Paul Graham on doing what you love

Doing what you love for work must be hard, because most people don't do it
It's easy to lie to yourself about what you love. #unfunfact Most people lie to themselves about loving their job because it's a social faux pas to not like it. This probably trickles down from the culture of success within celebrities and famous people (who are by definition, successful in some widely-regarded way); if powerful people love their jobs, then I should say I like mine too. This is also why we have furniture that imitates that of French royalty in our houses without realising it.
There are two ways to do what you love; two jobs (1. do what you love on the side, or 2. earn money first, then focus on it) and organically (ie go straight for what you love). The "earn first, focus later" is dangerous because it's hard to know you love something if you're putting it off for a long time; what you love is what you'd do even if you had to work.
Always be producing. It's really hard to lie to yourself about what you love (which is easy by default) if you're always doing it.

"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

This is important enough that I'm going to add "what am I producing" to my {{date}} Weekly reflection.

A side note on this article; it was reviewed by Aaron Schwartz, and it turns out he informed a bunch of things I love. He helped make RSS, design Markdown's language, make Reddit, and contributed substantially to piracy of academic articles (and information generally).