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Soul-First Specialization

Overview

Making big decisions in a world of abundance is challenging. More specifically, in a world with unlimited options, how do we answer the following questions:

  • Who should we spend time around?
  • What projects, companies, jobs should we take on or start?
  • What thoughts should we nurture?
  • What should we learn?
  • What should we specialize in?

These questions determine the trajectory of our entire life. Being even just a little bit better at answering these questions changes everything.

When answering questions like this, there is often a tension between what we feel we should do (what's most practical) and what our heart wants us to do.

I call this tension the XYZ Phenomenon.

Here are some examples where we face this tension:

  • Should we learn about this esoteric field I'm curious about or learn this in-demand skill?
  • Should we take the high-paying, prestigious job or the one we are deeply attracted to?
  • Should we network with the "high-value influencer" or the person that we resonate with the most?
  • When starting a business, should we listen to the customers (what we think the market wants) or scratch our own itch first?

There is a clear research-based answer to the XYZ Phenomenon, and it's the opposite of conventional wisdom...

In short, we should follow our heart.

We should Marie Kondo our life—Does it bring you joy or not?

We should heed Derek Sivers' wise words—It should either be a hell yea or a hell no.

Although, it may not appear practical in the short-term, in the long-run it's the most practical. Here's why...

8 Hidden Benefits Of Following Your Heart

Following your heart makes you successful via the combination of the following benefits.

1. Life is more fun

  • When you give yourself permission to do what's fun, you will have more fun.
  • It's self-explanatory

2. You are more productive

  • You procrastinate less
  • You work more
  • You get more out of your working time because you have more energy
  • You challenge yourself more

3. You are more charismatic

"We have consistently seen that people who create energy or enthusiasm in networks are far more likely to become and remain high performers as well as to move more fluidly in and out of groups." —Robert Cross, researcher and author of, Beyond Collaboration Overload (Harvard Business Review Press)
  • Your energy is contagious
  • People want to learn from you
  • People want to follow you
  • People want to spend time aorund you
  • There is an authenticity that comes through.

4. You stand out in crowded markets

"You don't choose your passions, your passions choose you," he once said. "All of us are gifted with certain passions, and the people who are lucky are the ones who get to follow those things." —Jeff Bezos
“Each person is uniquely qualified at something. They have some specific knowledge, capability and desire nobody else in the world does, purely from the combinatorics of human DNA and development.” —Naval Ravikant
  • Everyone has a unique DNA, personality, upbringing, skills, and development that can't be copied.
  • That uniqueness can be cultivated and turned into a strength
  • There are at least 1,000 true fans waiting out there who you can uniquely serve
  • When you follow what the market wants, you risk turning yourself into a commodity, because lots of people are trying to do the same thing.
  • In a crowded market, the worst thing you can be is invisible.

5. Tap into your innate intelligence

If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right.” —Paul Graham
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." —Steve Jobs
  • There is a hidden wisdom in what our heart gravitates toward.
  • It's based on intuition, tacit knowledge.
  • The dots always connect in reverse.

6. You gain a long-term competitive advantage

“No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what [business, project or art] needs you the most." — Naval Ravikant
  • The core of the E-Myth approach is where you try to make yourself replaceable.
  • In so doing, you make yourself

7. You will endure for longer

"Combined with his other virtues, what has helped Federer be at his best or close to his best, even at 39 is his undying “love” and passion for the game. “He just loves tennis and that’s why, at 39, he’s still out there. —Paul Annacone, Federer's Former Tennis Coach
  • When you love what you're doing, you will naturally want to do it for longer.
  • When you hate what you're doing, you will want to exit from it sooner.

8. You will improve faster than others

  • Pull up research from the Strengths Finder world.

9. You will successfully start new things and learn more skills

  • It takes a lot of cognitive energy to do hard things.
  • Extrinsic and intrinsic rewards keep us persisting.
  • However, part of learning a new skill is going through an extended period where there are low extrinsic reward.
  • Therefore, intrinsic reward is particularly important with new activities

Studies

people reinvest in tasks that are, on balance, rewarding (Boksem and Tops, 2008; Kool et al., 2010; Kurzban et al., 2013; Shenhav et al., 2013).

