可以像玩耍一样充满乐趣。我花了多年才真正理解这一点。

Jobs 工作机会

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.
到了高中，找到一份正式工作似乎指日可待。有时，一些成年人会来和我们聊聊他们的工作，或者我们会去他们工作的地方看看。大家都明白，他们肯定很享受自己的工作。现在回想起来，我觉得其中一位或许真的如此：那位私人飞机飞行员。但我并不认为那位银行经理是真心热爱自己的工作。

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.
他们之所以都表现得好像很喜欢自己的工作，主要原因大概是受到了中上阶层社会习俗的束缚。如果说自己讨厌工作，不仅会影响职业发展，还会造成社交失礼。

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.
为什么假装喜欢自己所做的事情会成为一种惯例？本文的第一句话就解释了这一点。如果必须喜欢某件事才能把它做好，那么最成功的人都会喜欢自己所做的事情。这就是中上阶层传统的由来。正如美国各地的房屋里摆满了椅子，而主人却浑然不知，这些椅子其实是 250 年前为法国国王设计的椅子的仿制品一样，人们对工作的传统态度，在不知不觉中，也是对那些成就伟人的态度的模仿。

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.”
这简直是造成疏离感的温床。当孩子们到了思考自己想做什么的年纪时，他们大多已经被彻底误导，对热爱工作的概念产生了错误的认知。学校让他们把工作视为一种令人不快的义务。据说，工作甚至比学习还要辛苦。然而，所有的大人都声称自己喜欢自己的工作。你不能责怪孩子们会想：“我和这些人不一样；我不适应这个世界。”

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：他们在学校里被教导视为工作的东西并不是真正的工作；成年人的工作（不一定）比学校作业更糟糕；以及他们周围的许多成年人在说他们喜欢自己的工作时是在撒谎。

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. ² 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. ³
最危险的骗子可能就是孩子的父母。如果你像很多人一样，为了让家人过上高品质的生活而选择一份枯燥的工作，你就有可能让孩子觉得工作很无聊。² 或许在这种情况下，父母如果不那么无私，对孩子反而更好。一个热爱工作的父母，或许比一栋豪宅更能帮助孩子。³

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.
直到大学时期，我对工作的理解才真正从谋生的层面剥离出来。那时，重要的问题不再是如何赚钱，而是应该做什么。理想情况下，这两者应该一致，但一些极端案例（比如爱因斯坦在专利局的经历）证明它们并非完全相同。

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.
如今，工作的定义变成了为世界做出一些原创性的贡献，并且在这个过程中不至于挨饿。但多年的习惯让我对工作的理解仍然包含着大量的痛苦。工作似乎仍然需要自律，因为只有难题才能带来伟大的成果，而难题本身并不有趣。人们必须强迫自己去解决它们。

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.
如果你觉得做某件事本来就应该感到疼痛，那么你就更不容易注意到自己做错了。这大概就是我读研究生时的全部感受。

Bounds 界限

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.
你到底应该有多喜欢自己所做的事情？除非你清楚这一点，否则你无法判断何时应该停止寻找。如果你像大多数人一样低估了这一点，你往往会过早地停止寻找。最终，你可能会去做父母为你选择的事情，或者出于赚钱、追求名望——又或者纯粹是出于惯性——去做一些事情。

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.
这里有个上限：做你热爱的事并不意味着，去做你此刻最想做的事。即使是爱因斯坦，可能也有想喝杯咖啡的时候，但他会告诉自己应该先完成手头的工作。

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.
以前我读到有些人如此热爱自己的工作，以至于没有比这更想做的事，总是感到困惑。我似乎并没有什么工作能让我如此喜欢。如果让我选择，(a) 用接下来的一个小时工作，或者 (b) 被瞬间传送到罗马，用接下来的一个小时四处闲逛，我会选择哪种工作呢？说实话，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，几乎任何人在任何时刻都宁愿在加勒比海里悠闲地漂浮，或者享受性爱，或者品尝美食，也不愿去解决难题。“做你喜欢的事”这条规则的前提是存在一定的时间跨度。它并非指让你此刻就去做最快乐的事情，而是指让你在更长的时间里，比如一周或一个月内，都感到最快乐的事情。

