Finding your passion 🆚 opportunities and playing the right games
Hey there,
For a very long time (the last 3 years), I’ve always had the same burning question in the back of my mind: what’s my passion, what’s my calling, what do I want to stand for. Environment? Technology? Health? I know you’re asking yourself the same question. After all, we are at a stage of our life where we are constently asked what we want to do next… How am I even supposed to know!
So we envy the dude that started coding at 12 and is now a prodigy, or the weird nerd who started building robots in his room when he was 10 years old. Why did I waste my time playing stupid games online at that age instead of learning how to code or design? Why don’t I have a passion, a hobby I could practice for hours without noticing?
Well, you won’t find it 🙅🏻♂️. It’s not by sitting in front of your laptop watching Ted talks and interviews of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos that you’re going to find the voice from above telling you what you are meant to do.
But we have something better than passion: time, the internet and the lack of responsibilities.
What do I mean by that? As young people in their twenties, we can do whatever we want - even stupid things, because hey, we're students, no one can blaim us for doing stupid shit - so we can take a lot of risks, pursue every opportunities instead of looking for purpose.
What would you rather do:
Pursue 10 different opportunities - as silly as they can seem (selling dog ramps) - during your twenties and end up selling a successful business north of a million dollars before you’re thirty, and then start looking for purpose with all the resources you now have - money, network, knowledge, time - to tackle a world-scale challenges like health, environment, poverty, etc
Spend your twenties thinking about what you want to pursue in life and just ending up in the rat race of life: get the most generic education (applied maths), graduate, join a big company (IBM, Google, EDF, SNCF, …) and never take any risk because now it's too late.
🤔 What I’m thinking about?
As I said above, we are just reckless students playing around. School is a game, internships are games, the whole graduate, find a job, get promoted thing is a game. What I started to realize is that there are two very different games you can play.
The first on is ruled by society - study after class, get good grades, get a decent job, buy a house, … - and is usually boring and doesn’t benefit anyone:
you don't learn much at school (nowhere near what you can potentially learn online),
as a student, you don't get paid (for most, you actually get in serious debt),
the school is not getting much from this effort neither,
the companies are hiring incompetent students that they now need to train (my math teacher told me graduate students are useless for the first 3 to 6 months of their first hire).
The second one is much more fun and lucrative:
how can you produce the required output (good grades) without the asked input (no, I'm not talking about cheating... am I? just kidding... am I?)
how can you get awesome internships without following the usual path, i.e go to office hours to create the same resume as everyone else, join Linkedin, send cold emails, apply on job boards, etc. Instead, you could maybe reach out to Lex Fridman and offer him to translate his podcast transcripts in chinese for free, and 2 years later ask for an internship or referrals.
Be aware of the games you play everyday and make sure that the rules are actually benefiting you. If not, you’d be surprised how easy it is to just set your own rules.
🔗 My favorite links this week
🎙 MyFirstMillion with Noah Kagan - I’ve been binge watching the archive for the past two weeks but this one really resonated, especially regarding today’s topic of passion vs opportunities.
🧵 Great Tweet on building an audience by Steph Smith of The Hustle - the secret is: show up consistently over several years. Not quality, consistency. Easy right, but are you willing to do it?
🧵 Scary thread on AI research and ethics along with this YouTube video going into more details. I think engineers and scientist are actually quite dumb when it comes to common sense… A few years ago, I saw the story of a young engineer working at a pharmaceutical company that was essentially selling poison to teenage girls. He was well aware of that, but he’d always been taught to have good grades, get a good job, perform well to get promoted, etc (remember, the games 👆). Until one day, when his own sister took the pill…
📹 Daniel Bourke is building a nutrition AI startup on YouTube - see what it takes to collect, clean and structure data, design models and infrastructures, build interfaces and more.