Everyone always writes these and yet I've seen very few ever talk about how to decide what's worth showing up for or how to get a working hypothesis of an animating principle for your own existence. It'd be remarkably useful to have a working framework for how to figure out what to want, especially targeted at smart people with top level talents in several areas.
If you love multiple things totally equally as a total novice(aka haven’t put a ton of time yet into it but shows initial talent), pick one (with rng if needed) and stick with it for an hour a day or so for a while. If you like it and it works for you keep doing it.
"What's worth it" varies so much by person that you can't generalize. Tons of people have written about that, but they all write different things, because they're different people.
That said, I've noticed that there is a pretty big split between short term success vs. long term success, with this site skewing toward the latter. (Primary short term example: work hard at a safe, high-paying career)
If you're reading this site, PG (original author of it) has written extensively on these things:
I think this is a great slogan because there seems to be an implicit myth that everyone has access to the same viewpoints and knowledge (or should), e.g. media narratives. In reality knowledge is very unevenly distributed, and the viewpoints of people and communities are more diverse than you can imagine (traveling and/or listening to random people is a good way to see this). If you're not living in "the future", your idea of "new" or "good" might be skewed or simply pedestrian.
> Pick an idea in a large market that will always be in demand and work on a product that caters to a subset of use cases exceedingly well.
I think it depends on your appetite for drama. To me, startups have a lot of drama and often fail spectacularly. They have good characters and bad characters. So if I just want to enjoy my life, then I'll work on something steadily, learn, improve my skills. After working on a bunch of things close to the state of the art, it's hard not to think of ways the world could be better.
I liked munificent's statement in this thread that "humans are incredible generalizers". That is, just do things and you'll get ideas. Certain work smells good and other work smells bad. (IMO the biggest bad smell is prestige: http://www.paulgraham.com/love.htmlIf it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.)
