Favorite Problems: A Practical Framework for Discovering Your Purpose
joebalcom.blog
joebalcom.blog
You may very well feel that way, like you want to keep working. But as he then later says, there is no time for other things.
I would rephrase as “ When you do meaningful, self-directed work, 8 hrs/5x a week feels worth it.”
Any work you do is going to have shit, so it’s never going to be a rainbows and sunshine all the time. Customers abandon you, vendors fall short, employees steal, boss fires you, etc.
But you get to generally choose the shit flavor, so if you choose shit that is tolerable vs intolerable, and if you work on something meaningful, it just might be worth it.
Then, close your laptop and give attention to the other meaningful things in your life. The ride will be over before you know it.
When you do meaningful, self-directed work, 16 hrs/7x a week feels like part-time."
Paraphrased: "When you're doing stuff you want to do, it's easy, when you're doing stuff you don't want to do, it's hard"
Don't confuse 'aspiration' as being 'meaningful' and certainly not 'utilitarian' or in any way beneficial to society.
Probably the best thing you can do 'to help society' is right in front of the nose, which is to take the skill sets you have, find a system in which you can work, and grind. Because it's mostly all just a grind.
The system works when we play our roles well, whether it's changing diapers, writing code, baking bread or maybe 2 out of 3.
Just anecdata, but it works for me.
(Shared my first version in a flowchart here on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AskJibran/status/1277940486205067268?s=2...)
Would love to dive more into your framework Joe!
This article seems to be a guide on how to find focus and how to direct that focus to the most meaningful and productive activities that you can find in your life.
At this point, humanity has partially conquered evolution. You can choose a different purpose than reproduction or fitness of the human species (helping others, as you put it).
There are people who see helping animals and nature as more important than helping other humans.
There are yet more who strive primarily for their own personal wealth/power, to the detriment of mankind and only sometimes with their own progeny in mind.
With that in mind, I think you may wish to also be more specific in your stated purpose. "Help others do their thing" is vague and imprecise. It would allow you equally to use your time and money to support others who's goals are merely to get rich (say, to be an angel investor), and to help others who's goal is likewise to help others (help others improve their lives and better themselves, such as through working at / giving to foodbanks, helping those doing positive work for humanity, etc).
I charitably will read your meaning not to be "help others to do their thing", but rather to "try to have as positive as possible an impact overall, including through helping others". If helping others is done with the intent of having a positive impact, it looks much different. You don't become a VC (the 3rd most evil profession) that optimizes for maximum returns, but instead help fund interests that you genuinely believe will end up being overall positive. You don't help others do their thing unless, as best you can tell, their thing will also have a positive impact on others.
Did you mean something to that effect, or do you see your purpose truly as an amoral helper who wishes to help others but neither impact good yourself (directly nor indirectly), nor discriminate in what "others" and "things" to help?
I was vague about helping others on purpose because experience has made me wary of claiming that I know what's good or moral. Fundamentally I would only claim to know better than evolution in two cases: 1) Jeopardizing the ecosystem/biosphere (because it would be suicide). 2) The need to get off this planet before it gets eaten by the sun (because I don't think evolution properly accounts for this). That's not to say that I claim to be amoral. Rather, in the name of humility, I'd stop at the definition: Being productive in a responsible way - guided by the two points above. My reason for this is that, in my experience, the worst consequences of human behaviour stem mostly from indifference, whatever the intention may be. And the promise of having a positive impact often makes people as blind to terrible consequences as the opportunism often associated with selfish behaviour. So I tend to limit how I express myself in this regard, because I think it's more honest.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...
As you break down the problems into further smaller problems you might encounter a problem which is possible to tackle with the currently available resources.
One of the possible outcomes here might be identifying a team within a comp / university who is working on the same problem and then joining them. That can be the first step in the long marathon of innovation.