I didn’t link to the original “tiger mom” story that was published in the Wall Street Journal because I’m not a parent and I don’t know a whole lot about parenting. Besides, people who criticize other people’s parenting styles are jerks. (If you missed the original article, it’s here.)
Today I read Paul Buchheit’s response, which discusses intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation contains a lot of wisdom. You can’t beat his basic approach to life:
My strategy can be reduced to two rules: 1) Find a way to make it fun and 2) If that fails, find a way to do something else.
And this hit home for me, as I’m sure it does for many people:
One of the problems I’ve faced throughout life is that I’m kind of lazy, or maybe I lack will power or discipline or something. Either way, it’s very difficult for me to do anything that I don’t feel like doing.
I think that a life full of things you feel like doing is a pretty good life. Oddly enough, for me they don’t necessarily have to be fun as long as they enable to attain a goal that is genuinely important to me.