It's a novel thing, and not in a good way, to hear the US government sounding like the dictators we used to ridicule in past decades. This is a decli… - Paul Graham

"Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. 99% of people reading Ulysses are thinking "I'm reading Ulysses" as they do it."

Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can’t make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else. How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can’t get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them.

If you want to create wealth (in the narrow technical sense of not starving), then you should be especially skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like doing.