What's my life's task
Reading the Daily Laws by Robert Greene, and I truly resonate with the call to find one's Life's Task. Sure, don't fall into the passion trap, but my personal experience tells me that there are some activities in which we naturally incline to much more than others. There is a primal, pre-verbal draw toward certain skills and domains.
For me, I naturally enjoy introspection, meditation, reflections, social interactions, story telling, socialising, creating something great, creating that magic for other people. Below that, I enjoy building things, creating systems, discovering and revealing secrets. I am good with spatial awareness and spatial-visual imagination. Throw me anywhere with a working GPS and map, and I can figure my way around. I am good with words, and pride myself on deploying words to achieve certain emotional impact. I truly enjoy the flow of social interactions, and have been observed by friends to be very perceptive to social dynamics, people's interior worlds, emotions. I am quick to empathise and have found judging other people to be a very unnatural act (perhaps why I didn't warm up to performance reviews right away!).
On the opposite hand, I am not inclined to music or any of the performance arts. I say this having played the piano for nearly a decade to Grade 8. It just didn't click for me. And it wasn't just the genre of classical music. I have tried my hand at pop music which was fun but not deeply satisfying. I enjoy singing inasmuch as I can impress people at karaoke, but without an audience, it feels hollow. I hadn't been a particularly athletic type. Once again, this stems from being in track and field for 4 years and disliking it. I played badminton for a while, but after 3 years, lost interest and dropped out. I enjoyed my time doing crossfit at Bespoke Fitness because of the community, competition, fresh air and the challenge of pushing myself. So that's why competitions like triathlons appealed to me, and people like David Goggins resonate with me. I love the grind of pushing myself to the limit, and competing against other people in a battle of will. Highly technical sports like pole vault and gymnastics are cool but not something I want to partake in. I say this having tried both sports.
Artistically, I hadn't fully explored this side of me. I have always regarded arts class as an unpragmatic use of time compared to the rest of my studies. Recently, I am mesmerised by 3D art and certain styles of 2D drawings with long bold lines (a la Minor Figures logo). Speaking of which, when I was younger, I love to create worlds with legos and card towers. I designed a game book and dreamt of creating a Doraemon world in Flash.
I have never taken easily to Math. It just seems so abstract and untethered from reality for me. Also inpractical. But physics I excelled and enjoyed. It made sense. I could project it into the physical world. Chemistry not so much, and biology was pretty much just a bunch of facts I memorised. So pursuits like trading doesn't appeal to me at all, and I'm only dabbling with algorithmic trading because I like the system building side of things.
Consolidating all these factors, as I grapple towards my Life's Task, a few things are clear. I am definitely going to stay being an entrepreneur. I can't imagine any other way where I work for other people. I love the process of 0 to 1, where I take a germ of a secret, project it into a vision, plan it out, gather smart people to work on it, and materialise it in the world. I love leading and socialising and interacting and impacting people. I also love communicating, be it in written or spoken form. I enjoy diversity, in the people I interact with, the places I work in, the domains I cross. I love studying reality and reflecting on it. And I also love making something magical that people enjoy. I am deeply people-oriented. Maybe something involving community and audience-building? Where I tell stories and impact people.
On mission, climate change is one of the biggest problems of our generation. I have to do something along this path.
What I won't do is politics (no sense of creation), running steady operations (too boring, no creativity), pure programming and solitary work such as mathematical research. My ideal workstyle is an alternate between solitary and team work. I don't enjoy structure and regimentation very much, as I have experienced in the miltary. I really don't enjoy forms for forms' sake.