Very nice of the author (of the article) to mention Kahneman who has done so much research around this stuff (if you haven't yet read Thinking Fast and Slow I highly recommend it)
Regarding the title, I'd say choose your profession in a way that you don't have to choose between work and play. You are reading HN so you're likely in a position to have many options. Life's too short to be doing things that don't feel like playing.
Especially given that everything is playing whether you realize it or not because the universe, entropy and purpose but that's a whole another story.
But even from purely financial point of view, it's likely that you will be better off by becoming master at what you consider to be a fun game.
Sometimes I marvel how much people are willing to pay for me to write and debug code. I can and would do it without pay - if I could choose the problem.
The trouble is a lot of what I work on is mind-numbingly boring and definitely feels like work, not play. But I think it's an acceptable tradeoff to achieve financial independence and get the freedom to pick my problems.
It takes some work to be able to work on things you enjoy and get paid for them. But it's more possible in this line of work than many others.
People have jobs at places like pixar, blizzard entertainment, and robotics labs. Tons of people manage to convert passion projects into real work.
I personally work in AAA games. I wouldn't work on CRUD without at least a 20k raise. You spend 40+ hours a week at work. A job you like is worth a lot.
Based on your first comment you may already have a chance to give some problems picked by you a try.
And as far as I understand it, you will never achieve financial independence by amassing some fixed of money. You need a cash flow and it won't just magically appear after working hard for some time. You need to focus your interest on this specific goal, research it and work towards it. Oops, I meant play towards it ;)
If you amass some fixed amount of money and buy a house with it, or keep it in the bank - yeah it won't help you.
If you amass some fixed amounts of investments, that gives you cash flow. Once that reaches a certain point depending on what your expenses are and your lifestyle choices are, you're free.
"Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants." - Epictetus
If I (or more importantly my wife) had fewer wants, I'd already be financially independent.
There is, in fact, an entire sub-reddit dedicated to turning amassed money into a fixed income, with the specific goal of financial independence: https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/
So while amassing money alone won't get you there, it can definitely facilitate it.
Ideally. But if you're living on your investments, you tend to attend to them more. The solution to that is to have such a substantial investment income that you don't need to worry about it, at all - which means that much more effort in getting there.
I absolutely need at least a few hours a week of creative outlet (Right now it's writing. In the past it has been painting, or woodworking or... to my wife's dismay, a long list of forgotten hobbies).
It sometimes feels like I have a small child in my head, one that wants to play, be free, and just burn off excess energy through creativity. And if I don't do that, he throws a temper tantrum, anxieties and restlessness start kicking up.
The idea that selection pressures would result in the apex-predator (humans) spending 1/3 of it's life in a completely defenseless state, must tell us a lot about the importance of sleep to intelligence and creativity.
After both personally experiencing and learning clinically more about how sleep - or lack thereof - impacts cognitive, physical, creative and immune capability I think it's a hugely important piece of the intelligence puzzle.
My hypothesis is that sleep amounts to a nightly scrimmage for the rest of our lives. So it's where we go to practice the things that we're planning on doing or could possibly encounter. We take the inputs from the previous days etc... into simulating future events/outcomes.
In reinforcement learning terms sleep is where we do "exploration" in our own personal simulation of the experienced world and real life is where we do "exploitation."
I find David Allen's work most helpful here. He points out that more valuable than time is mental freedom. You can schedule all the time in the world to solve a problem. If something else occupies your mind, progress may never come.
On the other hand, if your mind is not preoccupied, finding the solution may take very little time. His practice in his book Getting Things Done helped me practice this, not just abstractly know it.
> Most of us have to make a concerted effort to be mindful and open to the unfamiliar
Growing up, I came to believe that the word "concerted" means something like "effortful" or "work hard to do something". I later learned that it actually refers to a group of people working together (in concert) to accomplish something [1]. So technically, a person cannot make a concerted effort to do something alone.
Seeing the word used here in this technically incorrect way leads me to wonder how uncommon my experience is. Are we on our way to redefining this word with a more relaxed definition?
I've had the same experience with the word as yourself. It's interesting to note that the word "concert" itself has seen a similar shift: it wouldn't be at all strange to refer to someone performing a "solo concert."
