Water, at exactly zero degrees, doesn’t know what it wants to be. Add the tiniest nudge of energy and it stays liquid; subtract the same and it snaps into ice, molecules locking into a perfect repeating lattice. The tipping point itself, that knife-edge moment of indecision, is its own strange kind of object. For decades, physicists suspected something similar could happen to spacetime. Not water molecules, but the very fabric of the universe, organising itself into a crystal-like structure right on the threshold of becoming a black hole. Now, for the first time, a team from Vienna and Frankfurt has written down an exact mathematical description of what that object looks like, using nothing more than paper and pencil.
Do what you love, or love what you do?
I have about 70 posts on draft status, but it’s been a restless year so far, keeping me from fleshing out the details of my ideas. In the meantime I just came across this wonderful insight from Paul Buchheit (GMail’s creator), which truly everyone should read:
It’s often said that you should “Do what you love”, but that’s mostly bad advice. It encourages people to grind away their lives in pursuit of some mostly unattainable goal, such as being a movie star or a billionaire startup founder. And even if they do make it, often the reality is nothing like they imagined it would be, so they’re still unhappy.
Do what you love is in the future. Love what you do is right now. As with the other patterns, it’s meant to guide the small decisions that we make every moment of every day. It’s less about changing what you do, and more about changing how you do it.
One of the problems with having a goal-oriented, extrinsic mindset is that it treats the time between now and task completion as an annoying obstacle to be endured. If you’re doing something that is difficult, uncertain, and takes a long time, such as building a new product or company, and you have that mindset, then you’re likely gambling away a big chunk of your life. Subconsciously, you may also compensate by choosing smaller, more realistic goals, and that’s unfortunate.
Perfect. This kind of advice is sorely needed for Solving Gen Y’s Passion Problem. If you’re a techie, you might as well read Paul’s full essay of startup advice: The Technology.