Interest Tracking and Exploration
I once studied Shakespeare’s Hamlet in school. I have recently garnered a better understanding of the following from that play:
“To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?”
I will come back to that by the end of this post, and I hope you will gain a better understanding of it as well by then.
The status quo with interest exploration
Ask a group of working-age individuals about their career progression, and you will quickly gather that it is fluid and flexible, in general. One loosely planned event after another. A common theme is uncertainty about what it is that they want to pursue in life. As a result, they move from profession to profession, each person in their own way, and over the years they land somewhere. That ‘somewhere’ may be the end of their exploration because it is comfortable and it pays the bills. It may be because they luckily find their true purpose. It varies, unfortunately. That is my hypothesis of what the status quo is.
There is a cycle that everyone inevitably goes through, multiple times over: identifying an interest, learning more about it, and exploring it experientially. I think the cycle is way too long — taking anywhere between days and years. Everyone is unique, brings something unique to this world, and it is our purpose to find our life’s task, among other important things [Robert Greene, Mastery]. Unfortunately, not many of us get there because of how long it traditionally takes. Having to think that many spend our relatively responsibility-free youth toiling in things we don’t care enough about, is rather frustrating.
We don’t have much time to waste on being mediocre at what we do because we may not be at peak-performance. I imagine a world where individuals, from different walks of life, are able to identify their purpose, their life’s task, their ‘passion’, much quicker than if they had let the tides of happenstance lead them to such purpose. That may be wishful thinking if it hadn’t been done before, but it has. Not only because of luck, but because of perseverance and purposefully exploring. As proof, check out this article by Jennifer Turliuk on her experiences.
What a future of shorter cycles holds
Shortening the cycle of exploration and streamlining the process would see lots of benefits to people of all ages, especially those in middle or high school. Imagine what the future of our species can achieve if they are well advanced in the process of interest exploration.
There is a way. People have done it. So why have so many people not been able to follow suit? Are they just not aware? Is it too difficult? Is it only a certain personality type that such exploration suits? These (and many more) are the types of questions I spend a lot of my time thinking and researching about.
So when it comes to exploring one’s interests and purpose, there is nothing noble about ‘suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. Lots of work needs to be done to equip people with the tools necessary to take arms against the proverbial sea of troubles.
I want to hear from you about your career. Let’s connect: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/rahimshamsy