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.
无谓的享乐终究会让人厌倦。躺在沙滩上晒久了，你也会感到厌倦。如果你想保持快乐，就必须做点什么。

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.
最低限度来说，你必须热爱你的工作胜过任何无意义的享乐。你必须足够热爱你所做的事情，以至于“空闲时间”的概念显得不切实际。但这并不意味着你必须把所有时间都花在工作上。你的工作能力是有限的，超过一定程度你会感到疲惫，开始出错。那时你会想要做点别的事情——哪怕是一些无需动脑的事情。但你不会把这段时间视为奖赏，也不会把工作的时间视为为了获得奖赏而承受的痛苦。

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.
我把下限设在那里是出于实际考虑。如果你不喜欢做某件事，你就会面临严重的拖延问题。你不得不强迫自己工作，而当你这样做的时候，结果会明显差强人意。

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.
我认为，要想快乐，你必须做自己不仅喜欢而且欣赏的事情。最后，你必须能够由衷地说：“哇，这真酷！” 这并不意味着你必须创造出什么。如果你学会了滑翔伞，或者能流利地说一门外语，至少在一段时间内，你就足以发出“哇，这真酷！”的感叹。关键在于要有一个检验标准。

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.
所以，我认为有一件事差强人意，那就是读书。除了数学和一些自然科学类书籍之外，并没有测试能检验你读懂了一本书多少，这就是为什么单纯读书并不像工作。你必须将读到的内容付诸实践，才能感受到成就感。

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.
我认为最好的检验方法是吉诺·李教我的：尝试做一些会让朋友们惊叹的事情。但这可能要到 22 岁左右才会真正奏效，因为大多数人在那之前没有足够的人际交往对象来结交朋友。

Sirens 警笛

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
我认为，你不应该在意朋友以外的人的看法。你不应该在意名望。名望不过是外界的看法。既然你可以征求那些你尊重其判断的人的意见，那么去考虑那些你根本不认识的人的意见又有什么意义呢？⁴

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.
这条建议说起来容易，做起来难，尤其对年轻人而言。⁵ 名望就像一块强力磁铁，甚至会扭曲你对自身喜好的认知。它让你追求的不是自己真正喜欢的东西，而是你想喜欢的东西。

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.
例如，这就是人们尝试写小说的原因。他们喜欢读小说。他们注意到，写小说的人会获得诺贝尔奖。他们想，还有什么比成为小说家更棒的呢？但是，仅仅喜欢成为小说家的想法是不够的；如果你想写好小说，就必须喜欢实际的写作过程；你必须喜欢编造精巧的谎言。

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.
名望不过是灵感的化石。只要你把某件事做得足够好，它自然会获得名望。我们现在认为很多享有盛誉的事物，最初其实并非如此。爵士乐就是一个例子——当然，几乎任何成熟的艺术形式都符合这个条件。所以，做你喜欢的事，名望自然会随之而来。

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.
对雄心勃勃的人来说，声望尤其危险。如果你想让雄心勃勃的人把时间浪费在琐事上，最好的办法就是用声望来诱惑他们。这就是让人们去做演讲、写序、参与委员会工作、担任部门主管等等的秘诀。或许，最好的办法就是干脆避免任何看似光鲜亮丽的任务。如果任务本身不枯燥乏味，他们也就无需刻意营造光鲜亮丽的氛围了。

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.
同样地，如果你同样欣赏两种工作，但其中一种更有声望，你或许应该选择后者。你对何为可敬的看法总会受到声望的影响，所以如果两者在你看来不相上下，你可能对声望较低的那一种抱有更真挚的敬意。

