What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

January 2015 My father is a mathematician.

2015 年 1 月 我的父亲是一位数学家。

For most of my childhood he worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors.

在我童年的大部分时间里，他都在西屋公司工作，为核反应堆建模。

He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they want to do.

他是那些很早就知道自己想做什么的幸运者之一。

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 .

当你和他谈论他的童年时，12 岁左右有一个明显的分水岭，当时他“对数学产生了兴趣”。他在威尔士海滨小镇普尔赫利长大。

As we retraced his walk to school on Google Street View, he said that it had been

当我们通过谷歌街景追踪他去学校的路线时，他说

nice growing up in the country.

在乡下长大真好。

"Didn't it get boring when you got to be about 15?" I asked.

“当你15岁左右的时候，你不觉得无聊吗？”我问。

"No," he said, "by then I was interested in maths." In another conversation he told me that what he really liked was solving problems.

“不，”他说，“那时我对数学感兴趣了。”在另一次谈话中，他告诉我他真正喜欢的是解决问题。

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.

对我来说，数学教科书每一章末尾的练习代表了工作，或者充其量是强化你在该章中学到的知识的一种方式。

To him the problems were the

对他来说，问题是

reward.

奖励。

The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them.

每一章的文字只是一些解决这些问题的建议。

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.

他说，一旦他拿到一本新教科书，他就会立即解决所有问题——这让他的老师有点恼火，因为班级应该逐步解决这本书。

Few people know so early or so certainly what they want to work on.

很少有人这么早就知道自己想做什么。

But talking to my father reminded me of a heuristic the rest of us

但和我父亲的谈话让我想起了我们其他人的启发

can use.

可以使用。

If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for.

如果某件事在别人看来像是工作，但在你看来并不像工作，那么这就是你非常适合的事情。

For example, a lot of programmers I know, including me, actually like debugging.

例如，我认识的很多程序员，包括我自己，其实都喜欢调试。

It's not something people tend to volunteer; one likes it the way one likes popping zits.

这不是人们自愿做的事情；而是人们自愿做的事情。人们喜欢它就像喜欢挤痘痘一样。

But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it.

但考虑到编程所包含的程度，您可能必须喜欢调试才能喜欢编程。

The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.

你的品味对其他人来说越陌生，他们就越能证明你应该做什么。

When I was in college I used to write papers for my friends.

当我上大学时，我常常为我的朋友写论文。

It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking.

为我没有参加的课程写一篇论文非常有趣。

Plus they were always so relieved.

而且他们总是那么轻松。

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

奇怪的是，同样的任务对一个人来说可能是痛苦的，而对另一个人来说却是愉快的，但当时我并没有意识到这是什么

imbalance implied, because I wasn't looking for it.

暗示着不平衡，因为我没有寻找它。

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 from subtle clues, like a detective solving a case in a mystery novel.

我没有意识到决定自己应该做什么是多么困难，有时你必须从微妙的线索中找出答案，就像悬疑小说中的侦探破案一样。

So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly.

所以我敢打赌，明确地问自己这个问题会对很多人有所帮助。

What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?

哪些事情在别人看来是工作，而在你看来却不是工作？

Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston,

感谢萨姆·奥尔特曼、特雷弗·布莱克威尔、杰西卡·利文斯顿，