January 2015  
  
My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked for
Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors.  
  
He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they want to do. When
you talk to him about his childhood, there's a clear watershed at about age
12, when he "got interested in maths."  
  
He grew up in the small Welsh seacoast town of
[Pwllheli](https://goo.gl/maps/rkzUm). As we retraced his walk to school on
Google Street View, he said that it had been nice growing up in the country.  
  
"Didn't it get boring when you got to be about 15?" I asked.  
  
"No," he said, "by then I was interested in maths."  
  
In another conversation he told me that what he really liked was solving
problems. To me the exercises at the end of each chapter in a math textbook
represent work, or at best a way to reinforce what you learned in that
chapter. To him the problems were the reward. The text of each chapter was
just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new
textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems — to the slight annoyance
of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book
gradually.  
  
Few people know so early or so certainly what they want to work on. But
talking to my father reminded me of a heuristic the rest of us can use. If
something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you,
that's something you're well suited for. For example, a lot of programmers I
know, including me, actually like debugging. It's not something people tend to
volunteer; one likes it the way one likes popping zits. But you may have to
like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which
programming consists of it.  
  
The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they
probably are of what you should do. When I was in college I used to write
papers for my friends. It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I
wasn't taking. Plus they were always so relieved.  
  
It seemed curious that the same task could be painful to one person and
pleasant to another, but I didn't realize at the time what this imbalance
implied, because I wasn't looking for it. I didn't realize how hard it can be
to decide what you should work on, and that you sometimes have to [figure it
out](love.html) from subtle clues, like a detective solving a case in a
mystery novel. So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about
this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like
work to you?  
  
  
  
  
  
**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris,
and my father for reading drafts of this.  
  