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.
引人误入歧途的另一大因素是金钱。金钱本身并不危险。如果某项工作收入丰厚却备受鄙视，比如电话推销、卖淫或人身伤害诉讼，那么雄心勃勃的人就不会被它诱惑。这类工作最终往往由那些“只是为了谋生”的人去做。（提示：避开任何从业者会这么说的领域。）危险之处在于金钱与声望相结合，例如公司法或医学。对于尚未认真思考自己真正喜欢什么的年轻人来说，一份相对安全、收入丰厚且自带一定声望的职业极具诱惑力。

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?
检验一个人是否热爱自己所做的事情的标准是：即使不给报酬，即使需要兼职其他工作来维持生计，他们是否还会继续做下去。如果律师们必须免费利用业余时间从事现在的工作，并且还要兼职当服务员来养活自己，那么有多少律师还会继续做现在的工作呢？

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.
这项测试对于区分不同类型的学术工作尤为有用，因为各个领域在这方面差异巨大。大多数优秀的数学家即使没有数学教授的职位也会从事数学研究，而在另一个极端，教职的多少才是驱动力：人们宁愿当英语教授也不愿去广告公司工作，而发表论文则是争取这类职位的途径。没有数学系，数学依然存在，但正是英语专业的存在，以及由此产生的教授英语的职位，才催生了成千上万篇关于康拉德小说中性别与身份认同的枯燥论文。没有人会为了消遣而去做这种事。

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.
父母的建议往往更偏向金钱方面。可以肯定地说，想当小说家而父母希望他们当医生的大学生，比想当医生而父母希望他们当小说家的大学生要多得多。孩子们觉得父母“物质主义”。未必如此。所有父母在对待孩子方面往往比对待自己更保守，原因很简单，作为父母，他们承担的风险远大于收益。如果你的八岁儿子决定爬一棵高树，或者你的十几岁女儿决定和当地的坏男孩约会，你不会从中分享兴奋，但如果你的儿子摔下来，或者你的女儿怀孕了，你就得承担后果。

Discipline 纪律

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.
在如此强大的力量的误导下，我们很难找到自己真正喜欢的工作也就不足为奇了。大多数人从小就被灌输“工作=痛苦”的观念，注定了他们未来的职业道路。那些摆脱这种观念的人，几乎都被名利诱惑而误入歧途。究竟有多少人能找到自己真正热爱的工作呢？或许，在数十亿人中，只有几十万人吧。

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.
找到一份自己热爱的工作很难；如果只有极少数人能做到，那就说明确实很难。所以，千万别低估这项任务的难度。如果你还没找到，也别灰心丧气。事实上，如果你能坦然承认自己不满意，你就比大多数人领先一步，因为他们还在否认现实。如果你身边的同事声称自己喜欢你觉得不堪入目的工作，那他们很可能是在自欺欺人。当然，这不一定，但可能性很大。

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.
虽然成就一番伟业所需的自律性远低于人们的想象——因为成就伟业的关键在于找到自己真正热爱的事业，以至于无需强迫自己去做——但找到自己热爱的工作通常确实需要自律。有些人幸运地在 12 岁时就知道自己想做什么，然后一路顺风顺水，就像在铁轨上一样。但这似乎是例外。更多时候，成就伟业的人的职业生涯轨迹如同乒乓球一般起伏不定。他们先是去学校学习 A，然后辍学去做 B，最后在业余时间从事 C，并因此成名。

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.
有时频繁更换工作是精力充沛的表现，有时则是懒惰的体现。你是在放弃，还是在大胆地开辟新路？你往往无法分辨。许多日后成就斐然的人，在早期寻找人生方向时，都曾经历过令人失望的阶段。

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.
有没有什么方法可以让你保持诚实？其中一个方法就是，无论做什么事，都要尽力做到最好，即使你不喜欢。这样至少你不会因为不满而偷懒。更重要的是，你会养成把事情做好的习惯。

