# When to Do What You Love ![rw-book-cover](http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png) ## Metadata - Author: [[Paul Graham - Essays]] - Full Title: When to Do What You Love - Category: #articles - Summary: The decision to follow your passion in work is complex and depends on various factors, such as financial needs and personal interests. While pursuing what you love can lead to great work and startup ideas, it's important to explore your options and gain experience. Ultimately, if you want to do exceptional work, focusing on what genuinely interests you is essential. - URL: http://paulgraham.com/when.html ## Highlights - And indeed if your main goal is to make money, you can't usually afford to work on what interests you the most. People pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. But there's an obvious exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if you love football, and you're good enough at it, you can get paid a lot to play it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jtv3k2jxnb214hkez9cenhhc)) - The odds are better when you have strange tastes: when you like something that pays well and that few other people like. For example, it's clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a software company. He didn't just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed, but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jtv3m068yhrrjbkmxnfdf8n4)) - If you want to make a really huge amount of money — hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars — it turns out to be very useful to work on what interests you the most. The reason is not the extra motivation you get from doing this, but that the way to make a really large amount of money is to start a startup, and working on what interests you is an excellent way to discover [startup ideas](https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jtv3mtrtf8m04ryz1hwey5ns)) - Many if not most of the biggest startups began as projects the founders were doing for fun. Apple, Google, and Facebook all began that way. Why is this pattern so common? Because the best ideas tend to be such outliers that you'd overlook them if you were consciously looking for ways to make money. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jtv3nc4czxq5r95xs609fjek)) - What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty. And probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you're interested in. That will get you more information about how interested you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they offer for ambition. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jtv3qce7r84m7rb3tg1cxdpz)) - If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring. [[3](https://paulgraham.com/when.html?s=09#f3n)] ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jtv3rch30xy44r8zx3b77cys)) - There's a lot of selection bias in advice about whether to "follow your passion," and this is the reason. Most such advice comes from people who are famously successful, and if you ask someone who's famously successful how to do what they did, most will tell you that you have to work on what you're most interested in. And this is in fact true. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jtv3sebd2cq3y9vgdnpgwc4j)) - The root of great work is a sort of ambitious curiosity, and you can't manufacture that. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jtv3sp4znvqnph4mn3mgh7fe))