Why Now

Web3 is creating a

The Top 1% Performers Across Every Field Follow Their Heart

  • Warren Buffett tip toes to work and is still working in his 90s
  • Steve jobs took calligraphy class and dropped out of school
  • Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant loved basketball deeply
  • Rober Federer has always loved the game

Research Backs This Up

But Isn't Following Your Heart Not Practical?

  • Following your heart does not mean avoiding hard work. It means loving what you do so much that hard work doesn't feel like hard work.
  • Following hard work doesn't mean throwing caution to the wind. It means starting from where you are and making more and more choices that energize you. As you follow this over time, you will get better and better choices.
  • "I don't want to make my passion not fun by taking it to seriously."
    • "If I'm not excited about my passion, is something wrong?"
  • We live in a world where someone's full-time job at Apple is just to pick colors. There are more and more options to do weird stuff that resonate with others.

Isn't Enjoying Something Based On How Good You Are

In my friend, Cal Newport's book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, he makes the point that if you focus on mastering a skill (Rather than pursuing your passion), the mastery of the skill will create the enjoyment as you get the benefits of being good at something.

I agree that being good at something leads to lots of external benefits like money, respect, reputation, and new opportunities. At the same time, it doesn't necessarily make it a fundamental passion. Here's the research...

At the same time, there is a difference between intuition and passion. Passion is closer to the idea of a hobby. It's closer to the idea of sensation-seaking. With intuition I'm talking about something deeper...

The Quick Win

When making a decision and asking which option to pursue, ask yourself...

What gives you the most energy?

Energy is the best predictor, and we can intuitively and instantly sense whether we are attracted to something or repelled?

Biases

Strength Blindspot

  • Our strengths are invisible to us.
  • We think something is too easy, we don't do it.
    • Must be wrong
    • Too many competitors
    • You assume it must be easy for others
  • Impractical Mismatch
    • Not a square for what you do - People might undervalue

Mindset

  • Trust on faith that your uniqueness is your greatest strength even if you can't see it.
  • Give yourself permission
  • Soul-first
  • No judgement

Journal

  • Many of the people we admire the most are iconoclasts
  • They create there own styles
  • How to create your own style, aeshetic, taste (connoisseurship)
    • Diverse exploration (elephant technique)
    • Building taste and prediction
    • Synthesize
      • What's missing?
      • What works? What doesn't?
      • What do you resonate with? What do you not resonate with?

What's Most Interesting / Hooks

  • Surprised me as a path
    • I'm naturally super rational.
      • Challenges Cal Newport's thought that the better you are at something, the more it becomes a passion. (Mihaly)
      • We live in an age of AI and data-driven decision-making
    • I like to control the future (super goals) - think and grow rich
    • Being markets-oriented is considered the norm
  • It's a smart-people problem
  • Deep need: Finding your authentic, lasting place in a world that's constantly changing.
  • Synthesis: It's not one or the other. It's the emergent that comes from combining them. Soul-First
  • This explains why 99% of polymaths fail and 1% change the course of history
  • The only way to be the best at something over a long period of time is to fall in love with it (turn into a quote)
  • Closes the loop on 4D Thinking.
  • It's like Marie Kondo for life
    • Does this bring me joy?
  • Authority:
    • According to research
    • According to celebrities
      • Two biggest entrepreneurs in history pursued their POV

Schools Of Thought

Market

  • User-centered
  • Lean startup
  • MVPs
  • Incremental
  • Pulled by the market
  • Customer requests

Creator

  • Soul
  • Heart
  • Curiosity
  • Design-drive
  • Meaning innovation
  • New vision
  • Not afraid to be themselves (self-expressed)
  • Avoids labels
  • Humble
  • Tastemaker
  • Un-assumming
  • Unpretentious

Tech

  • Breakthrough development

Context

  • We have this emerging class of people who create new things for a living.
  • Although they often have companies, the decision-making logic should be very different than for a venture-backed tech company or more traditional company (think Michael Gerber).
  • We have to be careful about porting over philosophies that work for companies but not for creators.
  • The case for the creator path is that you will often not only be more successful, but way more happy.
  • We now live in an era where the work of a creator is extremely scalable
Company
Creator
Be replaceable (so you can work yourself out of job)
Be irreplaceable
Don't be a technician
Find the craft that makes you come align
Customer Relationship
Transactional
Have a personal relationship with customers (true fans)
Solve your own problem
Targeting
Target the most profitable customer
Target the customer that makes you come alive