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.
另一个检验方法是：持续创作。例如，如果你有一份不认真对待的日常工作，因为你计划成为一名小说家，那么你真的在创作吗？你是否在写小说，哪怕写得再差？只要你在创作，你就能确定自己并非只是用对未来宏大小说的模糊憧憬来麻痹自己。否则，你眼前这部明显存在缺陷的作品，会严重阻碍你对未来小说的清晰认知。

“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.
“持续产出”也是找到你热爱的工作的一种启发式方法。如果你给自己设定这样的限制，它会自动将你从你认为自己应该做的事情中抽离出来，让你去做你真正喜欢的事情。“持续产出”会像水在重力的作用下找到屋顶的漏洞一样，最终发现你毕生的事业。

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，弄清楚自己喜欢做什么并不意味着你就能去做。那是另一个问题。如果你有抱负，就必须将两者区分开来：你必须有意识地努力，避免让那些看似可能的事情影响你对理想事物的理解。⁶

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.”
把他们分开很痛苦，因为看到他们之间的差距令人难受。所以大多数人会提前降低自己的期望。例如，如果你问街上的陌生人是否想画得像达芬奇那样好，你会发现大多数人会说“哦，我不会画画”。这与其说是事实，不如说是一种意图的表达；它的意思是，我不想尝试。因为事实是，如果你随便找个路人，让他在接下来的二十年里竭尽全力地练习绘画，他最终会取得惊人的进步。但这需要巨大的精神投入；这意味着要日复一日地直面失败。所以为了保护自己，人们会说“我不会”。

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.
你经常会听到另一种类似的说法：不是每个人都能从事自己喜欢的工作——总得有人去做那些令人不快的工作。真的吗？那怎么才能找到这样的人呢？在美国，唯一能强迫人们从事令人不快的工作的机制是征兵制，而这项制度已经 30 多年没有启用过了。我们所能做的，就是用金钱和声望去鼓励人们去做那些令人不快的工作。

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.
如果有些事情人们仍然不愿意做，社会似乎就只能接受现状，不再需要它们。家政佣人就是个例子。几千年来，这一直是“总得有人做”的典型工作。然而到了二十世纪中期，富裕国家的佣人几乎消失了，富人也只能接受没有佣人的生活。

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.
所以，虽然有些事情确实需要人去做，但如果有人这样评价某项具体工作，那很可能是错误的。大多数令人不快的工作，如果没有人愿意去做，要么会被自动化取代，要么就会被取消。

Two Routes 两条路线

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，“并非每个人都能从事自己热爱的工作”这句话还有另一种含义，而且这种含义也确实如此。人总要谋生，而要想靠自己热爱的工作获得报酬并非易事。通往这一目标的途径有两条：

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.
有机增长之路：随着你声望的提高，逐渐增加你喜欢的工作内容，减少你不喜欢的工作内容。

The two-job route: to work at things you don’t like to get money to work on things you do.
双重工作之路：做自己不喜欢的事情来赚钱，以便从事自己喜欢的事情。

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.
有机增长之路更为常见。对于任何一位作品优秀的建筑师来说，这都是自然而然的。年轻建筑师必须接受任何工作机会，但如果表现出色，他就能逐渐拥有挑选项目的自主权。这条路的缺点在于缓慢且充满不确定性。即使获得终身教职，也并非真正的自由。

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.
双职工模式有几种变体，取决于你每次工作赚钱的时间长短。一种极端情况是“朝九晚五”的工作，你朝九晚五地做一份工作赚钱，然后在空闲时间做自己喜欢的事情。另一种极端情况是，你一直工作到赚够钱，从此不再需要为生计奔波。

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.
双职工路线不如自然而然的双职工路线常见，因为它需要深思熟虑的选择，也更危险。随着年龄增长，生活成本往往更高，因此很容易不知不觉地在高薪工作上投入超出预期的时间。更糟糕的是，你从事的任何工作都会改变你。如果长时间从事枯燥乏味的工作，你的大脑就会退化。而且，收入最高的工作往往也最危险，因为它们需要你全神贯注。

