Focus on what enlivens you

Using your likes and dislikes to guide you

There is an innate force within us which demands to be unleashed on a problem in the world. It’s source doesn’t follow the same rules as other energy sources and often keeps powering you after you would have given up on any other source. I don’t have a lot of data or evidence to back this up, but it is something I frankly don’t think would benefit from any kind of quantitative analysis. If you are a bit skeptical of discussions of “energies” and “forces” in this vein, I can’t blame you. However, please put the following hypothesis somewhere in your mental filing cabinet for later verification. When a child sees purpose in a task, they channel energy unreasonable for their age. Have you ever seen a child who has been given the task to dig a hole for a project their family is working on? I’m not talking about a hole just for the sake play or at the beach, instead one required to build a garden or plant a tree. If they are given appropriate tools and the task is physically achievable (in the sense that the dirt is soft enough to be moved by a child) watch the intensity and joy they bring to fulfilling their mission. It’s hard work, but some part of the relishes being able to work on something that matters. To be sure, they cannot go forever and will likely needs lots of help from adults to finish their project. However, once done, notice the pride with which they point to their work and say, “I made this!”

Crystalline tree from Modus Interactive

That’s not to say that something is deficient in you if you don’t find great joy in digging holes. One reason the child feels so proud is that the hole was important to the overall project. It may be the case that you yourself are not interested in projects that involve digging. It’s okay to find building gardens or planting trees not that interesting or meaningful to you. Indeed as adults, it can be hard to find instances of this kind of task which is laborious and yet energizing. One source of these feelings may come from tragic events, such as a natural disaster in your town or when a relative dies and you need to be responsible for part of the planning to death rites. In these cases, for many people, the energy flows effortlessly. It might indeed be incredibly hard to help repair your town or face the emotional burden of planning for life after the passing of someone dear, but in the context of the thing you are spurred to action. You don’t worry about every single tiny detail because you sense that they truly don’t matter (or you simply don’t have the energy to deal with them).

But we can’t rely on disasters to show us the way for obvious reasons. We need a way to probe into knowing what actions will enliven us without having to experience tragedy. Think about the last thing you did which felt extremely hard. Maybe you ran a marathon. Or maybe you did a really long hike? Perhaps, you hosted a birthday party for a gaggle of five years to celebrate your child’s birthday? Afterwards how did you feel? Tired for sure, but were there other emotions too? When I ask myself these questions, I’m fishing for a specific situation. One where I felt both completely exhausted and yet also energized about life at the same time. These are some of my favorite experiences and I believe they offer great insight into what we should fill our days doing. But sometimes just asking them and answering outright doesn’t produce an improved understanding of our situation. For me at least, I have to reach of other (sometimes silly and contrived) questions or stories to jostle my understanding of self to a state where I can better understanding. And with this improved understanding, I (also you too I hope) can begin to notice if what we will our time with gives us more energy in the long run or less.

Money, jobs and energy

A stranger approaches you on the street and gives you two choices. The first choice, continue your current job with a small raise you’ll be happy with. The second choice, agree to start a new job making 2 million dollars a year. The catch is this, you will not be given the details of the work entailed by option two and you must commit to it for 2 years. Which will you chose?

For many the immediate reaction to such contrived ultimatums is to launch into the contingencies of each of the choices. It really does depend on what the second option entails. For most people there is a huge category of things which they may not like to do but which they may do for a year to make that kind of money. On the other hand everyone has a long list of jobs or actions they absolutely would not do no matter the monetary compensation. I think it is the correct reaction to reject such hypothetical situations as too silly to take seriously. One can’t really know from the premise what one should chose. It’s a pure gamble! Although the expected value of monetary compensation can be computed, that pales in comparison to the factors that really matter. Although the premise is highly artificial, certainly no stranger (except maybe Mr. Beast) would approach you with such a proposition, we each face choices about what we are willing to subject ourselves to everyday. Reflecting on this can give you valuable intuition about what kinds of things you’d like to do and can help guide you toward a career path you’ll be happy with and would gladly chose if offered by some weirdly magical stranger.

I readily admit that it is necessary to consider money when making a choice about your career. But just like the previous example highlights, money is not everything. Ignoring money completely would be a stumbling block in pursuing your version of the good life. There are people who can rely on others to provide their basic needs (assuming also that they accept being reliant on others as a life path). For others, they must find their own way to obtain the basics of life and occasionally sometimes fulfill other desires beyond survival. The problem with pursuing money for money’s sake (especially if you plan to be employed by someone else and not be your own boss) is that you will be spending a great deal of time and maybe more importantly mental energy on your chosen career. The accumulated toll of having your waking hours, and hence significant portions of your energy, spent on something you don’t highly value is what can lead to terrible mental health situations. However, unlike artificial ultimatums, we usually have access to a wide spectrum and are not forced to pick between extremes. One doesn’t have to seek a job that fulfills a mythical ideal of “This is what I was put on Earth to do,” or be relegated to a job of misery. Instead we can find something that satisfies our needs and increases the energy we have to live with. Finding such a situation, as I’m sure many will attest to, is hard. I claim that it is not impossible! But, how to find such a situation? A great place to start is to list what you like doing (and try not to overthink it).

