Study Yourself

When I interview a student for Catalyst, I'm trying to really figure out who that person is at their core. And I don't hide that at all. This makes for some very interesting, sometimes pretty intense conversations.

But I don't do this for the sole purpose of learning who the student is. I do this to see if they themselves even know. And believe it or not, some actually don't.

Weird, right? Because if you wanted to learn about someone, you'd probably think that going straight to that person and asking them questions is the best way to do it. Because after all, they know everything about themselves, right?

I'm not confident that's the case. It turns out that if you want to learn some things about yourself, you actually have to study yourself. And some people, or maybe even most people, don't spend enough time doing that.

So what does it mean to study yourself? We can look to behavioral science to answer that question.

Generally, behavioral studies/experiments work like this: subjects are thrown into a situation with a controlled environment and presented an opportunity to make a decision about something. Then, their decisions are recorded and analyzed. This is done to better understand human behavior in a broader sense.

Here's why that's important: behavioral studies don't work by going to subjects and saying "If you were in this environment and presented with this decision, what would you do?" Because that's not studying behavior. That's studying feelings.

As individuals, we have a massive dataset to study if we want to understand ourselves and our behavior more broadly, and that dataset is the past.

And what's crazy is that that data set is getting bigger and bigger by the minute. The question is, are you paying attention?

And the other questions is this: how quality is the data? Can you learn anything from it? Are you studying yourself? Are you testing yourself?

I think a useful way to assess oneself in this way is to reflect on these questions:

What are you passionate about?

What type of work do you like to do?

What is one problem you're passionate about solving?

How do you know?

If you have thoughtful answers to those, and you're pretty confident your answers are at least close to the right answers, then that's great. But odds are you have some things to learn before you can answer those questions in a way that actually satisfies you. That doesn't mean you're behind--it means that you have the amazing opportunity to embark on the great adventure of finding the answers to those questions.

So how do you learn? How do you improve the quality of your data set, and how do you study it? The answer is by running experiments and reflecting.

And how do you run experiments? The same way we already talked about: by immersing yourself into new environments, presenting yourself with decisions to make, making them, and understanding why you made them.

Ultimately, everyone is trying to answer the same question. And that is, generally, the question of what we should do with our lives.

And not being able to answer that is terrifying. But that's because it's not the right question. How about how should I learn what I should do with my life? Maybe thinking through that is less terrifying. Especially because it happens to have a relatively simple answer: by running experiments and studying the results.

But why even do this in the first place? I would argue it's because one of the absolute most productive things you can do for the world is figure yourself out. Because you're complicated, and nobody else can do it as well as you can. But once you do it, you can figure out what to do for everyone else.

And that's why this is the premise of my interviews--if a student can show me that they are actively trying to better understand themselves and their strengths, that means they are actively learning how to best make an impact.

So to put it in clearer English, it seems like the best way to attain a better sense of direction is to simply start doing something difficult in pursuit of a goal, and seeing what the hell happens. It might not take you where you want to go right away, but it will give you a better idea of how to get there.

This post was very relevant to the "Outward and Forward" philosophy. And this entire idea of "Learning about yourself" is a key aspect of the "inward and forward" orientation, or what we call "growing". If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out the post.

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