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.
双职路线的优势在于它能让你跨越障碍。就业前景并非一成不变；不同类型的工作之间存在着高低不一的壁垒。⁷ 充分利用自己喜欢的工作内容，可以让你在建筑设计领域转型到产品设计，但可能无法让你转行到音乐领域。如果你靠一份工作赚钱，同时又从事另一份工作，你就能拥有更大的选择自由。

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.
你应该走哪条路？这取决于你对自己想做什么有多确定，你是否擅长接单，你能承受多大的风险，以及在你的一生中，是否有人会为你想做的事情付费。如果你确定自己想从事的大致领域，并且人们可能会为此付费，那么你或许应该选择自然而然的路线。但如果你不知道自己想做什么，或者不喜欢接单，那么如果你能承受风险，你或许可以考虑兼职两条路。

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.
不要过早做决定。那些很早就知道自己想做什么的孩子看起来很棒，就好像他们比其他孩子更早解答了某个数学题一样。他们当然有答案，但很可能是错的。

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.
我有个朋友，她是一位相当成功的医生，却总是抱怨自己的工作。每当有人申请医学院向她征求意见时，她都恨不得摇醒他们，大喊“别去！”（但她从来没这么做过。）她怎么会陷入这种境地呢？高中时她就立志要当医生。她雄心勃勃，意志坚定，克服了一路上的所有障碍——不幸的是，其中也包括她并不喜欢这份工作。

Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.
现在，她的人生却被一个高中生替她选择了。

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.
年轻的时候，人们总觉得在需要做决定之前，就能获得足够的信息来做出选择。但工作却并非如此。当你决定做什么的时候，你只能根据极其不完整的信息进行判断。即使在大学里，你对各种类型的工作也知之甚少。你最多可能有一些实习机会，但并非所有工作都提供实习，而且即使提供实习，也教不了你多少关于工作的知识，就像当球童教棒球一样。

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.
在规划人生时，就像规划其他大多数事物一样，使用灵活的媒介能带来更好的结果。所以，除非你非常确定自己想做什么，否则最好的选择或许是选择一种可以发展成一份稳定的职业或两份兼职的工作。这大概也是我选择计算机行业的原因之一。你可以成为一名教授，或者赚很多钱，或者将其转化为其他各种各样的工作。

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?
尽早寻找能让你接触多种不同工作的机会也是明智之举，这样你就能更快地了解各种工作的性质。反之，走极端同时做两份工作则很危险，因为它让你很难真正了解自己喜欢什么。如果你辛辛苦苦做了十年债券交易员，想着等攒够钱就辞职去写小说，那么当你辞职后却发现自己其实并不喜欢写小说时，该怎么办呢？

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：“我愿意接受这个问题。给我一百万美元，我就能想出办法。” 但事情远比看起来要难。限制塑造了你的人生。一旦失去限制，大多数人都会不知所措：看看那些中彩票或继承遗产的人就知道了。尽管每个人都渴望财务安全，但最幸福的人并非拥有财富的人，而是那些热爱自己所做之事的人。因此，一个承诺以牺牲如何支配财富为代价来换取自由的计划，或许并不像看起来那么好。

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.
无论你选择哪条路，都要做好迎接挑战的准备。找到一份自己热爱的工作非常困难，大多数人都会失败。即使你成功了，也很难在三四十岁之前一直自由地从事自己想做的事情。但是，如果你心中有目标，就更有可能到达那里。如果你知道自己可以热爱一份工作，那么你已经接近终点；如果你知道自己热爱什么工作，那么你几乎已经成功了。

Notes 笔记

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Dan Friedman, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, David Sloo, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this.
感谢 Trevor Blackwell、Dan Friedman、Sarah Harlin、Jessica Livingston、Jackie McDonough、Robert Morris、Peter Norvig、David Sloo 和 Aaron Swartz 阅读了本文的草稿。