This interview with Andrew Ng, founder of Coursera and now head of a Silicon Valley lab for Baidu, is kind of interesting for revealing the divide between the Hong Kong/Singapore culture in which Ng grew up and standard American culture. Some choice lines:
I think that “follow your passion” is not good career advice. It’s actually one of the most terrible pieces of career advice we give people. If you are passionate about driving your car, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should aspire to be a race car driver.
When I talk to researchers, when I talk to people wanting to engage in entrepreneurship, I tell them that if you read research papers consistently, if you seriously study half a dozen papers a week and you do that for two years, after those two years you will have learned a lot. This is a fantastic investment in your own long term development. [Fortunately in engineering we are not necessary plagued by “Why Most Published Research Findings are False”]
… if you spend a whole Saturday studying rather than watching TV, there’s no one there to pat you on the back or tell you you did a good job. Chances are what you learned studying all Saturday won’t make you that much better at your job the following Monday. There are very few, almost no short-term rewards for these things. But it’s a fantastic long-term investment. This is really how you become a great researcher, you have to read a lot.
There is much less appreciation for the status quo in the Chinese internet economy and I think there’s a much bigger sense that all assumptions can be challenged and everything is up for grabs. The Chinese internet ecosystem is very dynamic. Everyone sees huge opportunity, everyone sees massive competition. Stuff changes all the time. New inventions arise, and large companies will one day suddenly jump into a totally new business sector.
To give you an idea, here in the United States, if Facebook were to start a brand new web search engine, that might feel like a slightly strange thing to do. Why would Facebook build a search engine? It’s really difficult. But that sort of thing is much more thinkable in China, where there is more of an assumption that there will be new creative business models.
I didn’t finish the article because there was an important NBA playoff game that I needed to watch…
In your article on early retirement, you made some statements suggesting that self-imposing structure and discipline to accomplish things can be challenging. You seem to maintain a healthy diet of reading books, writing articles, writing books, building software… Have you developed any particular methodologies for accomplishing such things since you wrote that article a decade ago?
I find it hard to believe that watching television really has a high-priority place in your life!
For similar positive career coaching by a Georgetown CS professor, I can recommend the blog Study Hacks: http://calnewport.com/blog/. He also considers the mantra “follow you passion” bunk.
He’s written some books, but I can’t comment on them. Perhaps a gift for youngster in one’s life?
Am I the only one that thinks it’s weird that he thinks that a search engine represents a “new creative business model”?
Also: “don’t waste your time on frivolous entertainment” seems like some pretty obvious advice. (Why am I not a multi-millionaire?)
> Am I the only one that thinks it’s weird that he thinks that a search engine represents a “new creative business model”?
If you believe that a new search engine would have to be a second-rate imitation of Google in both technology and business model, you might have less reason to even try.
I think the idea is, these people think that if they do a good enough job of creating a new search engine, then along the way they will probably be able to discover/create a good new business model for that search engine.
> Also: “don’t waste your time on frivolous entertainment” seems like some pretty obvious advice. (Why am I not a multi-millionaire?)
Might seem like obvious advice, but it’s harder to apply it well. That’s why Ng discusses how he applies it.
Trevis: I love watching TV! But unfortunately I almost never get to do it 🙁 I wouldn’t say that I have a methodology. Mostly I have trouble leaving projects unfinished.
The Chinese revolution has been promised for 20 years, they had small breakthroughs in electroluminescent wire & LED’s, but mostly a spectacular fraud in the stem cell breakthroughs of 2004, the manned space program which fizzled to nothing. Their biggest success is making the components of the drone revolution, but not the practical applications. In the mean time, the social network revolution, the app revolution, the sharing economy revolution, the maker revolution, the wearable computing revolution, the virtual reality revolution, the electric car revolution, all happened in Silicon Valley.
I think “follow your passion” is being unfairly maligned these days. It is being pitted against putting in time to develop your discipline and competence, but of course the two aren’t mutually exclusive. It means that what you devote yourself to has to have at least a seed of passion. Why else would you give up Saturday to study materials instead of watching TV? (Driven by dreams of big fortune?) Or practice the piano for more than 10,000 hours even if you may not become a concert pianist. Speaking as a Chinese-American, it was pretty soul-crushing growing up to be always told you have to be a doctor or engineer and to be discouraged in other pursuits when I was really interested in the social sciences. (I’m now in ministry and don’t regret it one bit. Nor my brother who gave up a career in computer science to go into teaching high-school math and CS).
I often get the question about productivity vs TV and it often reveals assumptions about what people mean by “watching TV”. I watch a TON of TV/movies. And, it’s unbelievably rare for it to be the only thing I’m doing. Last night, I watched TV from 7 to 10. But, I also prototyped a node-webkit desktop application to source photos from Flickr’s creative commons collection with proper citations for presentations and other content I write.
Pretty much every bit of TV I watch is coupled with some sort of productive activity. Most non-subtitled TV can be easily followed (by me at least) when doing a wide variety of tasks. Sorting photos, responding to emails and lots of other tasks (particularly those that can be done on a laptop) aren’t mentally taxing enough to demand my full attention.
Similarly, I often have “TV” running on my phone, mostly listening while I’m outside brewing beer or tending to my BBQ smoker, switching to watching during the gaps in activity.
Some of that same time, I switch to audiobooks. I got through 70 audiobooks last year with 0% of the time being “dedicated” to doing so. It was all either driving time, walking/exercise time, yardwork/housework time, etc.
Genuine multi-tasking of things like writing a book and reading one are impossible, but there is a big gray area of tasks that can be doubled-up on without a diminishing of the efficacy of either.