Don’t Follow Your Dreams

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June 17, 2013 – That sounds negative, doesn’t it? Wait and read on though, it will make sense. Maybe. Just a bit of rambling tonight as I am thinking about humans and their penchant for getting stuck on an idea and refusing to let go, even when there is no sense in hanging onto it.

Have you ever encountered that mindset that comes to a conclusion and simply won’t budge, no matter the evidence, no matter the arguments. I think there is a certain amount of pride involved in such cases. People hate to admit that they don’t know, or that they are wrong. We invest energy into a position/idea/direction and to admit it wasn’t the right choice seems to be perceived as a monumental undertaking that the vast majority don’t seem capable of. It’s akin to the religious mindset. Once the indoctrination takes hold, there simply isn’t any point in trying to deal with the closed mind. They just repeat the central dogma and cannot waver for fear of the consequences of an open mind. The unknown seems more frightening than the (possibly falsely) known.

What does that have to do with the boats aground? Not much except that I see it as a metaphor. People can steer themselves up the wrong waterway and end up aground. Sometimes the tide can save them and get them going again, sometimes they can manage to get themselves unstuck, but sometimes the boat just stays stuck. Leaving the Captain and the fervent crew high and dry. Sometimes it disintegrates and doesn’t serve a purpose anymore. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing.

I’m not being pessimistic, but I really don’t understand why people can’t budge sometimes. I’m not limiting this to uneducated individuals. In fact, more often than not it is the highly educated and intelligent people who get mired in their own ideals. Part of it is probably that most people dislike being corrected or questioned on their thoughts. When corrected, there is a perceived loss of status – “I was wrong therefore I am somehow less”, at least to some. Religion. Extreme environmentalism. Business. Politics. Simple human choices. Choose your platform. There is ego at play. People generally don’t want to admit a mistake, maybe things are better when they are ambiguous? If there is ambiguity then there is instability and they can hold on to some semblance of control because their voice can still be taken seriously by some? By admitting a mistake they know I know that they know they’re wrong.

I don’t know, just a thought.

Fair enough if the correction is given in an arena where the obvious purpose was to embarrass or ridicule. Pride is a fragile thing and easily offended. But what about the same thing in a private setting? Often the end result is the same. So there is more to it than that.

I just don’t get it. It seems like some knee-jerk reaction to contradiction and there is often no logic to it. Given the effort required to find and correct (cognitive) mistakes, isn’t it better to be gracious when somebody points out where we went wrong? It’s anything but logical to grunt out a “whatever” and wave off the contradiction with an air of dismissal without actually setting out to discover if there is some truth to the correction. That doesn’t solve anything and just presents an air of ignorance above the original mistake.

I think getting stuck on an idea and defending it to oneself and others beyond logic is odd and unproductive. When it leads to misdirection and blatant ignorance of real evidence, not cherry-picked or manufactured, not twisted or falsely represented information, not just because someone desperately wants something to be true, then it’s something worse.

I read the following post a while back and tucked it into a folder for later. It’s an interesting read. I liked it particularly because I have lots of dreams, but I’ve never attached them to my career aspirations since those held different goals. My dreams are things like traveling and learning new things. For example sailing the Mediterranean and hanging out with the locals (check!), visiting the rainforest (check!) etc.

My career aspirations were different. I wanted to do something that involved the aquatic environment. I wanted to work with fish. I wanted to really learn about salmon, inside and out. I wanted to do something that was good for the ecosystem and for people. That took work, a lot of tears, a lot of frustration, a lot of time, and I am happy to be doing what I aspired to do. I never had any particular dream job on the agenda. I just liked to do things that involved making things better  somehow. The work usually presented itself, and when the satisfaction ended, I moved on. But always in an forward direction. Sure, there were ruts in the road, and it wasn’t smooth.

My current work does all of those things above, and so much more. I often say that I am doing one of the things that was on my list of dream jobs, but then again, maybe it wasn’t so much a dream since I encountered the program when I first started at university and, at the time, I knew I wanted to have some involvement in it. I went off in a bit of a tangent, but stayed true to the interest, and eventually I found myself where I am. I feel that what I do has meaning in my Province, to people, to communities, to the environment – aquatic and terrestrial, to conservation efforts, to rebuilding efforts, to the economy. And I love it.