Downside Of Lean Startup

  • Commodification
  • Successful by someone else's standards (external success)
  • Loss of your core (authenticity, curiosity, heart)
  • Customers don't know what they want. Many of the best companies were based on solving needs customers didn't know they’ll had
Think about the metaphysical presuppositions of the Lean Start-up for a moment. For starters: one can create only what is already expressed as desirable by whatever zeitgeist the creator happens to be in. And I don’t see anything generative about that. It seems to condemn one to the degrading slavery of being a child of their age. A zero-sum game. The person who does the market research wins: they capture the most market share." —Luke Burgis
There is a deadening effect to always doing what other people want or expect. We see this in relationships, in careers, in politics." —Luke Burgis
Finally, I believe there’s a moral dimension to all of this. I know an entrepreneur who started a website with the original intention of allowing guys and girls to chat in their pajamas. The original idea was to have people chat in a setting in which nobody really cared about how they looked. Casual clothes, etc. And what’s more casual than pajamas. But following the lean start-up model, he eventually went into porn: that’s what enough people wanted. That’s where the money was. And now he’s struggling with what his business has become." [...] If there are no sources of morality in our culture beyond the mimetically-popular norms—or the particular sub-communities that we’re a part of—then it’s curious how we make any moral progress at all. Omakase is an approach to business and to life that takes a stand. I view it as a moral stand, actually. I’m not talking about overfishing or ethical food systems here. I’m referring to moral questions about what it means to be human—about whether we’re human, or whether we’re dancer. Creators with a strong moral compass necessarily have to be anti-mimetic in many ways. If there are no sources of morality in our culture beyond the mimetically-popular norms—or the particular sub-communities that we’re a part of—then it’s curious how we make any moral progress at all. Omakase is an approach to business and to life that takes a stand. I view it as a moral stand, actually. I’m not talking about overfishing or ethical food systems here. I’m referring to moral questions about what it means to be human—about whether we’re human, or whether we’re dancer. Creators with a strong moral compass necessarily have to be anti-mimetic in many ways. —Luke Burgis, Omakase Creator

Upside Of Creator Driven

  • Big brands
  • Differentiation
  • Products have long lifecycles
  • Soul-market fit

Signs You're On The Right Path

  • Hard work for others feels easy to you
  • You feel energized rather than drained
  • You'd gladly do it for free
  • You'd do it even if no one else were to see it
  • You feel like a kid in the candy store
  • You have a high attention-to-detail
  • You look forward to it
  • If it's on your to do list, you tend to do it first (opposite of procrastination)
  • You could do it even if you were tired
  • Gives you energy
  • Time goes by fast
  • Makes your inner child come alive

Signs You're On The Wrong Path

  • Makes you feel tired, bored, and drained
  • You tend to procrastinate on it, even if you know it's important
  • You feel constant stress
  • You keep wondering if you're on the right path or not

Challenges

  • Sometimes feels like a luxury you can't afford
  • Sometimes it doesn't feel practical, prestigious, or financially feasible

Creator Driven Questions / Approaches

  • Try to give it away. Do the ones that others don't do. - Kevin Kelly
  • If it’s in you, you have to do it
  • If something is bugging you, you have a few choices:
    • Do it (and then drop it) - get it out of your system
    • Drop it (something deep inside of you won’t just disappear with the intention)
    • Go super deep on it (meditate, therapy) - but then it’s not guaranteed
  • Self-knowledge
    • Intrinsic Desires (conditioning, universal)
    • Lindy Effect: What has excited you for the longest period of time?
    • Attraction: What do you think about in the shower? In my free time, when it’s my own free choice, what am I drawn to?
    • Goal: What goals excite me when I hear it?
    • Listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast with Erik Schmidt. Schmidt said that once Bill Joy became a venture capitalist, he would read research papers, figure out who the best authors were, and then call them, and ask “What’s the most interesting thing in your field?”

