• Big Idea
• Myths
• Mistakes
• Hooks
• Big Ideas
• Interests Go Through Stages Of Interest Development
• 1: Discover
• 2: Incubate
• 3: Develop
• 4: Capitalize
• 5: Be The Niche
• Interest Domino Chain
• Interests Are Hierarchal
• Personal Interest
• Case Studies
• Jeff Bezos
• Overview
• We All Have An Energy Baseline
• That Energy Baseline Can Be Improved
• We Err Toward Conserving Mental Energy
• We Often Go Over Our Cognitive Allotment So Energy Replenishment Is Key
• Mental Energy Is A Signal
• Hooks
• Quotes
• Joshua Waitzkin
• Related Words
• How To Increase Mental Energy
• Internal Over External Motivation
• Navigate Mental Energy Links

Big Idea

• The perceived level of interest and curiosity we have toward something isn't random, it's a sign of intelligence.
• Cognition takes a lot of resources. Our brain burns 20% of our body's calories.
• For our ancestors to survive, we had to be conservative over what we spend precious brain resources on. If we over spend, we die.
• To help us manage our resources well, our brain is constantly doing risk-reward calculations. It gives us energy to do things that have a high return and removes energy from things that have a low return.
• Two sources of motivation are extrinsic and intrinsic.

Myths

• You have one life passion
• You fall in love in a moment
• The amount of passion is fixed
• People expect a "perfect" interest
• Interests are not discovered via introspection. Instead interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world

Mistakes

• Trying to force an interest

Hooks

• Skill is not enough. "Having a high IQ is not related to grit. What’s more, verbally talented spellers did not study any more than less able spellers, nor did they have a longer track record of competition. The separation of grit and talent emerged again in a separate study I ran on Ivy League undergraduates. There, SAT scores and grit were, in fact, inversely correlated. Students in that select sample who had higher SAT scores were, on average, just slightly less gritty than their peers. Putting together this finding with the other data I’d collected, I came to a fundamental insight that would guide my future work: Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another."
• STEM Is not enough
• Interests predict success over cognitive ability or personality
• "Meta-analyses conducted by two independent research teams (Nye, Su, Rounds, & Drasgow, 2012, 2017; Van Iddekinge, Roth, Putka, & Lanivich, 2011) have linked vocational interests and the fit between individual interests and their environments to various criteria of job performance. Interests have also been shown to have incremental validity over cognitive ability and personality traits in predicting job performance (Van Iddekinge, Putka, & Campbell, 2011) and career success (Rounds & Su, 2014; Stoll et al., 2017). —Study: Toward a Dimensional Model of Vocational Interests

Big Ideas

Interests Go Through Stages Of Interest Development

Each stage has unique and sometimes opposing needs.

Interest Domino Chain

One of the big ideas about interests we're making is that it is the start of a key domino chain.

Interests Are Hierarchal

We have established that interests are structured hierarchically, with preferences for specific activities at the lowest level, basic interests at the intermediate level representing core mental schemata that individuals use to classify activities, and broad-band interest dimensions at the top describing overall tendencies of an individual to be drawn to or motivated by general types of environments. — Study: Toward a Dimensional Model of Vocational Interests

In my opinion, one of the best approaches is to look at passions hierarchally. Our deep passions are most likely to last the longest, but that passion can keep throwing off branches:

• Lifelong (marry)
• Dating (lasts for moments
• Fling (captures interest for moments)

Personal Interest

• What if we have the horse and the cart backwards
• We focus a lot on building expertise or getting the extrinsic motivations right. If I get the skill and outside benefits, then I will enjoy it more. My gut instinct is that interest precedes expertise. Rather than So Good They Can't Ignore You, it should be So Energized You can't Stop
• It is interesting because it even challenges the idea of meditation.
• In addition, I never resonated with the idea of resilience. Again, I think resilience is critical, but it's a byproduct.
• Polymath Isn't A Choice, It's How You're Brain Is Wired. Build On It “Creative and manic thinking are both distinguished by fluidity and by the capacity to combine ideas in ways that form new and original connections. Thinking in both tends to be divergent in nature, less goal-bound, and more likely to wander about or leap off in a variety of directions. Diffuse, diverse, and leapfrogging ideas were first noted thousands of years ago as one of the hallmarks of manic thought. —Kay Redfield Jamison, Exuberance
• Surprising connections
• Brain: ADD, Hypomania
• Exuberance / Interests
• Polymath
• Open Networks

Current: The Number Of Competencies Is A Predictor Of Career Sucess, According To 5+ Studies

"Almost everybody can stay excited for 2 or 3 months. A few people can stay excited for 2 or 3 years, but a winner will stay excited for 30 years or however long it takes to win." -Art Williams Studies on highly successful people have proven again and again that success is not the result of str...

docs.google.com

• Avoiding downsides
• Flighty
• Not capitalizing on insights in a niche before jumping on to the
• New Opportunity
• Take time to connect the dots in reverse

