War on clichés: Why “Dream Big,” “Follow Your Heart,” “Follow Your Passion,” “Work Hard,” “Pursue Your Goals,” and “Think Positive” are bad advices?
The best career advice I ever got was a quote by the character Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”:
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”.
A similar quote from Albert Einstein:
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. Wisdom is not the product of schooling, but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it. Once you stop learning, you start dying.”
Simply put, lifelong learning is the key.
I think the power of dreams is so much overrated in our society. Everyone advise us to ‘dream big’. The basic flaw of this argument is the incongruence between dreams and reality. Instead of self-esteem (we are absolutely great!) and self-confidence (I can do anything! If I want, I can take an intergalactic flight!), self-realization (understand that I have limitations) and self-compassion (it is OK to feel sad but don't worry too much about setbacks. After all you did a good effort!) are most important. A few years ago I read an international self-help bestseller by Rhonda Byrne (The Secret). The claim is that if you dream big, you will get it. All nonsense. To get what you want in life, you should be pragmatic and work for it (my first career advice), mere dreaming is not enough. I believe facts are better than dreams.
Yet another highly overrated buzzword is The Power of Positive Thinking! I consider positive thinking (as good things will come, this world is the best of all possible worlds!) as neither good nor bad, but utterly ineffective strategy for life in general. I suggest students read a very famous novella “Candide” by Voltaire in which he satirizes those hopelessly optimistic people. The world is far from an imaginary utopia. We should be prepared to face the worst contingencies at any time, including our own death. “Be Prepared”, as in the motto of Scouts. Abraham Lincoln famously said once:
“If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
Acceptance of fate is the key. Have you or your loved ones got diagnosed with an incurable form of cancer? Accept it and move on. Perhaps you can do more than merely accepting the fate, welcome and love the fate, the so-called “Amor Fati,” mantra of Stoic Philosophy of ancient Greece. If you ever played a video game, would you like it if level 3 and level 1 have the same difficulty levels? The game would then be so boring, isn’t it? My advice is that you should treat your life as in a game, and love those challenges. Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius said:
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
If you live like Dr. Pangloss (in Candide) dreaming of all things positive, you will suffer terrifically when things go wrong.
In my opinion, ‘follow your passion’ is the worst career advice anyone can give. Problem is that most of us do not know what our true ‘passion’ is. Even if you believe your true passion as something like ‘to travel’, it is so ambiguous. Could you make a living by traveling? Is your traveling-passion that the world requires right now? You need to find a fine balance between what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what gives you financial support and so on, I suggest students search out a Japanese method called Ikigai to find the true “purpose” in life (I put “purpose” in quotes, as it has teleological connotations that which I do not subscribe to). Also, beware of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Passion leads to overconfidence, and overconfident people tend to make foolish decisions in life.
How about goal setting? I am not against the idea of goal setting, but insanely pursuing your goals is always a bad idea (search out how a group of mountaineers who obsessively pursued their goal to climb Mt Everest lost their lives en-route, 1996 Everest disaster). The issue with goal setting is that it presents a false dichotomy; either you achieve the goal and call as successful, or you fail to achieve it. Like 1 and 0, the binary coding. This approach is very bad! Goals will also give a false impression that “you set that goal, if you don't achieve it it’s your fault’, which is totally wrong. Many goals that we set in our life are not completely in our control; for example, consider hiking to a peak. Achieving that goal depends on weather conditions. Attempting to hike despite surging storm is a way too dangerous pursuit. If I go for Himalayan trekking, I do begin with a clearly defined goal, but I never march towards that goal thinking of goal alone (like small kids in road trip asking “are we there yet?”). Instead, I enjoy the path, relish the experience along the way (butterflies, flowers, streams etc). If I find an obstacle, I try to find optimal solutions to overcome; I might even entirely change my goal as well along the way if I find a better goal or the goal in question makes no sense to achieve (too dangerous, or I realize that I can’t achieve it). I keep on updating my prior expectations in light of new information, the principle behind Bayesian Statistics. The key is to know your strengths and weaknesses (self-realization). Treating life as a holistic system is what I prefer, far better than goal-setting. In life, everything matters; sleep, exercise, nutrition, life, work all. Instead of treating life as a linear path to the goal (or passion whatever it may), consider it as an intricate niche of an ecosystem which is rather reticulate (net-like). Everyone plays a role in our society; artists (producers), ragpicker (scavengers) and so on..everyone. Key is finding the role you are good at and occupying that sweet spot in the giant net of the world.
