鸿沟

在买买提上看到有人讨论卢昌海的转行现象，聊到卢因为对当前的物理研究现状失望，无法实现自己喜欢物理的初衷，因此转到了自己相对感兴趣的计算机行业，职业和兴趣就此分离。当然，我这里重点不是职业和兴趣的分离，而是帖子里面有人贴的一段话：

What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me…is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of disappointment to you, you know what I mean? A lot of people never get past that phase and a lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like to say to you with all my heart is that, most everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. It didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have. And the thing what to do is … everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, or if you’re just getting out of that phase, you’ve got to know it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story.

Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap, and your work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. In my case, like I took longer to figure out how to do this than anybody I’ve ever met. It takes a while. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take you a while. And you just have to fight your way through that. OK?

这是电台主持人Ira Glass 在 This American Life 节目上讨论创意时说的。刚看到这段话时我以为是哪个科学家说的，知道他的身份后还是很惊讶的。不敢评论说他这是多么深的洞见，因为我无法确定我能明智到判断一个人的洞察力，我只能说对我来说，这段话非常适用我所面临的处境。不过从这个页面下面的评论来看，这段话的适用性非常之广——从这个意义上来说，这确实是一种“真知灼见”了。

犹记得PhD第一年时意气风发，一心想要探索和解决有趣的科学问题，尽管当时被老板骂得狗血淋头，还是非常享受其中的乐趣，尤其是跟老板暗地里进行 code jam 模拟岩石裂隙问题的时候。但是第二年开始，就逐渐对自己所做的东西不满了，大概没有什么不能用 rubbish 来形容。一直想 quit，却一直狠不下心来，然后就在各种煎熬中毕业了。多年的 stuck 也确实让我有了放弃继续科研的想法：99.99% 做出来的东西都无聊得很，而自己又没有那种能力去做那 0.01% 的工作，还不如去工业界找份朝九晚五的工作，工作归工作，业余时间全用来做点自己感兴趣的事情，也算没有浪费生命。后来也是阴差阳错，至今仍然留在学术圈（当然，按我自己的说法是“游离在学术圈之外”）。在毕业后仍然 stuck 几年后，现在倒是有点想开了，套用 Linus 的“咆哮”——Talk is cheap. Show me the code——可以说是“Talk is cheap. Show me your work”。

既然只是“有点”想开，自然还是有所纠结：这两天成功把 model 扩展到了 general space，其实只利用了一个非常简单的概念，但是中间绕了一大圈（两个星期），于是弄出来后毫无成就感可言，沮丧得很。——不过虽然 gap 持续存在，好歹是走了一小步了。

来，干了这碗鸡汤！

附： Ira Glass 的广播可参见油管视频