You Have To Work Really Damn Hard to Figure Out What Fulfills You

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.

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You know you have to work really damn hard to figure out what fulfills you, right?

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.”

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.

Consistently and seriously lean into a few of the things you liked the most (or disliked the least).

Just because something doesn’t speak to you now doesn’t mean it won’t speak to you later. Developing baseline familiarity and competency can completely change the experience. Sometimes we think we dislike activities when we really just dislike doing unfamiliar things and sucking at them.

Also, leaning into some activities now doesn’t mean you’re committing to lean into them forever. Keep exploring on the side, and if you find some other activity you like better, switch it in!

You gotta come at the problem with a builder mentality, continually iterating. “What fulfills me?” is not some riddle that you can stare at until an epiphany comes to you.

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 other times 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.

TLDR: 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. All there is is compression. Whether it’s self-knowledge, technical skill-building, whatever, you can compress the time needed to acquire it if you put in more volume and/or work more efficiently than is typical.

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