People like to be told what to do and how to do it

Myself included. And this will serve as a reminder to resist the urge to itch.

Being told what to do and how to do it is a persistent itch we should want to train ourselves to resist. This doesn't necessarily apply to all areas of life, but it applies to some important ones, such as careers and relationships. 

Being told what to do and how to do it is the path of least resistance, which is why we like to scratch the itch.

It's easy to be told what to do and how to do it. Making choices that disrupt the status quo is a path of resistance. It's human to take the path of least resistance.

Figuring out 1) what to do and 2) how to do it is very difficult. 

Figuring out what to do is the more difficult of the two. It takes introspection to learn about yourself and truly know yourself. It takes humility to internalize that self-learning and self-knowledge and understand where it's useful in the world and where it's not. It takes courage and grit to add skills and transform yourself to the person you desire to become. Yes, I think we can create our own destinies more than we let ourselves believe. This disbelief is a flaw of human nature.

The key ingredient to figuring out what to do, though, is time. Luck is also a key ingredient, but we have less control over that. It can take years, and maybe decades, to figure out what to do. I think most people don't like to wait years and decades for things we really want. Not liking the required patience and understanding it's the necessary but more painful path are two different things.

How to figure out what to do? I'm still figuring it out, but I feel I'm making progress. It's not easy. Paul Graham has offered the most useful guidance, at least for me, which is to follow your curiosity and your interest. He says, "If you're interested, you're not astray." Well, "much easier said than done" would be an appropriate response, and there are many variables in life outside of our control that can shrink our opportunity set, but I would think that exploring our curiosity and interest and creatively finding ways for these to grow in our lives will always be a useful force. There are unsurprising tools or questions we can ask ourselves to uncover our curiosity and interest, and that's a separate topic.

Pursuing our curiosity and interests is the core of figuring out what to do, but we should also take our dose of rationality. There's a balance of figuring out what to do against how useful that thing is to our society. Even though I really enjoy the game of golf, I'm not a golf talent and I'd be far from professionally competitive even if I dedicated my life to golf. The universe isn't waiting for my golf game, and I would be foolish to pursue it. On the other hand, consider the job I've had for my entire career thus far, investment banking. I've done the job very well (according to my peers and superiors), but I'm not obsessed with it enough to keep doing it 5 years, 10 years, 20 years from now. There are people who are obsessed with it, though, and they are going to be much more useful at it as a result. The world doesn't need another un-obsessed investment banker. It has plenty. So now what? Well, there are parts of the job I am obsessive over (learning about businesses and having conversations with management teams), and relevant skills that I have obtained (valuing businesses), that I can use to move tangentially into a field I think I can be obsessive about for the rest of my life (buying and owning businesses).

So what's the right advice? Follow your passion, or develop a skill or current opportunity into your passion? There are strong views on both sides of this debate. I think it's more nuanced than that, and I think it's a paradox. Why can't it be a little bit of both? Maybe we should hold that paradox in our hands and make use of both sides.

I think there's a flywheel that unlocks with two ingredients. The first is a certain threshold of interest and taste that are exceeded in a certain activity, and the second is a developed skill set relevant to that activity. It's a gradient, but I think there's a tipping point in both 1 and 2, when put together, starts the flywheel. Part of the journey in life is figuring out what games get the flywheel to start spinning for you.

So that's all about figuring out what to do. But what about being told how to do it? 

By "being told how to do it," I mean a job description and duties. If you're an employee at McDonald's (I actually once was), it's "here's how you assemble this sandwich," "here's how you cook this meat," "here's how you run the dishwasher," "here's how you take an order." You're trained how to do specific tasks, and that's what you do. There are obviously varying degrees of rigidity and creativity in the employed workforce, but the point is, you have a lane in one of tens of thousands of pools in the world to swim in rather than the Ocean to explore.

This is why most of us don't mind being employees (though many of us over time have feelings of resentment over a lack of freedom and fulfillment). It's easier to show up somewhere and be told what to do instead of self-direction. That requires thinking, some effort and risk, especially in games we are not that inherently interested in. It's more stable and reliable, particularly as it relates to a source of income, to show up and be told what to do. And when others are relying on us (family), it makes that stability and reliability harder to reject, for good reason.

