At some point in a person’s life–I THINK every person’s life, but obviously I’m not sure because I only have first-hand experience with one–he discovers what he wants to do his life. Paul Graham calls it what you love to do. I wanted to be a computer programmer from the time I was 11 (yes, I have been a geek for a while now 
. You always hear about wanting to be a fireman or an astronaut when you grow up, but I dreamed about being the best computer programmer in the world. (I still haven’t achieved that yet, but I’m still learning and I’m still relatively young 
After I had worked as a programmer for years, I realized that
the true art behind building software does not lie in writing elegant code,
but in creating a great user experience and adding value for your
user. I learned that both from owning my own software company
(purification by FIRE) and by learning from Steve Jobs. So my goal has
evolved a bit over time, but not too much. In the end I still just want to
create things that make people happy. I think that’s why I enjoy painting as well.
Aside from myself, I’ve only seen this moment, when a young person finds out what they want to do with their life, a few times. It seems like it usually happens at about 11 to 14 years old. And while some are certainly motivated by money, many are not. It seems to be almost random, and I don’t know what triggers it. Mother Teresa had a passion for helping people. I think that’s fantastic, and it has to be one of the most fulfilling ways to spend your life. (Not coincidentally, if you read about her, you’ll find she also decided what she wanted to do at age 12.)
The ethereal thing that determines if the person actually reaches their aspirations seems to be "ambition". Throughout my life I’ve often heard people say that I’m "ambitious", and after thinking about it for a while I think the only difference between myself and others is that I have no doubt about the fact that I CAN reach my goals if I just keep trying. Other people have great dreams, but as they don’t think they’re within the realm of reason they never do anything about them, or they scale them back significantly. Thus, by taking the fact that people apply this label to me and that’s the only difference I can see between myself and others to whom the label is not applied, I consider "ambition" to be the idea that you CAN reach your goal.
The period of time when a child figures out what his aspirations are seems absolutely critical. It defines the rest of his life. It can go one of two ways, and the direction it goes seems very dependent on his environment.
Down the first path, the child will receive the encouragement and support he needs to pursue his dreams. The person who goes down this path gains what is known as "ambition", because he believes that if just keeps on going he will eventually reach his goal. Because of this ambition, nothing stands in his way for long. He will go under, over, around, or through whatever comes between him and his dream.
Down the second path, his parents and other people who supposedly know more about the world will try to "talk sense" into him. As in, try to talk the child into a goal that’s more in line with their view of the world. The sad thing is that kids don’t share the preconceived notions that adults do about what’s "realistic" and what’s not. They are a blank slate. But that also means that they soak up whatever their parents tell them about life. So from the very point they realize what it is that will make them happy and fulfilled, they are being told to scale back their aspirations and bring them in line with their parents. I imagine the same phenomenon occurs when a parent tries to live vicariously through their child, trying to shoehorn him into the aspirations that they themselves never pursued and have regrets about.
Do you know people who always look unhappy? There was a guy like that on Hell’s Kitchen this season (Matt)–Jessica and I would always laugh at this guy because he always looked constipated. I also know several people like this myself, who shall go un-named Now, I can’t speak from experience, but I can guess that if I were to scale back my aspirations in any way I would be pretty miserable spending my life doing things I had no passion for, and I suspect that this is where a lot of these people get that expression. Being told that you can’t do what you want to do for the rest of your life would be a pretty terrible experience, I suspect, enough to scar you with a permanent scowl if you believed it.
The interesting thing is that there seems to be a window of time after a person realizes what his aspiration is where he will hold onto that dream regardless of the negative feedback he gets from his parents. I remember sitting at a wedding years back talking to a young guy who wanted to be a computer programmer. He was 16 at the time and had been trying to teach himself to program from books–he didn’t even have his own computer, and he’d been trying to teach himself anyway. For obvious reasons I felt a connection with this kid, and I was trying to encourage him and even volunteered to give him an old computer I had. At the same time his mother was sitting next to him pooh-poohing the idea, telling him to stop talking nonsense, and literally telling him that he couldn’t take the computer I was trying to give him. (And all he wanted to do was PROGRAM COMPUTERS, not make cold fusion work or something!) I literally argued with her about it, and she would not let him take a free computer from me. Something about "pride", I think. I wanted to slap her. Needless to say, last time I heard about this kid he had given up on being a programmer and had joined the Marines. Tragic.
Sean Park wrote a post that touches on a problem that is near and dear to my heart, and one that I don’t have an answer to: how to find young people who are in negative environments and are in that "window of opportunity" to get that ambition they need. I’ve often told Jessica that if I could find a way to identify and help these kids I would immediately start a charity to do so. The problem is, there are a number of challenges involved with this.
The first problem is how to identify and locate these individuals. I’ve only run into them by chance, and I can’t see any way to do this other than having somewhat deep conversations with them. That doesn’t scale well. The second problem is, what do you do once you find them?
Certainly you can offer them encouragement and guidance, but is that
enough? Obviously I wasn’t able to help the young man from my example earlier. These people face negative reinforcement twenty-four hours a day at
home, is that little bit of encouragement you give them enough to
overcome that? Certainly providing them with some level of equipment
and/or connectivity to more encouragement is a huge step in the right direction. But even then, you yourself may still have to overcome parental obstacles just to get to that point, as I failed to do.
Sean wonders if the Internet can’t help in some way, and I imagine that it can:
I wonder (I hope) if perhaps there are ways to use the power of the
web, social media, ubiquitous and cheap communication to open
previously closed horizons to young people who haven’t had the good
fortune to be born in the right place, to the right parents. To afford
them the self-evident right to have ambition. To dream.
I have the same hope. Is there some kind of social network or application that doesn’t exist yet which will help identify these individuals and bring them to the attention of people who can help motivate them and push them forward? Can we build some sort of social network scanner which will identify these people? Does anyone have the right solution to this problem? I don’t know. If there is I would love to participate in it. Helping young people gain and keep the ambition to keep driving toward their dreams and aspirations would be one of the most fulfilling endeavors I can think of. And the contributions that these people would make to society would almost certainly repay your time and effort many times over.
P.S. I hope nobody takes this post the wrong way. It’s not meant to be egotistical in any way, but rather to help define a problem that I seriously think about on a regular basis and am hoping that the Internet community can eventually find a solution to.
