June 2022 — Letter to Readers

Some thoughts on passion as a work philosophy

Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

For my money, one of the worst pieces of advice that you can give a person is to follow their passion. I know that must appear hypocritical, given that my time on Medium is largely a passion-project, but bear with me for a moment and my reasoning will become clear.

I want to show you all a graph — this tracks the monthly output of one of my favorite bloggers over the course of about fourteen years. I’ve smoothed the data so that the trend is more visible, and also drawn a trend line.

Graph by Author

If you suggested to this author that the shape of his monthly output might follow a mathematical decay curve he would likely be surprised. Nobody seems to think that their interests might have a mathematical shape. What if I told you that there is a good chance that your last new-years-resolution followed a similar pattern? Or that the average piece of viral content shows a nearly identical shape?

The most surprising thing is that this shape manifests across a period of time that stretches not for days or weeks, but years. If you look at the blogger above, and squint so you can see the numbers…