Paul Graham has a great article on How to Do What You Love. A sample goodie:
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.
Another bit I like is here:
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.
I found it’s a hell lot easier to tell yourself ’someday they’ll recognize my genius when I finally do (insert appropriate dream here) when nothing real is being done. Someday, someday…’. It’s so much easier to delude ourselves on how magnificent and talented we really are…when we don’t have to do anything to prove it.
If there’s something I learnt from having this blog towards achieving my goals: start. Gain momentum. And then at least you have something real to test and measure against.
He has another great article on How to Create Wealth:
What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It’s just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.
Although he focuses quite a bit on IT businesses, it’s still a valuable read for anyone who wants to know the difference between money and wealth, and wants more of both.
April 11th, 2006 at 8:24 pm
Another few guides I’ve found:
o Is your genius at work (Richards) - a Parachute-like workbook. I like it, but haven’t finished
o The Lazy Way to Success: The Ice Cream Story
http://lazyway.blogs.com/lazy_way/2005/04/index.html
…key moments on one’s path to success where it is necessary to
make a commitment. These are times when you realize that you can
no longer dibble-dabble. It is like Nature has increased the
stakes and, if you want to continue to play the game, you have to
ante up. That means you have to make a leap. More specifically, it
means you have to make a commitment of time or money or brain
capacity or something that requires you to stretch out of your
comfort zone. Miraculous things happen when you do make that leap
… Before the leap is made, however, those miraculous things are
not at all obvious or certain so it can be a very scary time.
Cheers!