Find Your Water

Find your water:

Find your water.

Find the thing that makes you happy.

It may take many years trying many different things to find it, but keep looking for it.

Expect lots of failure along the way, but look for your water.

Was thinking of this picture recently (see above) on how our current education system is built today.

It’s composed of exams to test kids’ ability to memorize facts and follow instructions. It turns students into robots taught to regurgitate information. It stops them from thinking for themselves.

It penalizes failure in the ability to take tests well.

When we’re adults, no one cares how well you took a test when you were a kid.

Yes universities do, and for a large portion of the working world, that’s still a barometer of success when evaluating people, but that metric only goes so far.

It doesn’t tell you anything about how good a kid is in teams, whether he/she can think for themselves, if they can understand instruction, how much they care about the people around them, what their goals are, what they want their future to be, how hard working they are, etc.

People are much more than a grade score.

I met some of the most brilliant people in medical school who could regurgitate information like no one else. Yet they weren’t great doctors because they couldn’t socialize with patients. I’ve also met people who barely passed their exams yet are great conversationalists that really care about their patients.

Who would you want as your doctor?

No one asks your doctor where they went to school. All they want to know is can you help them be better and do you care about them.

Sometimes I feel sad for these booksmart people because their environment likely pushed them down a science path because it was the stable, socially acceptable thing to do. Yet they may have loved dance or art and never decided to pursue that because they were told their entire life they couldn’t make a career out of it.

None of that is true. All of that has flipped on its head because of the Internet.

It’s the great equalizer.

It allows everyone to find their water – the thing that makes them happiest.

Whether it’s researching monarch butterflies or understanding the intricacies of jet engines, there’s a community of people online who love the exact same thing you do. 

It still feels like people underestimate the power of the Internet.

My generation gets it, but the older generations I don’t think understand how powerful it is.

You can reach anyone in the world now and have access to all of humanity’s information at the palm of your hands.

That means there’s enough people out there who like the same things you do. You’re not trapped in your local bubble like our parents or grandparents used to be. You have the power to explore any area that interests you.

Education used to be for a select few of people who could afford to go to university and had access to the brightest minds in history.

Now everyone has that power. All the resources are available to you online to learn whatever you want. That’s super exciting and terrifying. 

People are left with a paradox of choice. It’s like when you look at a Netflix menu and you have no idea what to watch so you spend 5 minutes looking at the options before picking the thing you’ve seen 5 times.

People like comfort. They like going to areas and subjects that they know well. They don’t like trying new things.

Learning new things is the only way you’re going to grow and step out of this bubble that we’ve all trapped ourselves in. We’re all trapped in our own bubbles thinking we know so much about the world, when we really know nothing.

No one knows anything.

We pretend we do, especially those that have achieved great success. But they don’t know much. They might know a lot about their specific specialty or area of work, but they don’t know much about anything else.

Imagine putting Lebron James on a soccer field or Lionel Messi on a basketball court. These guys are the best in the world at what they do, but if you take them outside of their area of expertise, they’re just as much a beginner as you and I.

So find your field of choice. Figure out your specific knowledge. Naval said it best ‘find the thing that feels like play to you but looks like work to others.’ It’s hard because there’s no clear path to finding that thing besides just exploring your own curiosities.

There is no shortcut. You have to do the work. But once you figure it out, you’ll feel like a dolphin gliding through the ocean.

Find your water.