How To Do What You Love
January 24th, 2006 by owenamNever visited Paul Graham’s site before, but no one with such a nice picture on their web site could be bad, could they? Regardless, I appreciated his thoughts on doing what you love:
… 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.
(My emphasis.)