Later today, I watched the above inspiring talk by Paula Scher @ TedTalks, titled “Great design is serious (not solemn)”.

Paula Scher looks back at a life in design and pinpoints the moments when she started really having fun. According to Scher, you play or gamble when you take fascinating jobs you have no idea what they are about. These jobs are the ‘serious’ ones. However, later on, some of them become solemn or extra serious.
But being ‘serious’ about something, says Scher, is very different from being solemn–when you’re solemn, it isn’t all play anymore.

I can easily find an analogy to this as regards my work. I’ve started working on Collaborative Filtering for Recommendation Systems almost a year ago. At first it was a job for fun and profit. Now I think it’s becoming solemn. A paper is on its way to AIAI09, an Artificial Intelligence Conference and a startup at early stage. Definitely, not a walk in the park anymore.

So if you ever feel yourself in that same situation, try go back to that time of being youthful and arrogant, taking jobs where you have no idea what you’re talking about, and get serious.

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