Comment by globular-toast
7 hours ago
The first one is something I've been saying for years. I worked in computational biology for a while and it took me a while to realise, but eventually I noticed I wasn't very good at it. The people who were good at it lived and breathed biology. They would come to the lab on weekends and even the middle of the night to water plants and generally tend to their experiments. Above all, they cared. I was just a computer guy who took a gig. I got by, but I would never be good because it just wasn't me.
I realised my real calling is engineering, not science. I like finding and solving problems. Scientists have problems, but, in my experience, the best people were scientists first and engineers second.
Now I've settled on engineering I see it from the other side. I work with people who just aren't very good engineers. It's like someone with one leg trying to run races. You're just not going to get very far. You'll always be last. Always struggling to keep up. Find what you're good at and be the best. Don't try to do something you're bad at and be the worst.
I just do business apps and websites, and it pays the bills, but none of it is really interesting since a lot of it involves recurring patterns and simply fixing other peoples' past mistakes (and future people will probably fix mine). I give a shit only because doing that means less work and annoyances and not getting fired, but I still only give a shit 8 hours a day, usually less.
All this advice runs into time constraints and luck, which means you can get unlucky trying 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. things and you're not good at any of them while you still have bills to pay.
It's also an accessibility problem as some careers are gated by degrees (physician) or capital (farming). Doing the sample work (shadowing a physician, hired farm worker) to see if you like it has a risk of not giving a real picture of the actual work. If that happens, you have to rely on tenacity to stick it out.
Some people need to be in the deeper parts of the job before their brain kicks on and starts enjoying it (just being a hired laborer at a farm vs. owning and running the farm) because they don't have any 'ownership' when it's just a job.
All this to say that the quick advice like the OP is technically right, but it has about the same nuance and considerations of reality as clubbing baby seals.
I don't think the point was finding a job that isn't work. My job is definitely work; I wouldn't be doing it if I wasn't getting paid. It's more about just being good at it.
There's definitely luck involved. I'm lucky to have found a thing with basically zero barriers to entry (computing). But maybe I'd be even better as a farmer or physician. We will never know.
It's good enough just to find something that you don't struggle in, though. Not swimming upstream, as the OP puts it.