I think it is fair to say that most people would consider liking what you do to some extent as a core component of most meaningful measures of quality of life. A life filled with meaningless or tedium all the time would rank low in many scoring systems. On the other hand, you would likely assign a higher score to a situation where a person gets the chance to engage in things they find fun, meaningful, and energy giving rather than energy taking. This is one reason why finding a course that involves lots of activities you like and minimizes the ones you don’t like (since we can’t fully eliminate what we don’t like) is a way to find the good life. This provides at least a starting point to find what job will make us feel energized rather than drained. And we have to be willing to try some things that might fail why we do. While it’s a great starting point to use what we like as a way to find tasks that energize us, there are pitfalls to watch out for.

It’s important to point out that there are a category of things which are fun to you, but which no matter how much money someone pays you to do it, you’ll never feel good doing that thing for money. Everyone is different in this regard. Imagine you like video games (maybe you don’t even have to imagine!). You enjoy video games maybe more hours in a day than you feel you should. I think most people like this have faced the thought as some point, “Why don’t I try to figure out how to play video games professionally.” What’s more there are really existing jobs that involve playing video games all day. One such job is video game quality tester. In this position you provide value to the game developer by playing their game and taking detailed notes about they game. Such testers are also valued for their ability to identify bugs and know exactly what circumstances led to that bug. But already in the telling of the value of the job, we see a difference in the why the video games are played and more over we also see how playing games for this job is performed in a much different way than you might in a casual manner. Whereas casually you may enjoy open-world games because they allow you to deeply explore the different areas that you want to see and you can pick your classes as you like. But in a tester position you need a more “completionist” outlook. You’ll need to play the game completely and leave no stone unturned and no class untried. Maybe this would excite you or maybe not. But when you start to get paid to do something you often also change the way in which you engage with the activity. So be mindful of that.

Adapt as your focus changes

Another avenue in which using your natural inclination can lead you astray is when you don’t take into account how you change over time. I’m glad that the trend of advice to youths in our culture is moving toward embracing ambiguities (though as far as I can tell the mainstream remains as a force toward making concrete decisions about one’s future). Pressuring a teenager to pick a life path is in some ways absurd. I think arguments that are skeptical of a 16 year old’s ability to choose a career are well trodden. On the other hand, I fear this has led to a situation where people are not encouraged to try something to see how it feels (I’m not talking here about trying things obviously detrimental. Rather things like starting a library of punk rock albums). On a cellular level we are all the ship of Theseus. After a certain amount of time every cell in our body is replaced with new ones. The atoms and molecules which make up our body are swapped out for different ones as times passes. Then we must ask, are we still ourselves after all this change? There are lots of fruitful probes into this philosophical paradox, but we don’t even need to solve it to get benefit. Just like our physical bodies change and remain non-static, so too does our mental and spiritual selves. How we carry out our goal seeking is not static. And yet, we often feel completely devastated to not achieve a goal even when that goal becomes less interesting over time.

For example, I once planned to dedicate a month to learning how to be good at speed running a game (this is where you try to finish a video game as fast as possible. It is an interesting competitive sport to me). I had been consuming some content that made the experience seem interesting. I certainly felt like I would also enjoy it and thought, “Hey, this could be a fun way to spend evenings and I like how it has an easily measurable goal (time to complete the game).” But it turns out after a week or so it wasn’t that interesting to me. Even though this goal didn’t have grand meaning in my life, after all it was just something I thought would be fun to do and a way to relax after work, I still felt bad that I didn’t achieve my goal. However, why should I feel bad? I had an idea about something that would be fun, I tried it and it didn’t resonate. So what! Now to move on to other things and be happy for the knowledge that I’m not so interested after all! Ultimately, there is nothing that can prepare us to make difficult choices about what to spend time on. The best we can hope for is that we get slightly better over time given our experiences. With this in mind, I think choosing whether to go down one career path or another is not a science but an art and one must probe how one feels about the situation and use heuristics rather than pure statistics and data. While this experience took place over a short time frame, I think a similar reaction should hold for something over a longer time frame. Just because you’ve spent every weekend doing oil painting for 7 years doesn’t mean you have to continue to engage with it if you no longer find it enlivening.

But letting go of goals is hard. There is a strand of thinking that is popular now about goal setting which espouses that you should be extreme in how you approach goals. These trends usually compel you to say things like “no one will out work me.” Sometimes this kind of thing is referred to as “rise and grind” mentality. In my somewhat casual and silly example of learning to speed run a video game, what should I do? Should I approach it like a rise and grind type or be gentle to myself. In this case it is easy to see that I should be gentle. Video games don’t matter so much as to disturb my peace. Since this situation is not about my survival it is easy to see this logic play out. The situation becomes much harder when our jobs and careers are on the line. Choices about jobs and careers feel like they are on a completely different level than deciding to stop speeding running video games. Even so, be gentle with yourself about these choices that really do matter. Navigating your changing interests as they relate to your work over time is tricky. Do not assume that just because you like doing an activity now, you will also like doing this activity while being paid for it. Try new things and periodically check-in with yourself about how your current state is affecting your energy for living.

