#32 - Learning from Diamandis’ Laws, Maria Popova on Finding Purpose and Paul Graham on Doing What You Love
June 18, 2020: A curiosity-driven adventure took me down the rabbit hole of learning about Peter Diamandis’ 29 Laws and Maria Popova’s essay on Finding Purpose through 7 fascinating people. This started my annual pilgrimage to Paul Graham’s essays digging into various models for Doing What You Love.
Listen on:
Episode Notes:
Peter Diamandis’ 29 Laws.
The Co-founder of X-Prize, Singularity University, all kinds of Space-related research to get people off of Earth.. who studied aeronautics and astrophysics at MIT and got a MD at Harvard.
#2 When given a choice, take both
#3 Multiple projects lead to multiple successes
#5 Do it by the book, but be the author
#6 When forced to compromise, ask for more
#16 The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live
#17 The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself
#20 If you think it is impossible, then it is… for you
#22 The day before something is a breakthrough it’s a crazy idea
#23 If it were easy it would have been done already
#24 Without a target you’ll miss it every time.
Learnings from: How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love by Maria Popova:
An overall message from the 7 excerpts is on the adventure of seeking, searching and exploring for what you love doing. Not settling early.
The Holstee Manifesto:
“Ask the next person you see what their passion is, and share your inspiring dream with them.”
“If you don’t have enough time, stop watching TV."
How to Do What You Love by Paul Graham
The case for selfish parents => unselfish parents sacrifice doing what they love for the instant win of (apparent) stability. They thus give the impression that work sucks, university will be the best years of your life, your supposed to dislike what you do for a living and you have to suck it up for your family. But, if parents had been selfish, maybe the kids would grow up seeing someone who does what they love. Maybe those kids wouldn’t exist yet and that wouldn’t be a bad thing either. In the absence of good parental role models….. it’s not a bad scenario to be childless.
"How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia.” => know the upper and lower bounds. Lower could be determined with figuring out dislikes. But upper is what you want to continuously test.
"Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second…...The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month."
"As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it."
The lower bound limit gives wind to things you constantly procrastinate over. It’s the dichotomy of resistance and things you actually dislike. I wonder what the balance is?
"the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it—finding work you love does usually require discipline” -> this will take a long time. And you will ping pong everywhere.
"Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche."
""Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.” -> kind of the pejorative of OMD Daily.
"Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.” -> Being flexible but at the same time, not lowering my standards.
"Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically there."