Find purpose and do what you love

Maria Popova at Brain Pickings curates a wonderful blog.  Today she put together an article on "How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love" by curating the thoughts of seven who have talked about it.  She gives pithy quotes and gives links to the source, essays, videos, whatever.  There is a reason Technorati gives Brain Pickings a score of 726 which is a very high ranking.  Quality and quantity. 

Literary Wolf

She starts with quotes of Paul Graham from his essay How to Do What You Love written in 2006.  Still makes sense.  He starts "Do do something well you have to like it."  Maria is taken by Paul's opinion about prestige. 

The quote I like is "Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious."  


Paul says you should not worry about prestige and admits it is easy advice to give but hard to follow especially for the young and/or ambitious.