What holds your attention tells you something important about yourself
My boyfriend loves to talk about ideas. He loves to discuss the future: electric vehicles, technology, blockchain and all the other juicy high level forces that will shape how we interact with the world in a decade or so.
Interesting stuff, for sure. For many people.
But I’ve come to realize that it is just not my set of interests.
I used to fight this.
I used to think: why can’t I love the future and technology as much as him? Surely, there are plenty of job opportunities and high potential paths in this sphere, but I couldn’t ignore the simple truth: it’s not for me.
This realization came to me in a flash one day. We were on a walk and he was exploding with ideas and enthusiasm about this book he was reading that took place in a future ruled by all these hard-to-fathom-but-entirely-possible-technologies. I watched the way his entire being lit up with excitement, curiosity, and a zest for life that one cannot fake – that kind of raw excitement that is either there, or it isn’t.
It was there for him, it wasn’t there for me.
His radical enthusiasm highlighted the deep contrast between his emotional response and mine.
Simply put: what he was talking about didn’t stir up anything unique deep inside me. I could acknowledge that it was intellectually interesting, but when it came to an emotional response - the hunger for more that he was dripping with - it just wasn’t there for me.
And that’s perfectly OK.
The beautiful thing about realizing what you are not interested in is that you create the space to discover what you are interested in.
This step is surprisingly difficult and revolutionary. Because when you set aside what you wish you liked to do (i.e. “I wish I liked coding”) and start to instead search for what you actually like to do, you really start to get to know yourself.
And truthfully, you might not love what you find. It might be inconvenient to possess the interests that you do; they might not be highly lucrative (in obvious ways) or societally praised/accepted. This might create a sense of resistance for you to accept that these are indeed your interests.
But once you accept your authentic and unique set of interests - the things you are naturally curious about - you can use this knowledge to inform your actions and trend towards a more meaningful and fulfilling life. And if applied properly, you can even build a career around these interests.
The importance of genuine interest
There is no one more effective than someone genuinely interested in the task at hand. Think about how driven, powerful, and focused you are when you actually like the thing you are doing; when you’re in flow. Now consider when you’re doing something because you have to, because you’re trading your time for something (a grade, money, etc.). The difference is astounding. And thus, to be truly great at something - to be the best at it - a sincere interest in what you are doing is a necessary prerequisite (Note: intense, unrelenting grit sometimes works too, but this method often leads to burnout).
That being said, exploring your interests might not mean making a radical change like switching careers or moving across the world right away. You can merely begin enriching your life in small ways with things that interest and excite you, that you want to discuss with others and keep learning about about.
These intangible feelings are all indicators of where your mental energy wants to flow.
The process of bringing your interests into your every day life starts with getting to know yourself.
The importance of getting to know yourself
We are all different. That is why book stores are filled from floor to ceiling with thousands of books from hundreds of genres. We’re not meant to be the same. We’re not meant to all like the same thing or want to go down the same path.
Quite the contrary: we are all sincerely, radically unique.
Unearthing and expressing our uniqueness is one of the most challenging, intimidating, and meaningful journeys we can embark on.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
It might not be obvious how to find what you are uniquely interested in/curious about. This isn’t by accident. Our whole lives, society has been persuasive and effective at telling us what we should and shouldn’t do or like. This started as early as we could read, write, and most importantly, take tests. From a young age, we were told what our interests were and where they should map us to.
You get good grades in science? Great, be a doctor. You’re good at math? You should really look at finance. You’re good at both? Engineering is for you.
If you display early signs of ‘potential’ in some highly sought after domain, many forces in our lives (teachers, the education system, parents, mentors) usher us towards the most ‘successful’ or prestigious paths that we can grasp onto.
More often than not, no one really pauses to ask you what it is that you are interested in. Your grades in school are viewed as the indicator for your interests. You’re doing well in science and poorly in english? You couldn’t possibly like writing or public speaking. You say you want to keep studying french, but you’re not doing great in it at school? Maybe you should reconsider.
Early on, the primary (and arguably, only) indicator to the outside world of what we were ‘interested in’ was our academic performance. As a result, the world around us overvalues this metric and undervalues what it is that we naturally gravitate to, ask questions about, and are pulled towards independent of a system measuring our performance.
The downstream effects of this are that we, ourselves, confuse our natural inclinations with what we perform well in. This is how so many highly capable, bright young people end up in prestigious jobs, making lots of money, yet are deeply unsatisfied by the work they do, confused as to how they ended up in a line of work so far from what they’re interested in.
Alas, this is the rhythm of career selection we are funnelled into at a young age, where some poorly measured byte of our performance from ages 12-16 indicates what we should be doing for the remaining decades of our lives after we leave the education system.
The point of this tangent being: we are never really told to explore our interests as young adults.
But that’s what this newsletter is for! To expand and explore our minds in ways that our every day lives don’t push us towards.
So, here is a quick exercise for you, dear reader, to rectify this gap.
