The following post is an exploration.
It is the attempt of a puzzled mind trying to work things out.
It should be analysed cautiously to see what, if any value it might contain.
The author though does post it in the sincere hope that it will provide something for you.
End of warning.
I'd like to talk about enthusiasm. What is it? What happens to your enthusiasm as you go through life? And how can you get it back if you happen to lose it?
What exactly is enthusiasm? If you like what you do, if it makes you feel better, if it's fun, then you are enthusiastic about what you do.
In short enthusiasm provides energy.
How can you tell if you're enthusiastic about something? The test is simple: if you have to wonder about whether you like doing X then you're not enthusiastic. Someone asks: "Do you like doing X?", enthusiasm brings up an immediate response: "yes, duh, why wouldn't I?"
Why should you care about enthusiasm? Because enthusiasm will turn what would objectively be a lot of tedious, weary chores, into light, fun tasks.
The truly great people in any profession have all been enthusiastic about what they did. The long hours of practice and study weren't difficult, they were ... fun!
If you want to be good at what you do, then you need to be enthusiastic.
How often do you need to be enthusiastic about what you do? Often enough that your life seems good rather than bad.
'Ask yourself frequently, "Am I having fun?" The answer needn't always be yes. But if it's always no, it's time for a new project or a new career.' - Stephen King
Starting out in life, it's easy to find enthusiasm.
When you're young (i.e. up to about six years old), life is full of fun, friends, toys, lots of time. It couldn't be better.
Then you start elementary / primary school.
School is a grind, but the promise of fun is just a bell ring away. In fact hardly anyone tries to suggest that you should feel enthusiastic about being in school, and of the few who do, most of them are rightly dismissed as sad pretenders.
As you go on to secondary / high school the work load mounts up. Bell rings don't promise fun so much as temporary relief, and pretty soon even your weekends aren't safe anymore.
By the end of seconday / high school, you just accept that this is the way that it is. Life is just hard work, you work towards the promise that things will improve when you enter college / university.
But upon entering college / university the work habits that you started to grow in secondary / high school are brought to maturity. The work is even more demanding, and to get good marks you have to put in exponentially more effort than what it takes to merely pass.
The carrot that led you from secondary / high school to college / university is the improvement in quality of life. But soon you discover that university is even more work than high school, and soon a new carrot appears: the improvement in life that a job will bring.
I followed the 'yellow brick road' from secondary / high school, through college / university, and out into the work force. Every time I grabbed the proferred carrot I found that the improvement in life was not nearly what I hoped.
As to my enthusiasm, what was that again? When was the last time that I had fun? I can't remember.
I never hated my studies, I often found them hard, but my response was a luke warm one. "How are things?", "so - so ... alright".
But was I enthusiastic? Was I having fun? Never. I was just working toward a job.
Indeed looking back I can see that my enthusiasm was beaten down as I moved through the educational institutions. I'd willingly take on almost any drudgery if there was the promise of a reward at the end. Often the chance that I would get good marks at something was enough.
On entering the work place, I found that the promise of a better and interesting life evaporating before my eyes. See my essay "Organisational Values: Producers and Consumers" for one of the reasons for this. People just did not care that much about the work.
Where does your enthusiasm go? It's beaten methodically out of you during your education.
How do you get enthusiasm?
If you don't like what you do at work, you need to introduce things that you like to do into your life. Once you do these things, the enthusiasm carries you along, and you become good at them. Once you become good at them you can change what you work at to what you like.
You need to find what looks interesting, because what looks interesting has the promise of something you may become enthusiastic about.
How do find out what is interesting? Paul Graham has some very useful ideas. But he concedes that this is a hard problem.
Some pointers on looking for what is interesting:
* You need variety in your life. It should be different from what you normally do in some way.
* Experimentation should be cheap, in terms of money and time. Most of what you will try will fail and you need to be able to walk away with few regrets. Also heavy investment brings pressure to keep trying something long after any potential for fun has faded.
* You should be able to keep your experiments secret. If people know what you are doing they will inevitably: ask stupid questions, and have unreasonable expectations, none of which you need. Having a secret can be fun too, it's all yours and no one else's.
* Some of your experiments, say approximately 50%, need to be doing something constructive, i.e. either making things or repairing things. If you find something constructive that you like doing then it's easier to see how you might make a living from it.
The search for enthusiasm is difficult, but the only alternative is to become a drone. Medium to large organisations love drones, people who exist solely for time outside of work, like regular paychecks, and are happy to do what they're told with the minimum of fuss. The sad thing about being one of these people is that living from paycheck to paycheck, and weekend to weekend means that the next stop for them is death. They don't get the chance to do more with their lives.
Because working on something that you love will bring many more opportunities into your life. You have to spend a third to half your waking hours at work and it's a pretty horrifying idea that they should trickle away as an apathetic waste.
For myself, I am quite horrified at how my life has turned out. I went after the proferred carrots that took me from school to work, I did computer science because I found it mildly interesting and it seemed like the path of least resistance. But the proper enthusiasm in my work never surfaced. In fact work nearly snuffed out my interest in computers and everything else all together.
If I'd known what I know now about enthusiasm I'd have used university to put myself in a position for better options. I'm a bit dissapointed that it took me this long to figure this all out, but relieved that at least I still have the opportunity to try things. A lot of people never even get to that point.
