Alright, we got another question here from TreeFallingInAForest who asks, "Would you do your CS researcher writing if you could not share it?" Probably not. I mean, I think impact is an important property of satisfying a meaningful career. Knowing that your writing is being read by people, I think, is really valuable and it's fine to prioritize that.

Knowing that your computer science paper is cited and other people are building on it is a real source of satisfaction and is important. So I'm not a big believer in this fortune cookie wisdom around careers that it should just be the thing you would do if no one was watching.

Well, I don't think that actually really holds, right? Because it's way too narrow of a view of what a satisfying career is. It narrows down to the actual activity that you're doing. You know, it's, okay, is the activity you're doing in the moment something that feels good or something like this?

And career satisfaction is a much more complicated and rich tapestry. That's why I talk about it so good they can't ignore you. Things like connection to other people, impact on the world, mastery, so having an objective measure of you getting better at something, these are all part of the tapestry that all weaves together to build a satisfying career.

So I don't think it's useful to try to separate work from all of that and become obsessively activity-focused. Is the actual activity you're doing, you just enjoy doing the activity and that's the only measure? I think that's going to be probably way too myopic. It's why, for example, sports stars obsess so much about their contract size.

Now, let's use this as a quick case study. Again and again, the casual fan will say, "I don't understand. This player likes it here. The hometown crowd loves them. They're being offered more money than they'll ever know what to do with in their life. So why throw that all away to go somewhere completely new and to get all of the ire of their fans for a little bit more money on top of an amount of money that they would never know how to spend in all of their life?" I mean, in other words, what I'm saying is, why, Bryce Harper, why?

Come on. But if you talk to the more serious sports fan, to the athletes themselves, mastery is important. I mean, what else was going to get someone to that top level in something as competitive as sports than a real desire to get better and better, to push themselves, to revel in the unambiguous mastery that they have developed?

One of the ways you measure that mastery is the contract size. And so they care about these epsilons. Bryce Harper cared about the $330 million that the Phillies were offering versus the $300 million that the Nationals were offering. And this is exactly the type of conversation with similar numbers I have with my publisher, very similar numbers.

He cared about that difference because $330 million would have been, it was at that point, I believe, the largest contract that had been given to an individual ballplayer. Like, that really matters, right? When you're really, the epsilons of mastery, when you're at that level of the game, at an MVP caliber, that really matters.

If you just think about it the way we do, it's like, "$300 million seems good to me. It doesn't make sense." So this whole divergence, me excising my baseball demons, is really about getting back to this main point, which is there's a lot of different attributes that come into making work satisfying, and some of those attributes include other people, other people recognizing you, you getting unambiguous indicators of mastery, you make an impact on the world.

That all matters. We can't just think about work in a myopic, activity-focused manner. We can't just say, "If you would do this when no one's watching, then that's what you're meant to do." Nonsense. Professional life is complicated, and it's social, and there's community aspects to it, and there's a lot of interesting, complicated stuff in it.

So that is why Bryce Harper left, and it's why we should care about how many people actually read what we write.