Case Studies

Jeff Bezos

Jeff’s unusually interest-filled childhood has a lot to do with his unusually curious mother, Jackie. Jeff came into the world two weeks after Jackie turned seventeen years old. “So,” she told me, “I didn’t have a lot of preconceived notions about what I was supposed to do.” She remembers being deeply intrigued by Jeff and his younger brother and sister: “I was just so curious about these little creatures and who they were and what they were going to do. I paid attention to what interested each one—they were all different—and followed their lead. I felt it was my responsibility to let them do deep dives into what they enjoyed.” For instance, at three, Jeff asked multiple times to sleep in a “big bed.” Jackie explained that eventually he would sleep in a “big bed,” but not yet. She walked into his room the next day and found him, screwdriver in hand, disassembling his crib. Jackie didn’t scold him. Instead, she sat on the floor and helped. Jeff slept in a “big bed” that night. By middle school, he was inventing all sorts of mechanical contraptions, including an alarm on his bedroom door that made a loud buzzing sound whenever one of his siblings trespassed across the threshold. “We made so many trips to RadioShack,” Jackie said, laughing. “Sometimes we’d go back four times in a day because we needed another component. “Once, he took string and tied all the handles of the kitchen cupboards together, and then, when you opened one, all of them would pop open.” [...] “My moniker at the house was ‘Captain of Chaos,’ ” Jackie told me, “and that’s because just about anything that you wanted to do would be acceptable in some fashion.” Jackie remembers that when Jeff decided to build an infinity cube, essentially a motorized set of mirrors that reflect one another’s images back and forth ad infinitum, she was sitting on the sidewalk with a friend. “Jeff comes up to us and is telling us all the science behind it, and I listen and nod my head and ask a question every once in a while. After he walked away, my friend asked if I understood everything. And I said, ‘It’s not important that I understand everything. It’s important that I listen.’ ” By high school, Jeff had turned the family garage into a laboratory for inventing and experimentation. One day, Jackie got a call from Jeff’s high school saying he was skipping classes after lunch. When he got home, she asked him where he’d been going in the afternoons. Jeff told her he’d found a local professor who was letting him experiment with airplane wings and friction and drag, and—“Okay,” Jackie said. “I got it. Now, let’s see if we can negotiate a legal way to do that.” In college, Jeff majored in computer science and electrical engineering, and after graduating, applied his programming skills to the management of investment funds. Several years later, Jeff built an Internet bookstore named after the longest river in the world: Amazon.com. (He also registered the URL www.relentless.com; type it into your browser and see where it takes you. . . . )

Overview

We All Have An Energy Baseline

People have a baseline level of mental energy (Shulmana et al., 2009). This baseline level of mental energy supports consciousness and cognition.

That Energy Baseline Can Be Improved

People can increase the baseline level of mental energy. Pre-task allocations of mental energy are sensitive to factors, such as anticipated demands and rewards of the upcoming task (Beedie and Lane, 2012; Kruglanski et al., 2012; Shenhav et al., 2013), so that people can engage in beneficial cognitive behaviors.

We Err Toward Conserving Mental Energy

There are incentives to be conservative with mental energy allocation as mental effort is costly, both absolutely and from an opportunity cost perspective (Boksem and Tops, 2008; Kurzban et al., 2013; Goldfarb and Henik, 2014). This leads to mental energy deficits, especially when energy use exceeds energy allocation on consecutive tasks (Kanfer et al., 1994).

We Often Go Over Our Cognitive Allotment So Energy Replenishment Is Key

Fourth, pre-task allocations of mental energy cannot address a cumulative deficit. Thus, an energy replenishment function is conceptually consistent with the prior literature on mental energy use. Replenishment is a necessary part of an effective mental energy management system.

Mental Energy Is A Signal

A basic case is that our brain is always doing a cost-benefit analysis of different tasks. When the incentives are favorable, we are more motivated. We they are unfavorable, we are less motivated. Therefore, we can look at our energy level as a form of intuition.

Perhaps, the most curious characteristic of the mental energy replenishment system is its sensitivity to the cost-benefit trade-off of a completed task.

Hooks

• So Passionate You Can't Stop (play on so good they can't ignore you)
• Downsides of external motivation
• The Polymath Brain - Polymaths, Mania, And Leveraging Who You Are -

Quotes

The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.” —Louis Pasteur

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." Albert Einstein

"I keep six honest serving-men, They taught me all I knew; Their names are What and Why and When, And How and Where and Who." Rudyard kipling

Joshua Waitzkin

“I find that most great thinkers are slicing through complexity like a knife through butter. Then, they arrive at an area of stuckness. And they’ll spend a long time on that stuckness. And they can spend consciously at that point days, weeks, months at that stuck point. But they can also study everything involved with that stuck point, sleep on it, and wake up and just slice right through it.

“And so, for me the question is usually that area of stuckness after I’ve studied all the complexity. And that rhythm between consciously integrating technical information into my being, then releasing what arises is a huge part of how I approach creativity.”

[...]

“If they’re thinking about it right before bed, they’re thinking about it consciously. They’re not releasing the conscious mind, which is a huge part of that… [It’s]tThat core Hemingway principle of writing and then finishing his workday leaving something left to write. Right? As opposed to tapping the well. Finishing it all up, which most people who are externally driven in what they’re doing or thinking about how they’re looking or moved by guilt as opposed something more intrinsic, they feel guilty if they don’t do everything they have to do. Versus Hemingway’s principle of doing just that. It’s very interesting, but he would always speak about… the importance of stopping your thinking at that point. And he would relax. He would drink wine. And also for me as a chess player, I found that if studied chess openings up until bed, I was thinking chess positions. If I studied it earlier and then released it, then I was able to dream about the insight.

[...]

End of work day pre-dinner. I usually have a workout post workday. Right immediately at the end of the workday, I have some sort of workout to do to flush my physiology. So, it’s before that workout.

Related Words

"We have given sorrow many words, but a passion for life few.” —Kay Redfield Jamison, Exuberance

• Exuberance
• Zeal
• Passion
• Unstoppable

How To Increase Mental Energy

Internal Over External Motivation

“Prolonged cocaine use, which diminishes dopamine functioning, gives support to the general rule that external sources of exuberance are ultimately overruled by the brain's inclination to seek out equilibrium.”—Kay Redfield Jamison, Exuberance

• Increase absorptive capacity

Navigate Mental Energy Links

• Overview
• Top Books, Studies, And Articles On Mental Energy
• Case Studies