How To Figure Out What To Do

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The solution to “I don’t know what I want to do” is NOT “I guess I just won’t do anything because I don’t know what to do.”

You gotta come at the problem with a builder mentality, continually iterating. It’s not some riddle that you can stare at until an epiphany comes to you.

Even if you have literally zero self-knowledge, just try a bunch of random activities and reflect on what you liked and disliked. Boom! You now have some self-knowledge. Now consistently and seriously lean into a few of the things you liked the most (or disliked the least). Keep exploring on the side, and if you find some other activity you like better, switch it in!

Iterate, iterate, iterate. Self-knowledge is not part of your base install. You don’t spawn with it. You gotta work your ass off to acquire it bit by bit, exercise by exercise, experience by experience, just like developing expertise in any other subject. It takes a massive volume of reps and there is no shortcut.

Epiphanies seldom happen, and when they do, they only come after you put a ton of work into building. The epiphany is just the final piece that snaps a bunch of infrastructure into place that you previously built. Sometimes you feel the snap when it happens, but most of the time you don’t even realize the significance until later down the road when you look back and try to make sense of how you got to where you are.

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