Transcript
Speaker: A lot of people, particularly young people, are lost.
Speaker: They just don't know what to do now, next week, or really what they want to dedicate their lives to.
Speaker: They can't find their passion.
Speaker: And obviously, modernity has not helped because the traditional structures which provided them with your set, your default answer are gone.
Speaker: Globalization, the dynamic nature of today's job market means that, well, people are less likely to follow their parents and parents.
Speaker: go down the, you know, work in the family business.
Speaker: They're also less likely to know what different job roles there are because quite frankly, there are far too many options.
Speaker: But the problem is,
Speaker: People just expect their passion, expect this answer to just magically appear from somewhere, as if from out of the sky.
Speaker: I think that obviously this is a result of the media, the romanticization of people discovering their life past.
Speaker: I mean, we must understand that a movie is like an hour, two hours long.
Speaker: And so you kind of have to gloss over the pain, the amount of time a person spends experimenting with different jobs, experimenting with different things until they find their path.
Speaker: And of course, there's a retrospective bias.
Speaker: Now, if you are someone who's achieved something in their lives, so they're a much older person, you ask them, oh, tell me your life story.
Speaker: They're just going to remember things in a very much biased way.
Speaker: They're going to gloss over all the difficulties they went through.
Speaker: And it's going to seem as if it was almost certain, it was almost obvious from the very moment in which they were born that they were destined to become a lawyer, an architect, an entrepreneur.
Speaker: And so people are lost.
Speaker: Their chains, there's this illusion that their passion, their goals will just magically appear from somewhere.
Speaker: And so how do these types of people, how do we get around this?
Speaker: What's the strategy?
Speaker: We need to dive headfirst into it.
Speaker: The reality is that your passion is not something that you can find.
Speaker: It's something that you need to make.
Speaker: And this is the case for the vast majority of people, at least.
Speaker: Okay, maybe if you're Mozart and you start writing symphonies from just a few years old, it is a different case.
Speaker: But the moment that you're already asking yourself the question of...
Speaker: I'm not quite sure what I should do with my life.
Speaker: That already means that you are in a different position.
Speaker: You're not one of those few hundred or few thousand lucky people on this earth who somehow just have, from the very first moment in their life, a clear path written out for them.
Speaker: And that's not something to be sad about.
Speaker: That would be equivalent to being sad that you're not the...
Speaker: top 10 most tallest human beings on earth.
Speaker: We cannot control the hand that we're dealt with.
Speaker: We can only control how we play it, right?
Speaker: And for most of us, the hand that we're played is one that isn't clear.
Speaker: It's one where we ourselves have to answer the question of who are we meant to be and what are we going to do with our lives.
Speaker: To do this effectively, we need to try things out because we cannot know what we like without...
Speaker: without trying a lot of different things.
Speaker: Even if we find something that we think this could be a bit enjoyable, if then it stops being enjoyable, it is not because we are determined to live without the passion or that we're determined to be lost.
Speaker: It is because that was just not the fully right thing for you.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: I mean, it is in a way like having a hundred boxes in front of you on a table.
Speaker: And you know that in one of these boxes, there is something, there is the reward that you're looking for.
Speaker: We know that every person has something that they're better at than other things and something that they enjoy more than other things.
Speaker: That is what you're supposed to be looking for.
Speaker: The goal here is not to have a strategy that would allow you to have the same sort of passion as that person that has done that one thing since they were two years old, because that is fundamentally impossible.
Speaker: The goal here is to maximize enjoyment, productivity, and fulfillment in life by finding the thing that makes us feel the best about our work, who we are, and what we do on this planet.
Speaker: The way to do this is to go through as many of those boxes on the table as possible with as little risk and pain as possible so that you can then find that one thing that you truly want to stick with.
Speaker: But the reality is that you cannot find that if you think about minimizing that pain as simply trying things for one day, maybe, oh, I'm going to try to edit one video.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I didn't really like it.
Speaker: I'm going to try to write one article.
Speaker: No, writing's not for me either.
Speaker: It wasn't really nice.
Speaker: I'm going to try to...
Speaker: Program, one application for one day.
Speaker: I couldn't do it in a day.
Speaker: I don't think it's a program is really for me.
