June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins Fields Medal

To hear him tell it, he doesn’t usually have much control over what he decides to focus on in those three hours. For a few months in the spring of 2019, all he did was read.

“Which means I didn’t do any work,” Huh said. “So that’s kind of a problem.” (He’s since made peace with this constraint, though. “I used to try to resist … but I finally learned to give up to those temptations.” As a consequence, “I became better and better at ignoring deadlines.”)

He finds that forcing himself to do something or defining a specific goal — even for something he enjoys — never works. It’s particularly difficult for him to move his attention from one thing to another. “I think intention and willpower … are highly overrated,” he said. “You rarely achieve anything with those things.”

This was a great biography about one person’s path towards discovering what they are passionate about.

I find a lot of parallels in my work. Agency life can be a grind, and it’s tough to say “deliver this work by this date” and feel motivated to deliver on it, especially when that work is not particularly novel or challenging.

I much prefer being still for a little bit, finding something to be curious about, and working towards discovering everything I can about that thing.

On a related note: I recently had a great talk with a coworker about the game I want to build. Our talk transformed that idea into one that now is making me motivated to learn more about AIs that generate visual components and how one could incorporate them into a dynamically-built world.

Kinda cool stuff, no?