Thank You for Being Annoying

Kyle saved it via Michael Dempsey’s post, which pairs it with Andy Weissman’s 2013 blog post “Andre Agassi, Do What You Love, Bob Dylan”. See So maybe the question we… (tweet).

Key claims

• “‘Do what you love’ is the most dangerous sentence in the English language.” People leave school expecting love to feel like constant bliss, and when it doesn’t they decide they are the one person who doesn’t fit.
• People who have “made it” are mostly annoyed. Doctors, lawyers, academics and founders who love their jobs mainly complain about bosses, patients and broken prototypes. “I love my job” means “My job pisses me off, but in an enchanting way.”
• Good annoyance vs. bad annoyance. Bad annoyance makes you want to leave. Good annoyance pulls you in, like a crooked picture frame you can and must straighten. “Fun fades, but irritation is infinite.” So the right job puts you in charge of what annoys you. Being near your annoyances without the power to fix them (“the Museum of Slightly Crooked Pictures”) is a recipe for misery.
• The masters sound irritated too. He quotes Vargas Llosa (writing as a tapeworm), Andre Agassi (“I hate tennis”), Marie Curie, a Pac-Man champion, and Meryl Streep. Expertise doesn’t end frustration: “I merely traded them in for newer models.”
• A cybernetic explanation. The mind is a stack of control systems, and happiness comes from correcting error, not from its absence: “a belly that’s being filled.” That’s why lottery winners rarely quit and rich people take up extreme sports. “Annoyance is the only truly renewable resource known to man.” No productivity system can create annoyance that isn’t there.
• Altruism runs on “cold pricklies.” Good Samaritans in his friends’ stories acted because they couldn’t stand to watch: “I just can’t bear to see it like that.”
• Love includes annoyance. He draws on Ava’s line that “closeness is fundamentally annoying.” If you look for someone who never annoys you, you’ll never stop looking.

Notable quotes

“When we say, ‘I love my job,’ we really mean, ‘My job pisses me off, but in an enchanting way.’”

“Fun fades, but irritation is infinite.”

“This out-of-whack/back-in-whack cycle is not a source of motivation. It is motivation.”

“So maybe the question we should be asking young folks is not ‘what do you love?’ but ‘what bugs the hell out of you?’”

“Do What You Love is a nirvana state, an end goal, and output.” (Andy Weissman, 2013, the companion piece Dempsey cites)

Full text

How it connects

• Career · Motivation — choosing work by what bugs you.
• Happiness · Cybernetics — happiness as error correction.
• Altruism — the “cold pricklies” account of kindness.
• Betaworks — Weissman’s companion post on finally feeling satisfied, at 40, building betaworks.
• Ambition — Agassi’s “Please let this be over. / Then: I’m not ready for it to be over.”