But here again I think lies another paradox. Can't you have a little bit of both? You can be an employee in an organization, and also mold, over time and proven performance, a role that is more aligned to your curiosity and interests. A high-quality organization should want you to tell it what that is, and it should want to support you to getting there (if you aren't proving performance, you should move to an organization and role where you can perform the thing you're good at). The first step is figuring out what that is (above), and the second step is think about what you want and the third part is to start saying what you want. I'll repeat, think about and say what you want. 

How else can we start to tame that lingering itch of wanting to be told how to do something? One quite effective ointment I think must be experimentation with more of the things we really like to do, whether or not we are at first highly qualified or experienced at doing them.

Another ointment is making the commitment and having the discipline for the initial push of work in those experiments. We should strive to experience joy in experimentation. At the start of any new learning experience, you'll be enjoying the fastest rate of growth, because you'll be compounding your knowledge on the small base at which you must start. 

Earnest learning and curiosity may also attract friends, peers and mentors, all sources to accelerate learning and support. Mentors are extremely valuable teachers. Mentors don't need to actual person-to-person relationships, either...anyone you admire, if they've shared any thoughts in the public domain, can be your mentor. Cultures of organizations could also be a mentor.

We should want to get to a place where we're being only ourselves, meaning each one of us. We are all different; there's no other human being on Earth who is exactly like any one of us. So we should work to bring that out. As Naval says, "Be the only, not the best." 

Figuring out what to do and how to do things our own way, with our unique sense of self infused into that activity, is a way of life that is lived with quality and integrity. It takes courage.

"Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed." -- Terence McKenna

Let me know what I'm missing.

Book: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Jonathan Livingston Seagull (JLS) is a book about Compounding Integrity.

I would recommend this book 5/5 times for those who like thinking about curiosity as a guide, independent thinking and/or those who believe that waking up in the morning with excitement for day ahead is attainable.

Spoiler alert, a summary of the setup and of the fable and my takeaways are below. To me, reading a summary can be a lower integrity way to read a book as compared to actually reading the book yourself, because what's below is only my interpretation and summary of it. That said, maybe this is a helpful tool or bridge for you to invest less time upfront to understand if it's something you would like to read, which I encourage you to do. It's not a long book.

JLS is a seagull, but he is "no ordinary bird" because he loves to fly. He is not like the other birds because all the other birds live to find and eat food. They live a life embodied by the phrase, "a means to an end." They fly only to find food in the ocean and fly back to shore. They do not experience joy in flying itself; they do not love flying for the sake of flying.

It becomes clear early on that JLS has a hunger to learn. Because he feels great joy in flying, he likes to experiment with flight to learn new things about flying, and he does just that, typically without any fear of failure.

His growth in the art of flight wasn't just a straight line up-and-to-the right, however. After one particularly bad crash, negative self-talk enters JLS's mind. He realizes he is a normal seagull, "limited by my nature. If I were meant to learn so much about flying, I'd have charts for brains. If I were meant to fly at speed, I'd have a falcon's short wings..." He decides to rejoin the Flock.

He feels better to be part of the ordinary Flock. Life is easier. No challenge and no failure.

Then one night, flying relaxingly but mindlessly in the dark (gulls don't fly in the dark) he hears a warning voice telling him to stop flying in the dark. The voice says he is not meant to be flying in the dark, because he doesn't have things like a falcon's short wings. There, he has a revelation related to his last big failure: a falcon's short wings. "That's the answer! What a fool I've been! All I need is a tiny little wing, all I need is to fold most of my wings and fly on just the tips alone! Short wings!"

JLS then goes on to quickly learn to increase his flight speed, resulting in the Breakthrough, which is a seagull speed record. He thinks the Flock will be thrilled to hear about the Breakthrough, but instead JLS is met with scorn and a casting of guilt. Realizing the Flock "might as well have been stone," and facing rejection from the Flock, he goes his separate way. JLS "was not sorry for the price that he had paid" and "discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with these gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed."

Shortly thereafter, JLS makes his way to to his next world beyond Earth, where he will "level up" again.

I'll leave the summarizing there, which happens to be the summary of Part 1 of 4 Parts.