Try different modes of working to get unstuck

When you have to give yourself a pep talk to start your work day, it’s a good sign that you are engaging in many energy draining tasks. For most people, we must engage with undesirable tasks from time to time. We can not expect to have every moment of every day filled with only desirable things. At some point, we are all compelled to engage with things we don’t like. Despite this taking notice of what makes us feel good is productive, especially if those things are related to work and not just pleasure. It’s probably more helpful for you to know that you feel really at peace and calm when the bathroom has been thoroughly cleaned than to know that you really like to eat an ice cream sandwiches (an argument can be made I’ve got this the wrong way). For many I’ve talked to, cleaning toilets is not necessarily fun or enjoyable, but once they begin to clean a part of themselves takes over. They blink and then all of a sudden the bathrooms in the house are clean! You put it off for too long and all it took was one spark of a thought to finally have this task complete. There are many tasks like this. They hang over us and it get harder and harder to start. However, once you find a spark, the deed is almost as good done. This is one example of how sometimes getting the ball rolling is all we need to get energized.

We should try arrange days to have significant chunks of activities that energize us rather than drain us. As I said before, I don’t think for most people it’s possible to configure life so that you never have a period of time where you’re working on something that’s not fun. But I do believe that it is possible for almost everyone to have at least some chunk of their day filled with something enlivening that restores energy than than drain it. But if we don’t know ourselves well enough even deciding how to experiment with tasks to see what you like can feel like a daunting challenge. To this end we’ll discuss some concrete possibilities to try things out to improve your self understanding.

Proposition: Write four concrete tasks that provide value in your given domain (education, finance, service industry, etc.). Now think of two completely different ways to get each of those tasks done. Set aside time to try out each of these different ways. Then take note. Which way left you feeling more energetic?

For example, consider a teacher. Naturally they have multiple facets in their job. They have administrative tasks that involves paperwork and communicating with students, other teachers, and school leaders. bout what standards are going to hit and things like that. Then there are the student facing tasks, the actual instructing. And before they can do instructing they must plan. Afterward, there is likely feedback about the instruction and performance to consider. We’ve already mentioned four board categories of tasks there’s like four categories for teacher.

Now let’s examine different ways that the instruction task could be performed. One way is to deliver a classic lecture. Stand up at the front. Talk for 45 minutes. Answer the occasional student question. The goal is to informing your students in an engaging way. Put in interesting references that students might be surprised by. Offer either key insights or key facts about the topic. A completely different way to organize your instruction time would be to prioritize individualized instruction. In this case you might first give a short lecture. Ten minutes at most. Afterward, pass out a problem set or list of questions which students work through while in the class room. After the lecture part walk around the class answering questions to small groups of students.

These are two different ways approaches to achieving the goal of instructing students about a topic. We might have preconceived notions about which way will leave us more generic but if you have the power consider actually auditioning different modes of doing the same task. Sometimes you have to try stuff out to know how it affects your energy. If neither way feels good, that’s still progress. Come up with other ways to do the tasks you are required to do. Through auditioning different ways to execute your key tasks, you’ll likely end up with more insights into yourself. This is more fuel to power your ship to a place that you want to be.

Be pragmatic (or not)

It’ll quite a bit easier for somebody who really loves a certain kind of work to do more of that work and improve at that work. They will not experience as much friction as others who are lukewarm about doing the work. Think about it from a systems point of view. A person with natural affinity for something will naturally probe deeper into the domain than less enthused others. It’s not a matter of work ethic. Learning to perform better is about advancing down a branching path of questions. All the questions needed to progress will arise more naturally in the one who is more interested. That’s how I think about it at least. This is the pragmatic reason reason why we should how doing things makes us feel energetically. But how are we supposed to react when we notice our current situation is not lifting us up and is instead pushing us down?

There is a strategic game to be played about once you recognize something is not energetic. Some folks have dependents who rely on them. They may not have flexibility to drop work if it means endangering the survival of their loved ones. Others may realize that the time is ripe to drop everything and forge a new way. Identifying what energizes you is a great first step. Sometimes you can take immediate grand action. But often the pragmatic choice is to try small things out in a way that doesn’t require life altering changes. One reason to avoid giant changes all at once is because it is truly difficult to know yourself well. Anytime one has what feels like a deep insight, I think it is important to take it with a slight grain of salt. Sudden thoughts may not lead us where we want to go. On the other hand, if we always ignore nagging feelings and write them off as not worthy, undesirable situations can build up for years. Sometimes the right choice really is to just to just go for it and break a bunch of bridges.

This line of reasoning does have some dangerous element to it. They lead to important life decisions. Just because a blog like this one told you that it might be okay to do something, I urge you to not do it until you check in with the people in your life that are really important to you. Before doing anything life altering make sure to talk to someone whose opinion you value (and choose someone who cares about your well being). But tell them you are committed to trying things out and if they don’t agree with your decision ask them to give you their advice (you can take it or leave it after all).