If you set a goal for yourself when you're young like,
"I wanna be a vice-president of a company by the time I'm 40,"
the problem with that is that that is not a specific skill.
That goal can change, it can be 10 different things depending on which company you're in
or which career path you choose. You're not gonna be able to sustain
motivation to achieve that over a long period of time.
You're choosing a goalpost that's gonna be moving as time goes on.
It's better leverage to focus on developing a skillset.
Obviously, this is a hugely common question, especially among young people.
And people who have a lot of different ambitions, a lot of different ideas,
is how do they decide the one thing that's worth investing their time and
energy in that moment. Well, I think there's
three considerations to take into account. And I'm gonna list them in order of
importance in my opinion. So, the first thing is,
is you need to look for things that light you up emotionally.
Think about what you want to do with your life rationally and there's a time and place for that,
but if the emotional component is not there, if you're not passionate or,
it's not even passion necessarily, but excited or intrigued,
or filled up by what you wanna pursue, then at some point, you're gonna burn out,
you're gonna lose interest. As soon as you stop
getting the benefit of that thing, you're gonna wonder what the hell you just
spent the last three or four years doing. And a good way to do this,
a good kind of litmus test for this is ask yourself which activities drain you,
which activities the more hours you do them, the more exhausted and burnt out you feel,
and which activities light you up, which activities do you forget to stop doing.
And the funny thing about finding passion or finding something that lights you up
is that they tend to be things that seem so natural to us
that we don't even realise that we do them. So, for me personally, when I was younger,
I used to spend hours on internet forums. I used to be that guy on the internet forum,
who would write a 12-page response, telling each person exactly why they were wrong
with links and research and backup to my points. And to me that was just fun, I never even
considered that most people don't do that. It seemed so natural and enjoyable to me.
It was like, "yeah, what? Not everybody does that?”
“Not everybody stays up until 3 in the morning writing 20-page long forum posts?"
It's no wonder, it took me years to realise, I was like, "oh shit, I love writing!"
But it's not like every time I sit down to write, I'm like, "oh my god, I love writing!"
It's more like I just don't even notice that I write.
I write all the time and I don't even notice it. I don't think about it.
It just spills out of me, very naturally. So counterintuitively, the first place to look
to find what emotionally lights you up is what are you doing naturally
without thinking about it? What feels comfortable to you
that doesn't feel comfortable to other people? And sometimes it's hard to see that yourself.
I think a good exercise is to ask a few people around you.
What do I do, or what do I seem to love that most people don't.
Cause other people are better at seeing it than you are.
Second component I think is the focus on skills, rather than occupations or experiences.
Skills are transferrable, they're something you can work on throughout your life.
If you set a goal for yourself when you're young like,
"I wanna be a vice-president of a company by the time I'm 40,"
the problem with that is that that is not a specific skill.
That goal can change, it can be 10 different things depending on which company you're in
or which career path you choose. You're not gonna be able to
sustain motivation to achieve that over a long period of time.
You're choosing a goalpost that's gonna be moving as time goes on.
It's better leverage to focus on developing a skillset.
So things like writing, programming, negotiation skills, social skills, networking skills,
learning a trade, these are all things that once you develop them,
they're always gonna be an asset, for the rest of your life.
And then on top of that, there's things that you can always continue to work on.
So the passion will never die. No matter how good I get at writing,
I can always be better. And so, that way I never lose
motivation or ambition. Pursuing a skill,
it kind of creates this evergreen ongoing pursuit that will never dry up or run out.
And in third is just the practical side of what to do, what to dedicate yourself to
and that is choose something that's gonna open up more opportunities down the road.
Let's say you're coming out of school, and you have a few different options
and one is going to lead you down a very narrow path
of a very certain type of career but another option can open up opportunities
in other industries or living in other places. It's best to err on the side of flexibility.
It's best to err on the side of skills and pursuits
that are closely linked with a number of other skills and pursuits.
So that it's not such a big jump to go from one to the other.
You see a lot of famous actors who started out as comedians
or they started out as musicians, you see a lot of
executives and successful entrepreneurs who started out as coders and programmers,
so there are some occupations or skills or practices that
very logically lead into other areas as well. And so, it's best to give yourself the most
long-term opportunity and flexibility by looking ahead before you start.