Takeaways, ideas, quotes and questions (TIQQ) from the rest of the book:

  • There's no reason to accept the ordinary just because it is simply observed as ordinary; you don't have to be part of the Flock just because that's what most gulls do and think they "should" do. The Flock kills freedom
  • Living with vitality and creativity and joy is attainable, and everything you need to know about getting there starts from within you
  • If you're doing what you love to do, you're not astray. "We can be free! We can learn to fly!"
  • Self-limiting beliefs, especially those with the message that you don't have the born-with tools to succeed at what you want to do, are unnecessary obstructions to freedom. Instead, study those who are best at doing what you want to learn, find another way, but keep trying and practicing
  • Learning happens through small experiments, and they can be fun and whimsical
  • If you have joy in an activity, you'll have an inner desire to constantly learn without fear of failure, and you'll care about the long-term direction you're going
  • There are different stages, or worlds, of learning. Each stage has a sense of "leveling up" where you're able to see more, feel more, than the earlier stages. "We choose our next world through what we learn in this one."
  • Regarding approaching the next level: "You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there." [bold added]
  • Is the author saying that Perfection is a feeling or state of being that is above consciousness? That it's out of body? Don't let your mind limit itself to the boundaries of your body?
  • All you need to know is already within you. "True nature lived...[is] everywhere at once across space and time." "To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived."
  • Kindness and love is the highest level of being and living? The "most powerful and fun" thing to do is to "...fly up and know the meaning of kindness and love." A sage (Chiang), before disappearing, "exhorting them to never stop their learning and their practicing and their striving to understand more of the perfect invisible principle of all life...'keep working on love.'" And the way JLS demonstrates his love is to teach other gulls who may also benefit from recognizing that a life of freedom is out there for the taking
    • What are other ways to "work on love" other than teaching? How else to give?
  • This is the essence of Integrity? "Each of us is in truth an idea of the Great Gull, an unlimited idea of freedom, and precision flying is a step toward expressing our real nature."
    • What is the Great Gull? Spirituality? Connected consciousness?
  • Pushing yourself to the limits of your current ability is where the growth happens
  • "The only true law is that which leads to freedom. There is no other." There are no laws of the Flock.
  • When the Flock talks about JLS, they say that if he is not the Son of the Great Gull Himself, then he is a thousand years ahead of his time. JLS says "...this kind of flying has always been here to be learned by anybody who wanted to discover it; that's got nothing to do with time." Freedom can be discovered by anyone; it is not other worldly.
  • We struggle to remove the limitations from ourselves, in our minds. "Why is it that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he'd just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?"
  • JLS as an instructor, talking to Fletcher Seagull: "You need to keep finding yourself, a little more each day, that real, unlimited Fletcher Seagull. He's your instructor. You need to understand him and practice him." Everything you need is within you
    • He's talking about Compounding Integrity?
  • Things in nature are cyclical, like the short-lived golden age of more recognition from the Flock that maybe there actually is something to flying and freedom, but then the ensuing fall as they became distracted by mimicking and worshiping the ways of JLS rather than practicing for themselves
    • They became fixated on little details about JLS and how he flew, leading to lots of talking and no flying. But this misses the point. The point is JLS showed them they could fly...that they should just start flying and discover flight for themselves
    • As I was reading, a parallel I couldn't help but think of is the infatuation with Warren Buffett by like-minded aspiring investors. What does he use as the discount rate? What is the appropriate price to pay in terms of discount to intrinsic value? What's the highest multiple he would pay for this or that? What gross margin is acceptable for this?
    • Admiration can be a self-limiting distraction
  • How did the cycle turn again, back to more flying? Curiosity. "Because they were curious, they began experimenting with flight, though they never used that word. It's not flight...it's just a way of finding what's true."
  • Not believing until seeing is another self-limiting belief that prevents practice and simply starting on the path to flying (freedom). Anthony Seagull couldn't believe the Breakthrough, he thought it was a fairy tale. It defied logic. Flying (freedom) like that isn't possible
    • In a subsequent suicide attempt (?), he nosedives from two thousand feet, only to find a comrade in high-speed flight leading to amazement there was actually another seagull flying at that speed
      • Anthony Seagull "was awake and alive for the first time in his life, inspired."


Let me know what I'm missing.