Speaker: This strategy is doomed to fail from the very beginning, from its very roots, because we cannot find something that we're really passionate about, something that we really like to do without finding something that we're good at.
Speaker: For the vast majority of people, it's extremely difficult to be passionate and enjoy something.
Speaker: that you're not good at.
Speaker: And there's only one way to get good at something.
Speaker: And that is by going in and putting in the work and being bad at it at first, because unless you're born good at something, unless you're one of those people that we have already established that, I mean, me and Seve, neither of us are one of those people.
Speaker: We have done ourselves that work.
Speaker: For example, even looking at this content that we're making right now, not to say that we're in any way mass decided to know we have a long way to go, but we started just a few months ago and
Speaker: Neither of us never had thought that content was something that would become even an enjoyable activity.
Speaker: We just sort of thought that it was something we had to do in order to further our business.
Speaker: But by putting in a few months of work, it's been three months now, maybe even less.
Speaker: We have already overcome that initial hump that exists when you start to do any new thing and managed to get ourselves to a point where it's becoming enjoyable because we're learning the skills that it takes to make that thing enjoyable.
Speaker: That is what is meant by you need to make your passion, not find one.
Speaker: You need to go through things and experiment with them to the point where you get at least good enough at them that you have some sort of understanding of whether you truly enjoy it.
Speaker: Not just try it.
Speaker: Try something for a day, be bad at it and decide that it's not for you because you suck at it.
Speaker: So Sebi, what would you say?
Speaker: How can we really embrace the suck, so to say?
Speaker: How can we really stop letting go of that worry about having to do this thing?
Speaker: Yeah, I think just to take what you just said and put it in a very simple kind of practice that you can do.
Speaker: I think you need to expand your horizon of giving up because I think you need to strike a balance between trying something out
Speaker: experiencing the pain associated with you starting doing that thing.
Speaker: And obviously because you started doing it, you're not gonna be very good at it.
Speaker: You're not really gonna know what you're doing.
Speaker: You're the strike of balance between experiencing that pain
Speaker: And the other extreme of subjecting yourself to the sunk cost fallacy.
Speaker: So you want to give something a go.
Speaker: So for, for us, um, filming content, for example, you want to give it a go for long enough that you give yourself the opportunity to start getting good enough that you can then think, okay,
Speaker: I've got a bit better at this.
Speaker: I'm actually decent at doing this thing.
Speaker: Is it something that I really want to do?
Speaker: Because I think the problem is on the first extreme, when you're subjecting yourself, you know, you're experiencing the pain, the difficulty, obviously that translates to a negative message, right?
Speaker: Your brain's going to think, oh, this is difficult.
Speaker: I'm not getting anywhere.
Speaker: I'm not seeing any progress.
Speaker: This is something I don't like.
Speaker: And so it will help you answer the question, do I want to do this activity?
Speaker: Not by answering it, but by just saying, oh, I don't like the negative feelings associated with it.
Speaker: But on the other extreme, it is true that the sunk cost fallacy exists, that you can devote your time to kind of beating a dead horse, pursuing something which you're just not very good at or perhaps don't actually enjoy.
Speaker: So I think you need to expand your horizon before you give up.
Speaker: and to strike that balance between these two extremes.
Speaker: But I think the idea of just embracing this difficulty is something that's quite important and that I think I just like to explore a bit further.
Speaker: because it just points to the general idea of you have to get bad, you have to be bad before you can get good.
Speaker: And this is something which is, you'll see a lot in Instagram, YouTube, it's thrown around the internet quite a lot.
Speaker: But why actually do you have to be bad before you can get good?
Speaker: I think one of the reason is that when you go about trying something out, you set yourself, you're engaging on a mission to find out what one of your goals is, right?
Speaker: And so the reason why you have to get bad before you can get good is because when you start, you lack information.
Speaker: You lack an understanding of what exactly that goal is.
Speaker: And secondly, information of how exactly you can get there.
Speaker: So to use an example, say you want to try, pursue the avenue of, oh, I want to become a lawyer.
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: Usually when you start off, that exists as some sort of vague idea.
Speaker: Oh, I want to become a lawyer.
Speaker: But what does actually becoming a lawyer means?
Speaker: What type of lawyer do I want to become?
Speaker: Eventually, you'll start to refine your understanding of what actually that is.
Speaker: And then the best way of getting there.
