The biggest challenge is that there's just so much noise.
It's like have you ever had someone in your home,
maybe it's your wife or maybe it's a friend or whatever
just play a really bad song too often.
You just play a song and just think, “ugh turn that off”
and after a while, it's been on for so long that you become immune to it.
Like it's just there and it's still on.
It's there in the back of your mind and you didn't manage to turn it off.
So the noise that I describe in life, whether it's your parents' expectations,
whether it's society's expectations,
whether it's your partner's expectations,
all of those are like noise in the background.
And that noise drains out your ability to understand
the mind and the intelligence.
That's one of the biggest trip-ups.
I was looking at, I gave a presentation called, “Build A Life, Not A Resume,”
it's also one of my popular videos.
But the research that I was doing was around the most common resume lies.
The truth is over 40-50% of us lie on our resumes.
And I started to dig deeper and I was looking at,
a lot of people lie about their dates of employment and instead of three
days, it's now three months, whatever it may be.
Now, I dug deeper and I wanted to meet some of these people and speak to people.
And so, I spoke to people who lie on their resumes
and we know that at least 40-50% tell us they do.
One other thing is no one was proud of that.
No one was like, “yay, I know I'm gonna get…”
really what it came down to is we're really insecure about our own abilities.
Really what it came down to is we're not confident about what we have to offer,
what it came down to is a lack of self-awareness, what it came down to is a lack of understanding
what am I good at, what am I passionate about,
what am I bringing to the table, that's what people are really worried about.
They were worried about the job, but when you dug beneath the surface,
the real behavioural trait that was coming out was insecurity
and being unconfident about one's potential.
That tells us a lot.
That indicates a lot about human behaviour and human nature
that the noise from outside makes us want to fit into a container.
And that stops us from differentiating between what is my mind saying and what is my intelligence
saying and what happens is that noise becomes your
voice.
So that noise becomes what you think is what you're saying.
System one is your initial response to anything that happens.
It's a stop that I can't really say, so if you say something that I don't like,
my system one naturally would be a face that I pull and I'm like,
“I don't agree with that.”
That's an understanding of what system one is.
It's your initial default
reaction in the moment.
That can be positive often.
For example, if someone pulled out a knife, you'd feel scared and you'd run.
That's system one, that's a good thing, it's safe for you.
But also system one is someone says something that hurts your ego
and you start defending yourself immediately.
That's a negative of system one.
That we would refer to as the mind, it's built up of
conditioning, those responses are conditioned, those default elements are there because of
habit and continuous practice.
The system two is more like the intelligence,
what I would say is more like the parent.
If you consider system one to be more like a child,
system two is more like a parent.
It looks more at the long term, it looks more at the bigger picture.
It processes that default reaction through a set of checking and metrics
to decide whether that's true.
The child is the one that wants everything right away
inpatient, quickly responding, straight away reacting when he doesn't get what he wants.
The intelligent parent, a good one, knows what the child wants and
needs and what's better for him in the long term.
Just starting there and being able to reflect and observe the different voices inside of
us, is a great place to start your self-awareness.
Because the biggest challenge is that most of us don't know what we're listening to.
And most of us don't know that there are more than one voice
inside of us.
Just getting over that line is a huge win.
Because now, at least you're trying to differentiate between what you're hearing.
And that's gonna help you make better decisions in the future.
So how do I find my passion?
My simple model which is the dharma model,
dharma means eternal duty in the Vedic tradition, it's very similar to what Ikigai is being
spoken about today, which is a Japanese version of “reason for
being.”
Why do we live?
Where is meaning coming from?
And it talks about an intersect of four areas.
What am I good at?
What do I love?
What does the world need?
And how do I get paid for it?
To me, those four help you unlock your passion.
When you find the intersect across all of those four,
you're making your passion your purpose.
You'll unlock your passion, you'll find your purpose.
This is path one, there's two paths.
Path one, I find my skillset
and I engage it to help other people and become better at it.
So I'm becoming better at what I'm good at and I'm using it to help other people.
Because I'm aware of I'm quite good at and I know what knowledge I have,
what skills I have, I have some self-awareness.
The other path, that people often miss is actually
I just start serving people, I just start helping people and I start to
notice what I enjoy about that and what I'm good at helping people with.
So that's Gandhi's path.
Gandhi said that you find yourself when you lose yourself in the service of others.
So, for me those are the two paths of how do I find my passion
and finding the intersect between those four areas.