When I went to this job someone said to me “Why would you want to go work for someone else? You can make more money in the private sector! You are shortchanging yourself and not going to get what you are worth” It wasn’t about the money, it wasn’t about being employed vs self employed. It was about doing something I thought was worthwhile and had significance. And I think that’s worth more than dollars, it makes sense, to me anyway. But some people are more interested in the end result in the bank account. So who’s wrong? We all have different paths, but it’s important to find the significance in what you do. We can do things ethically, or we can take advantage of the system and the people in it. I reject the latter.

Again, this is an interesting read, for what it’s worth.

DON’T FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS

The best career advice you’ll never hear in a graduation speech

By William MacAskill April 18, 2013

Reality check: following your passion won’t lead to success.

“Follow your passion” is the stupidest career advice I’ve ever heard. Why? Because my passion in life is for singing bad karaoke. My friend Dodgy Dave’s passion is for dealing crack cocaine. Some of my friends have many passions. Most of my friends have none.

“Do what you’re good at” is better, but still stupid. It gets things the wrong way around. For almost all activities, being “good at” something is the result of thousands of hours of practice and learning. In choosing a career, you’re almost always making the decision about what to become good at, not the other way around.

How, then, should you find a job you’ll love?

Here’s my slogan: ”Do something valuable.”

Let the problems in the world dictate what you do, rather than forcing a preconceived checklist labeled “success,” to be your motivation. Do something that genuinely helps others and makes the world a better place in a major way. That’s the way to have a happy, fulfilled life.

When I tell people this, half think it’s crazy and half think it’s trivial. I think it’s neither. So here’s a three-part explanation.

First, here’s the intuition. Think about yourself at 85, sitting on your rocking chair, looking back on your life. You, Version 1, think: “I made a ton of cash, own three beach houses and a yacht. But what was the point of it all?” Compare with You, Version 2: “I made a lot of money. I also dewormed the entire childhood population of Burundi. But what was the point of it all?” We find it pretty easy to imagine You, Version 1; but the thought of You, Version 2 being dissatisfied is jarring. If you want lasting job satisfaction, you should do something you find meaningful. And the best way to do something you find meaningful is to do something that actually is meaningful.

Second, here’s the science:

Acting altruistically makes you healthier and happier. This study found that people who volunteer for good causes report higher levels of happiness and health than those who don’t volunteer. The authors suggest that volunteering gives you a sense of perspective—so that when you judge how well your life is going, you’re aware of people who are less privileged than you as well as people who are better off than you.

Giving money makes you happier. Another study gave participants $20: half were told to spend the sum on themselves; the other half were told to spend it on others. It was the charitable half that reported greater happiness after spending their windfall, even though participants believed that spending on themselves would make them happier. Similarly, in a representative study of American citizens, those who donated a greater proportion of their income were happier, as were workers who donated a larger proportion of their bonuses.

And it’s been found that one of the most important factors in job satisfaction is how much your work affects the well-being of others. Feeling that you’re making a difference makes it easier to get into the state of flow, or complete immersion in an activity. And, the greater significance you attribute to your work, the higher your job performance.

Finally, I can speak from personal experience. I used to work because I wanted to be The World’s Best Philosopher—something like Wittgenstein 2.0. Now I work because I want to help others. This has improved my life in many ways. I now have a deeper sense of meaning and completeness in my life. I know I’m living up to my own values, rather than following the crowd. And I feel a tremendous clarity and resolution of purpose. There’s no messing around trying to find the “true me”—it doesn’t exist. In contrast, the problems in the world are real, and concrete. So I never doubt my aims now: altruism is the one thing you can do that you know you won’t regret.

When it comes to self-interest, everyone is competing for the same things: money, fame, power, status. So if you want anything, you’ve got to fight everyone else for it. But when it comes to altruism, there’s no competition—everyone wants the same thing, namely to make people better off. So it’s much easier to be wildly successful as an altruist—you’ll find other people supporting you at every step.

So does that mean you should drop everything and work for Oxfam? As I’ve previously argued: not necessarily! What it does mean is that you should start finding out what’s valuable, and get help working out the ways in which your career can make for a better world.

(William MacAskill is an ethicist at Oxford and Princeton. He’s the founder and president of 80,000 Hours, an ethical careers advisory service.)