Pull out a journal or a digital note taking app. Don’t think too hard about this, just focus on what first comes to mind.
Think back to high school. Answer the following questions (one word answers are fine):
- What subjects did you like?
- What subjects didn’t you like?
Exercise #1: Exploring your interests by examining the subjects you did/didn’t like.
Did the two buckets that come to mind closely resemble the subjects you did well in, vs. the ones you didn’t do as well in?
For many, this will be the case. This is how warped our perception of interests is. As kids, we equate performance with interest. It’s what we’re trained to do, so we tend towards paths we appear to have an aptitude for, independent of whether we have are interested in these subjects. (Note: aptitude can be an indicator for interest, but this is not always the case. It can also be an indicator of work ethic, industriousness, and a number of other qualities).
Now try thinking a bit deeper about the following questions. Your answers can include school-related activities, extracurriculars, hobbies you did as a kid, etc.
- What classes or activities did you feel excited to go to?
- What was something you created/worked on when you were younger that you were/are proud of?
- Which activities sparked joy for you?
- What could you talk about all day long or be happy doing all day long?
- What felt easy for you that others found challenging?
Exercise #2: Exploring your interests by examining what you enjoyed during childhood.
These answers might start to reveal more nuance when it comes to our natural inclinations.
For example, I remember genuinely loving art class and finding it less challenging than others did, but it didn’t initially come to mind when I first thought of subjects I liked. Almost automatically, as if someone else was making the decision for me, I felt the words science and math pop up as my ‘favourite’ subjects. But the truth is, I didn’t “love” these subjects, I was simply good at getting good grades in them. And to the outside world, good grades = your interests, as a kid. This is a broken system that misses so much juicy nuance begging to be expressed when we are younger.
Recapturing our youthful wisdom
Much of our map for life lies in what we knew intrinsically as kids.
For example, my boyfriend whom I mentioned earlier convinced his teachers to let him redo a coding course in middle school even though he did exceedingly well in it the first time, just because he enjoyed it so much that he wanted to do it again. Now, here he is, more than a decade later, returning to his roots, exploring complex technology and its applications.
In looking through old documents on my middle school computer, I found a speech I wrote in English class titled, You are Responsible for What You Become. I remember picking this essay topic out of a host of topics that covered a wide range of subjects that had nothing to do with self-improvement, personal responsibility, or anything of the sort. And of course, this is the one I picked – a topic highly related to the types of books I’d read throughout young adulthood and the articles I’d eventually write. After re-reading the speech recently, I was shocked at how the words I had written at age 13 echoed through the writing I now do in my free time at age 23.
So, look at that. Both of us could have saved ourselves a hell of a lot of soul searching if we had just consulted the youthful wisdom we possessed before we had graduated from middle school!
Embrace your inner child
So many answers we look for in adulthood can be found in examining our youthful selves; in releasing our inner child.
When we are kids, our ego is quiet. Society hasn’t gotten its grip on our trajectory yet. Our identity isn’t yet tied to what we do, how successful we are, or what people think of us.
We just are.
We are pure, untarnished by external forces. Our natural self is intact. As a result, we tend to have more self insight in our youth than than we do as mature adults, after we are molded and hardened by society and its expectations, opinions, and conventional wisdom as to what our lives should look like.
As adults, we have to put in work to separate our opinions from the ones that have been braided into the fibers of our psyche through years of influence from our environment.
So this week’s homework ;), is to take yourself back to your childhood and think about what it is that you were drawn to naturally. Not because someone told you you were good at it, or because you got good grades in it, or because people told you it would be good for your future to do it, but because you actually enjoyed it, were excited by it, and found yourself feeling fulfilled and happy when engaging with it.
Return to your inner child and search for what it is that lit you up in that era of your life.
Envision yourself as a child in flow state. What comes to mind?
Then, try doing those activities today. This week.
Start simple. Start drawing, or practicing a language, or playing with a science lab simulation online, or reading poetry, or acting, or taking photos, or doing whatever it was that you liked doing when it was still you behind the wheel – before you were old enough to drive a real car, and were still young enough to steer your life where you wanted it to go, fuelled by unadulterated youthful curiosity. Go back there. Explore.
Final thoughts
Your inner child is always with you, inside you somewhere. Get to know him/her a little better this week, give them the opportunity to play and explore your raw interests.
Observe how you feel and what it’s like to really be in touch with that part of yourself, doing something you genuinely enjoy doing.
My guess is that it will light up a part of you that you thought you might have lost or forgot was there.
Never doubt the wisdom of a child, especially yourself as a child. We don’t realize how much we know about ourselves at that age. Oftentimes, it takes almost an entire lifetime to rediscover the wisdom and self knowledge we possessed as children.
“Genius is nothing more than childhood recaptured at will.“ — Charles Baudelaire, French poet 1821 - 1867
This week, embrace your inner child and re-discover your true interests.