You think it's technically incorrect usage because you didn't know other uses of it nor its root. Technically the quoted sentence is 100% correct, concerted also means something you tried hard, struggled with, strived to get done. The musical concert actually derives its meaning from that, but done by a group put together: https://www.etymonline.com/word/concert
Yep. It talks about the noun and verb "concert". It doesn't mention "concerted" though, which is the word I'm interested in. These words are obviously related, but in determining the definition of a word, one typically looks to the explicit definition — not to the definitions of related words.
If "concerted" can also have the meaning that you describe (and that I grew up believing in), then why isn't this meaning/usage included in any definition for "concerted"?
Yes, it does. Here is the entire verb entry from that link:
1690s, "to contrive, adjust;" 1707, "to contrive and arrange mutually," from French concerter and directly from Italian concertare "to bring into agreement" (see concert (n.)). Related: Concerted; concerting
Yeah, I meant that it doesn't mention it anywhere near where it talks about striving (which was what caio1982 had asserted was the meaning). That only appears in the discussion of the noun "concert". I should have worded that more clearly.
If you can't provide any direct support for your position (which is contradicted by dictionary definitions [1-3] and a forum discussion on the topic [4]), I won't continue to engage. Good day!
Note also that your link #4 references the Oxford English Dictionary, which is where the first link I give above comes from. The argument given in your link #4 seems plausible, but given the fact that there are reputable sources leaning both ways, I don't think you can say the single person usage is simply wrong. Perhaps "uncommon" might be a better term.
Thanks for adding these to the discussion. This was the sort of thing that I was hoping others would contribute.
It's an interesting question as to what a word means when dictionaries differ. In some cases, the differences might exist on a spectrum (e.g., is "furious" more upset than "livid"). But in this case, we have a completely separate meaning that some dictionaries bless but others do not hint at.
I would be curious to see whether there are historical trends here, which might hint if we're headed in one direction or the other.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/concerted says it is a past participle of "concern". Not sure if it is correct, but it makes some sense if viewed with this in mind?
I'm not keen on reading a book that's in any way affiliated with Deepak Chopra. He represents one of the most intellectually bankrupt and destructive forces on the planet. Is he just mentioned offhand or is he given real focus?
I find it baffling that a physicist who is respectable enough to write a book with Stephen Hawking would be able to stomach writing a book with a man who claims that quantum mechanics proves that meditation can affect one's "quantum-mechanical body" and prevent aging.
EDIT: It seems I've misunderstood the book he wrote with Chopra. It's structured as a debate. I still that giving Chopra anything less than open hostility is a mistake, but it seems Mlodinow is not some new-age woo peddler.
The article seems to claim exactly that: that the interviews with Deepak et al are anecdotal at best, and don't add much substance to the author's claims.
Seems like this is one of those countless self improvement books: built around a premise that makes intuitive sense (here: having an outlet apart from work improves your performance at work) and listing tons of anecdotes to ingrain the idea further. Basically, a blog post padded with stories to make a sellable book. I'm not the biggest fan.
Instead of citing relevant research, he devotes
multiple pages to famous people and their original
ideas, among them Stephen Hawking and Deepak Chopra (his
collaborators on previous books) and Seth MacFarlane,
of “Family Guy” fame. His discussion of the novelist
Isabel Allende’s mixed success with ayahuasca as a cure
for writer’s block is an eye-opener, but on the whole
these celebrity testimonials are too weak to provide
much insight into the value of elastic thinking.
Something of a mild distraction, no? Seems like an addendum to the rest of the cavalcade of characters in a spread-spectrum mass appeal attempt at name dropping.
Seems petty to ding someone on the merit of their associations, rather than let their own principles and qualities stand on their own.
I'm not saying I'm a fan of this guy. I'm saying I'm not of fan of such trivial mud slinging.
Regarding the title, I'd say choose your profession in a way that you don't have to choose between work and play. You are reading HN so you're likely in a position to have many options. Life's too short to be doing things that don't feel like playing.
Especially given that everything is playing whether you realize it or not because the universe, entropy and purpose but that's a whole another story.
But even from purely financial point of view, it's likely that you will be better off by becoming master at what you consider to be a fun game.