Speaker: Do I do an undergraduate in law or do I do an undergraduate degree somewhere else?
Speaker: Do I, I don't know, try and get an internship at a practice, learn on a job, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: And so you have to get bad before you get good because you just simply lack information.
Speaker: And I also think there's another way to look at this in that say you've achieved a lot of success, right?
Speaker: You've got good.
Speaker: And you look back at how you were maybe a few months ago, a year ago, and you think, wow, I was actually pretty bad.
Speaker: I sucked.
Speaker: If you come to that conclusion, then it would suggest that you've actually been doing something right.
Speaker: Because it suggests that you've become a better person as a result of trying that thing out, enhancing your understanding of what your goal is and how to get there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And getting to that point where you can really feel like
Speaker: hey, three months ago, I wasn't that good at this thing.
Speaker: And now suddenly I am.
Speaker: That does take effort and it does take overcoming a certain initial hump.
Speaker: But that initial hump is not as bad as we make it out to be in our own minds.
Speaker: You know, we suffer more in our imaginations than we do in reality.
Speaker: And most people aren't really that afraid of failure itself, but rather are afraid of failure.
Speaker: rather afraid of what other people think of them if they fail in public.
Speaker: Because think about it, if you're playing, I don't know, a video game, a single player video game, and you're just playing a level and you lose that level in the comfort of your own home, it doesn't really feel that devastating at all.
Speaker: Okay, you can make the argument that this isn't connected to any real value, so you're not losing anything, fine.
Speaker: But even if you envision yourself starting your business,
Speaker: Is the fear of doing it really about, oh, what if it doesn't work out?
Speaker: Or is it more about what if I get disapproval for even taking this path in the first place and then failing at it?
Speaker: In the case of many young people who are trying to choose what path to take, for example, just after getting out of high school and choosing what degree to do or whether to go to university at all,
Speaker: This social acceptance plays such a critical role in so many people's decision-making that it becomes hard to draw a line between what is it really that we want and what is it that others want us to do for them.
Speaker: And what others want us to do for them is to conform to a role that makes them feel comfortable about themselves.
Speaker: Ultimately, everyone is out for their self-interest.
Speaker: And when it comes to the topic of what you should do with your life, other people, even though they may pretend that they want the best for you and they may root for you even right now,
Speaker: Once you become more successful for them, that will change, more successful than them, that will change very, very quickly.
Speaker: And what that suggests is that people do not want you to be the best version of yourself.
Speaker: No, they want you to be the best version of yourself for them.
Speaker: And often that means conforming to patterns that they themselves are basically being pushed into and they want you to conform to them so that they would feel more comfortable about themselves as well.
Speaker: One of those patterns is not taking risks because
Speaker: A lot of people around you likely aren't taking significant risks with your life.
Speaker: If you're right now in a situation where you feel that you don't have the best circle around you, it's very likely that one of the reasons that the people don't feel like they're best people is that they're not taking significant risks with their life.
Speaker: And what that inevitably means is that they don't want you to do that as well, maybe because they truly care for you.
Speaker: If it's someone that you know you're very close to, but there's definitely an aspect in there also of, oh, I don't want you to take that risk because I don't want to be reminded that I didn't and that I succumbed to the comfort of not taking any risks in my life.
Speaker: And that is like understanding that that is the root of the disapproval of others.
Speaker: Really, I feel helped me overcome taking that into account at all.
Speaker: Because if others disapprove of me trying and failing different things that they have never even tried to do because they have this mental model of one, that they still believe in this delusion that you should just find your passion and stick with it magically without trying and failing first to find the optimal thing.
Speaker: and very likely they're living it out by just sticking to the first thing that was thrown at them.
Speaker: First of all, they're still living in that delusion.
Speaker: And second of all, they don't want you to, they don't want you, they don't like you failing because that reminds them of the risks that they weren't taking.
Speaker: After I realized that, it sort of helped me overcome caring about that at all.
Speaker: And it made me realize that
Speaker: that it isn't really a problem that I need to take into account when making decisions.
Speaker: And once I overcame having to take other people's opinions about my failure into account, then the only thing that was left was me and my own fear of my own failure.
Speaker: And that takes the control back into your hands.
Speaker: And it makes it so that it is no longer about what others around you think.