What if you fail to reach the goal? My advice is not to treat failures as antonyms of success (as many youngsters do), but to treat it as a part of success. A piece of profound wisdom is in the ancient Stoic exclamation “Carpe Diem!” (seize the moment!). Instead of fretting about past and worried about the future, we should mindfully live in the present fleeting instance (like when you play with a little baby or a pet animal, or when you play a game). We should endure the failures (remember “Amor Fati”) and treat it as information to inform future decisions, as in Bayesian Statistics. We should treat unexpected results as inflection points to keep improving. During my voyage to Antarctica, I used to play chess with a friend of mine. We played like hundreds of times and every time he plays similar tactics, similar mistakes and always fail. A common saying is “practice makes a man perfect”, which again is very ambiguous. Practice the chess every single day, still, you won’t progress. Why? Insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results (remember Naranath Bhraandan). Instead, we should analyze the game carefully after each failure to see what went wrong. Learn more tactics to push forward. It’s like feedback loops for quality improvement. Merely playing more passionately and dreaming of good days won’t work! Equally important is to stop comparing yourself with others. Comparing brings all bad feelings (ego, jealousy, and unhappiness). To live happily, live hidden, and be unpretentious! Another important takeaway is to stop living for others' approval. Focus on action and education, and forgo validation and status.
Hard work- the perseverance- too is highly overrated in today’s society. Hard work leads to stress, psychological turmoil, and a host of diseases. We should find time to play games, enjoy things we love and even simply sit and get bored! A famous statement is by Dwight Eisenhower (former US President):
“What is urgent is seldom important and what is important is seldom urgent.”
If you have read Orwell’s Animal Farm you might remember the story of Boxer, the horse. It is not hard work that counts; what counts more is where you put your efforts; smart work rather. You can be busy all the time yet very unproductive. Studies have revealed that merely 20% of our efforts produce 80% of results (while the rest 80% of efforts lead only to 20% of results). So, we should treat productivity as a vector, like velocity (where direction too matters). Instead of perseverance, deliberate practice and grit are the keys. For time management and other productivity tips for students, please read my “The Crux of Time Management.”
In these times of information overload, what is the best advice for students to decide what to consume? While deciding what to read or listen, I always remember double Nobel laureate Marie Curie’s quote:
“Be less curious about the people and more curious about the ideas”
To decide which idea is worth our time, my advice is to look for disconfirming pieces of information, proofs, and pieces of evidence, rather than looking out for pieces of information that confirms our pre-existing notions. For example, if you are a vegetarian, you tend to read and appreciate articles that argue how vegetarianism is good for health and good for the planet; there is a name for it in psychology, confirmation bias. If someone refutes you with evidence, for example, our own forefathers were meat-eaters, or vegetarian diet tend to be protein deficient, you vigorously defend your core belief, leading to a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance. Yet another example; if you are a Pakistani, you tend to read anti-India articles, how India supports terrorism and so on in Pakistani media, and never care to read what Indian media says. The Greek philosopher Epictetus said:
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
A related Chinese proverb:
“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”
Spending our precious time and energy on things that merely confirms our beliefs is the best way to waste our time, unproductive to the core indeed. In these times of social media and information overload, the key is to get out of ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’ of confirmation bias. Unfortunately algorithms of social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc. vastly favor filter bubbles and ideological polarization. My advice is to look for disconfirming evidence, as in science. Science progresses by refuting, rather than confirming, earlier hypotheses (this is called “Falsification” of Karl Popper). Religion and pseudoscience take the opposite stance; instead of disconfirming, they look out for pieces of evidence to confirm their preexisting beliefs (and, therefore, never make any signs of progress). I remember seeing a religious wall poster a year ago in Delhi “Read our holy book, never edited a word for last 500 years”. Imagine if scientists thought “not editing” (textbooks) and ‘not refuting’ (hypotheses) as an appreciable quality? We would then still be in those dark ages and hardly cross 40 years of age (human life expectancy was merely 40 years till the 17th century). Copernicus would never have refuted the Ptolemaic geocentric universe, nor Darwin, the creation myth. Rational skepticism is the key. Students should learn to question everything, including their core beliefs. Students should read across the territory and try to get out of filter bubbles. We all should embrace the change and uncertainties; resisting them is futile. Rationalism and freethought should be guiding lights of our life.
Always remember those two mantras: “Amor Fati” and “Carpe Diem.”
