How To Discover And Pursue Your Passion
you've tried again Herman bar as we
learn who we are in practice not in theory and so I think the biggest problem
for young people is if they're
sitting around introspecting to try
to figure out what their passion is go and try something it's not it's almost
certainly not going to be the first
thing it may be you may get lucky but it's probably not going to be the first
thing so you should get going on
that experiment process and start building a model of the world so that you can
understand what your options are cuz I
also think the issue with passion
and happiness is again like I was talking about I think it was can't remember
everything that was before the
recording started and after um but like when I
used to run the 800 meters or now
when I write books if you ask me to any given moment am I enjoying this am I
happy
about it you know am I passionate
about some's like no I want to throw my computer out the window are you crazy
but it's so engaging it's so compelling
and it pushes me in a way to learn
that I can't do just on my free time and so I don't think we have to think
about just
passion find something that is so
incredibly engaging to you uh and then
go from there and engaging really is
how do you know that it's engage it's when you sort
of FL drop into that flow state
where nothing else seems to matter or flow I mean flow is a tricky one because
it's a
lot easier it it shows up a lot more
in people that are like surfing or painting than it does in some kinds of
knowledge work but I think it when you when you
get really engaged in something you
a curiosity about how you can get better at it what else you can learn next so
I think it it stimulates this kind of
curiosity That You Don't See in
people when they're just in something where they're kind of going through the
motions so you you start to understand
like when I I remember when my my
then girlfriend now wife um it was important
to me you know for health that like
both of us be lifelong exercisers for example and the first time we we moved in
together and I'm saying like all
right we got to identify uh something that works for you and I take her to a
gym and drop her off
and not realizing I have you know
Decades of learning how to do stuff in a gym
that I take for granted and then I
realiz okay I need to sort of walk this walk with her and so
we would try different things like
running she wasn't as into that so then you know try some other thing etc etc
and finally she found one kind of class
and she comes home this day we did
this and then we did this it was so hard let me show you this other thing we
did I'm like you found your thing and the one
problem was then when we were
looking at moving States we had to be within 15 minutes of that kind of class
walking
distance for any house that we were
going to buy but it's like you can see this curiosity develop uh when someone
Why Grit Is The Key To
Success
hits something it's so engaging that
they want to understand how to be better they want to talk to other people
doing it they get so curious about it but you
have to experiment you have to
experiment I wish there were a way out of that I wish you could say this is the
thing that's going to work for you may
maybe someday with AI I maybe but
highly unlikely highly unlikely um and and AI
just like changes the field that
you're playing in right and so I think experimentation I think it's going to be
even more important as people can't
expect to be doing the same thing their whole careers anymore I mean they're
threads that they can expect to to carry
through but not the same exact thing
when I saw your video called why Divergent thinkers beat Geniuses in the
real world I thought you were going
to talk about neurod Divergence in the video so someone that was you know
diagnosed with ADHD maybe when I was
about 30 years old I thought oh he's going to explain why neurod Divergence
things like ADHD and autism result
in um better outcomes in the real world has
your work ever had any crossovers
with NE Divergence not a lot but I mean I have read some of that work and I do
think something that's really
important is the more different types of thinking that we can like get into a
stew the
better off I think I think we all
are I mean there are reasons why um ADHD like there's there's some
it's not it's not a big body of work
but I think it's relevant where you can look at nomadic populations that then
settled
and you can see certain genes that
are associated with and these are these are small effects
um but you can see certain genes
that are associated with uh like novelty seeking with with ADHD um will
apparently start to be like selected
out once they settle and it's more common
when they're nomadic and what that
suggest to me is that these are things this attentiveness to lots of different
stimuli that are really important
have been important for us ancestrally and are still important and so they're
still
here they may be maladaptive if
you're telling someone they have to sit still in a classroom for 10 hours a day
which
I think is a difficult environment
for anyone to adjust to but I think to some extent and I think this has
happened
sometimes in in some companies um
that look for opportunities for people with Autism where you say okay where is
this
adaptive where is this type of
thinking adaptive instead of maladaptive so useful instead of unproductive and
I
think if we're not doing that then
you're missing opportunities to really use people who think differently from
you yeah I mean it's interesting because
your work does whether it is
endeavoring to or not it really does make a great case for diversity in the
workplace yeah
yeah yeah uh you want to do a quiz
sure pretend you're a doctor okay and I'm
your put my white coat in my head
with a little stethoscope around my neck yeah okay because that's that's what
all doctors look like um and and I'm your
patient okay and I've got a
malignant stomach tumor and there's a new type of Ray or Focus radiation that
can destroy
the tumor if it's at sufficient
intensity the problem is at that intensity it will also destroy healthy
tissue in my stomach so how can you save
me okay while you're thinking of that tell you a story there was once this
General had to capture a fortress to
to liberate a country from a brutal dictator and he had plenty enough troops
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