Speaker: And you're explicitly realizing that that was the problem before, but it is no more.
Speaker: And now it's just about whether I am willing to face failure in order to get what I want.
Speaker: And if I am not, like failure can be thought of as one sort of pain.
Speaker: And it can be thought of as sort of the same type of pain as any other effort that has to be put in towards success.
Speaker: And then it becomes a question of, am I willing to take a bit of discomfort in order to achieve my goals?
Speaker: And that's a much simpler question to answer than, oh, am I willing to fail in public?
Speaker: Much simpler question to answer yes to, because obviously it takes effort and obviously it takes discomfort to achieve great goals.
Speaker: And this is sort of the mentor framework that helped me at least overcome a lot of my fear of taking those risks.
Speaker: But Sebi,
Speaker: Do other people even care about you failing?
Speaker: Yes, there are some close to you that are definitely going to talk to you about it.
Speaker: But does the wide world even care in the first place about what you're doing or whether you're failing?
Speaker: Will they ever even notice it really as much as you think they do?
Speaker: Well, as Seneca would say, we suffer more in imagination than in reality.
Speaker: in that half the time when we think, when we fear people judging us, the reality is that they don't actually care.
Speaker: They're not sitting there watching us, observing all of our actions, drawing judgments.
Speaker: They're not really, a lot of the time, they're not actually
Speaker: doing any of these things, right?
Speaker: It's just that because of the way in which our minds have evolved, our minds have evolved, our minds care about this social validation.
Speaker: And because of this, we imagine that people are constantly looking at us, constantly judging us.
Speaker: So I think the reality is that, yes, if
Speaker: It is true that some people are saying things about us behind our back.
Speaker: They're laughing at our failures.
Speaker: In this case, so what?
Speaker: What are them laughing at you really going to do?
Speaker: How is it going to impact you on a more tangible level?
Speaker: But realistically, the amount of harm that you think you're being subjected to, the amount of judgments that you're being subjected to are likely a figment of your own imagination.
Speaker: And this is why this mental model that Ruko has been discussing is so useful, so helpful, because it just helps you realize, oh, I don't really care about what others think.
Speaker: And when I think that they're thinking about me, half of the time, it's probably my own imagination.
Speaker: So I'm just going to get on with my own thing, get on with my own life.
Speaker: But that leads us into kind of summing up this episode, because what we've really been talking about is how you can just get on with your own life and start seeing success.
Speaker: Because we started by talking about why people feel lost, right?
Speaker: And the problem is that they just feel the answer, the solution, their goals, their life purpose will magically appear from somewhere.
Speaker: But quite frankly, that's not the case.
Speaker: And the solution, the way in which you find your purpose, your passion, your goal is by giving things a go.
Speaker: It's about looking at all these, there's 100 boxes on your table and opening them because eventually you will find something.
Speaker: But obviously, when you go about opening these boxes, don't just open them, look at them and then toss it away if you don't like it from a first glance.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Give something a bit of time because when you start anything, any activity, you will suck because you simply don't know, you simply lack the experience, lack the information and how to best go about it.
Speaker: And that sucking, that failing, isn't necessarily something to be afraid of because you shouldn't really care about what other people think.
Speaker: You should only really be caring about what you think.
Speaker: And if you really think about it, failure, failure,
Speaker: can't really hurt you because failure helps you get close to finding your goals, your purpose in life.
Speaker: And so failure only can offer benefits.
Speaker: And ultimately, can you even consider it failure unless you stop
Speaker: Because if you just keep going and you keep trying new and new things and you keep looking for these new experiences until you find something that you are really comfortable with, I don't think that all of those past things that were some sort of painful experience should even be named failure.
Speaker: I think we should name them simply stepping stones or learning experiences towards finding that one thing that you truly like in the end, that one thing that you're passionate about.
Speaker: And that one thing that truly allows you to live your life your way.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: That's it for this week.
Speaker: Thank you very much for listening.
Speaker: Be sure to check out our social media pages and website, links in the description, for more on how you can live your life your way.
Speaker: Also, if you thought that you gained something from this episode, whether it be a small insight or transcendental reality-shaping piece of enlightenment, then feel free to share this episode with your friends, family, whoever it may be, for there is no better gift than that of a good idea.
Speaker: Thank you very much, and I'll see you next week.
