Find the Hard Work You're Willing to Do (2018)
The world thinks mathematicians are people for whom math is easy. That's wrong.Relatedly: We convince people that you -- yes, you -- need to sweat and find something burdensome in order to make the big bucks and make the world a better place. We do a poor job of clearly conveying how to add real value and how to capture some portion of that in the form of money in your own pocket.It actively causes problems for talented people who often think of their talent as something "easy" or fun and wouldn't know how to charge for it or how much to charge for it.We have all these proxies for providing value -- such as hours worked -- that I think of as "paying you to sweat" rather than paying you to be productive.I don't know what the solution is but it's something we ought to be more actively working on.