Conventional

The conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley right now is to focus on Lean Startup. The implicit constraints and assumptions are:

  • Needs to grow fast
  • Needs to grow big
  • Founder will likely sell

Many people recognize that many of the top entrepreneurs actually haven't used this approach—people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Yet, that's where they stop. The advice is, "Steve Jobs is brilliant and a once-in-a-generation entrepreneur. You're not Steve Jobs, so use this other approach.

History

Know thyself -

What about introspection illusion.

Quotes

Value Follows Attention

What the smartest people do on the weekends is why everyone will be doing in 10 years.” -Chris Dixon

Miscellaneous

“You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.” ―Joss Whedon
You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment. —Nassim Taleb
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
It's far better to follow your own path imperfectly than to follow another's perfectly. —Bhagavad Gita
Know thyself
"You don't choose your passions, your passions choose you," he once said. "All of us are gifted with certain passions, and the people who are lucky are the ones who get to follow those things." —Jeff Bezos
Some people go into flow with certain things (like knitting) without a rhyme or reason. —Mihilay of flow
If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right.” —Paul Graham
That describes the way many if not most of the biggest startups got started. Neither Apple nor Yahoo nor Google nor Facebook were even supposed to be companies at first. They grew out of things their founders built because there seemed a gap in the world.” —Paul Graham
Kevin Kelly https://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy

Visuals

Lucy Sheridan
Lucy Sheridan

Frameworks

Soul-First Specialization

  • Similar vein to Find Your Why Or Profit-First
image

Creator Quadrant

  • Having an internal, gut-driven compass is crucial to filtering.
    • Internal
    External
    Rational
    Gut
    xxxx
  • Other level - Current (what is) vs. Ideal (what could be)

Name Of Creator Path

  • Humble master

Case Studies Of Soul-Market Fit

Questions

  • How is it that some people sort of say F-U to the system and then are accepted by the system?
  • How is it that some of the biggest discoveries in history came via curiosity?

Examples

Cultures

  • Samarai
  • Craftsmanship
  • Native american
  • Scientists - follow their curiosity

People

  • Joe Rogan
  • Snoop Dogg
  • Steve Jobs
  • Bob Dylan

Companies

  • History
  • Apple
  • Rework - https://www.rework.fm/scratch-your-own-itch/
  • Tesla
  • Nintendo - "If Nintendo had closely observed teenagers using existing game consoles, it probably would have improved traditional game controllers, enabling users to better immerse themselves in a virtual world, rather than redefining what a game console is." —Roberto Verganti in Design Driven Innovation.
  • Alessi - "If Alessi had visited users in their homes to scrutinize how they pulled corks from a bottle, it would have created more-efficient tools, not objects of affection that a person buys twice—once for herself and once for her best friend." —Roberto Verganti in Design Driven Innovation.

Following Childhood Dreams

It's not cool to talk about rich people anymore. Particularly if they're white. They have advantages that others have and a lot of their success is based on luck.

This logic makes sense and it doesn't.

But, I'm still fascinated by how people start from

Bill Gates

??

Warren Buffett

  • Started investing when he was 12

Elon Musk

While his parents were away, Musk lived mostly under the watch of a housekeeper. According to Musk, she was mainly there to make sure he didn’t break anything. “She wasn’t, like, watching me. I was off making explosives and reading books and building rockets and doing things that could have gotten me killed,” said Musk. “I’m shocked that I have all my fingers.”

Jeff Bezos

“Ever since I was 5 years old — that’s when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon — I’ve been passionate about space, rockets, rocket engines, space travel.” Back then, says Bezos, “The idea of going to the moon was so impossible that people actually used it as a metaphor for impossibility. What I would hope you would take away from that is that anything you set your mind to, you can do.”

Omakese

"An omakase chef doesn’t take a poll from clientele about what they’d most like to eat that night. He serves them the best meal they’ve ever had—and it’s sure as hell not because it’s what you would’ve ordered. It’s because it’s exactly not what you would’ve ordered." "These chefs wins—we all win—because of the shared culture, the things we learned along the way, the daringness to take risks and give people something they might not like." —Luke Burgis

Dreams Of Jiro Sushi

Resources

Research

To Do

  • Check out Cal's book, So Good They Can't Ignore You

Related Ideas

  • Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned