The Villain You Were Meant To Be
It’s an essay on our nature. As we progress through the conscious state of life, much of our nature becomes set. I’m not saying we stop growing.
If I used Carol Dweck’s terminology of “Growth vs. Fixed Mindset”, I do believe people can change their mindsets to be someone that continuously strives to improve. To compound the self.
However, one’s nature includes elements like strength and curiosity. Learning new skills and obtaining knowledge is part of the growth mindset. But someone’s fascination with military history and the ability to optimize/systematize everything they touch is part of one’s nature.
It’s where the basis for “follow your passion” probably comes from. It’s also why “Know Thyself” is probably something that should be taught as the goal for every student in university.
Introspection has been something I’ve been obsessed about once my journaling became something akin to habit some ~5 years ago. I do believe that everyone has an “owner’s manual” and it’s a life’s journey to finding the pages to put together through various experiences.
Naturally, the more contrasting one’s experience, the more valuable each data point will be in learning more about the self. For example, individual sport or team sport? Turns out, I love powerlifting, investing, wrestling, and breakdancing for a reason. I’m great on a team when others don’t like working.
I would say my bookshelf and books lying all over my house say I’m a curious person. But I would also say my curiosity is geared to military history, psychology, business, philosophy, and everything personal development. This is my nature.
Mohnish Pabrai is an investor I admire and any new lecture he has…I’ll watch it then rewatch it. In his latest lecture at UCLA, his final part was focused on knowing one’s nature when investing. Investing is an art form and there are “many ways to skin the cat”….but that means one needs to know what their nature is and invest accordingly. A value investor might have a natural fit to be a commodities trader.
To be frank, I’ve been obsessed with my own self-examination for a long time. But I still find I’m only at the beginning of understanding my nature. This leads to all the various books and podcasts I use to continuously push the boundary further and here’s an exercise I think is worth sharing.
I learned about it from the Coaching For Leaders podcast episode with Scott Barlow from Happen to Your Career. The exercise is about imagining you are building a puzzle of what you should be doing with your life.
It goes like this:
Get a pen and paper. Bigger the better for paper.
Mark the corners of the paper
The corners are where you write your unique strengths. Not skills. Coding isn’t a strength. Nor is accounting or any other language. A strength is what is so obvious to you but not to others.
Fill out the outline with what’s important to you. Things like autonomy, remote environment, how much you need to make, lots of sun, independence, etc…
You’ve now built the frame for your puzzle.
The corners are what you are uniquely great at and the borders are the various values/conditions that are important to you
Fill in the middle with the ideas that come from what you’ve written down.
This is a start. Now you can explore these ideas further.
I spent a good part of my day doing this exercise and like everything worth doing, doing it with ample time and no distractions (phone on airplane mode and no-one bothering you at home) is imperative.
Some people’s nature dictates they may need to be the villain in someone’s universe. That’s also a required role for without villains there won’t be heroes. Everyone has a nature and it is our job to figure out what that is. Even if the truth hurts, we must accept it and move on