making the most of your time on earth
Moontower Munchies #124
Friends,
A Moontower hobby-horse is the tension between the importance of “matching” to the work we should do and the dangers of premature optimization most recognizable in the 35-year-old doctor/dentist who realized a dumb 18-year-old chose their life path for them.
I muse on the topic frequently because I sense that spending 40 hours or more of your week in a vocation aligned with your likes, skills, and goals makes for a happier life, less defensiveness, and a better menu of compromises.
But career and life advice is often narrowly practical (“take the best paying job”) leading to local maxima or vacuous platitude (“follow your bliss”).
Chris Rock once said, "You can be anything you're good at, as long as they're hiring”
Real. But vaguely unsatisfying.
It would be nice to have some structure to approach the profoundly important question of “what do we do”.
Well, today we get something nice.
It’s author and NYU professor Suzie Welch’s framework to “becoming you”. I discovered it from her interview with Dan Harris as she promotes her new book.
Why this landed for me
"The limits of my language are the limits of my world. As soon as we get words for it then our world can start to write itself." — Wittgenstein
We aren’t getting into a drawn-out debate of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, but that quote captures the value of this discussion. We don’t have structure around this problem because a lot guidance counselor speak feels squishy.
Welch is refreshingly practical without losing any respect or appreciation for how this problem is innately philosophical. We will go deeper in a moment, but just to introduce the framework, Welch breaks the decision into three measurable, explorable dimensions that form the intersection of:
values
aptitudes
economic viability
Her definition of these terms is what pulled me in. It’s a major achievement, in my eyes, for the language of career advice.
I cover the major points in the summary below but if this topic is of interest to you either for yourself, your children, or your parents (seriously…just see the notes at the end!), I urge you to listen to it or share it with someone who needs it. [Welch says you probably need to be at least 16 for it to feel useful.]
Before going in I just want to highlight her thoughts on happiness versus purpose, because I strongly agree.
“Happiness is not a goal but a byproduct of living with purpose…Almost everybody who is living in their purpose has a kind of exquisite aliveness, which is pretty much joy."
She jokes about "the happiness industrial complex" and believes "there's just a lot more promise to trying to figure out what your purpose is" rather than chasing an often undefined and fleeting emotional state. Or as Denis Leary noted 40 years ago:
Happiness is a cigarette butt, or a chocolate chip cookie, or a five-second orgasm
The extreme situation is the proof. A survivor carrying on or helping others survive may not be happy, but sustains via purpose. I don’t care for sarcasm (etymology is fitting: “to tear flesh”) but there’s probably been a few books written about the importance of purpose. You might even look around at the senselessness around us and wonder if there is a crisis of purpose.
Personally, I don’t think there is a Meaning of life. I believe you create your own meaning. It probably has something to do with what you’d want your loved ones to say about you at your funeral.
I’ll mostly stick to summarizing, it stands great on its own, but there’s just a couple spots where I inject a thought.
[Fyi, I organized and re-factored the transcript with Claude]. The general format is topic and select quotes. It follows a sequential progression.
Core Framework Overview
The "Becoming You" Methodology: A systematic approach to finding your "area of transcendence" (purpose) through understanding three key components:
Values — Your deeply held beliefs that galvanize actions and decisions
Aptitudes — Your cognitive wiring and how the world experiences your personality
Economically Viable Interests — Work that can sustain you financially while engaging you
"It's better to be the author of your life than the editor. There's just so many editors around us. The world will edit us soon enough. Don't edit yourself."
"I'm not the police. I'm not coming to get you if you don't live by your values, aptitudes, and economically viable interests. I'm just telling you that this is one way to think about how to live that might get you to your purpose which feels again exquisitely alive with less torment."
The Three D's of Living
Default Mode: Living in reactive mode, exhausting and discouraging
Deliberation: Starting to wrap your arms around life with some intention
Design: Living with a theory of yourself and your values, allowing for detours but with clear direction
"We never figure out who we are when we're standing still. Most people do not figure out who they are standing still until they have to, like a crisis happens."
[Kris: the design part reminded me of Bill Burnett and Dave Evans]
Deep Dive: Values
The Problem with Values
Only 17% of people can identify what a value actually is
Values have been "hijacked by politics"
People confuse values with virtues
"Values are the deeply held beliefs that galvanize our actions and decisions. They're what we believe."
"You can't just ask somebody [their values]. It's not like asking somebody what's your name. You have to ask from a lot of different angles."
"You have a right to whatever values you want in whatever level you want. If you're not hurting anybody, your values are your values. All you need to do is live them if you want to be authentic."
[Kris: I found this approach profound in its practicality but what I find to be practical, you might find despicable. I’ll explain what I mean at the end of the list…]
The 15 Core Values
Scope — Stimulation, excitement, new experiences vs. predictability and routine
"I had a student describe scope as wanting to touch everybody's brain. It's sort of the Bianca Jagger on the back of a white horse going into Studio 54 dream of your life."
Radius — How big a crater your life would leave on the world; desire to change the world
"Radius... this is if your life was a bomb and you dropped it on the earth how big a crater would it leave."
Family Centrism — How much family is your first, second, and third priority
"Every decision and action you make is about family."
Belonging — Connection, community, being in groups vs. smaller circles
"Somebody who goes to 16 weddings a year, you know, they probably got belonging off the charts."
Cosmos — Faith as an organizing principle; religious/spiritual orientation
Agency — Self-determination, driving your own bus vs. collaboration
"They've got to be the author. No one is the boss of them."
Beholderism — How much you care about how things look (spaces, stuff, yourself)
Non Sibi — "Not oneself"; motivation to help people
"I've had students say to me, 'I don't care what company I work at, what industry I work in, I don't care about any of that. I've got to be helping people day in and day out.'"
Work Centrism — How much work is an organizing principle of life
"For me, work centrism is off the charts. I love my work…people who have high work centrism like me have been called workaholics our whole life. And I've always thought to myself, 'aholic' - it's not a disease to me. It's my value. I like working. I'm not hurting anybody."
Affluence — Your relationship with money and financial security
"I've had people go through this process and say, 'Look, my value is financial security. I just want to be able to rent an apartment near my store.' And I've had other people say... they want a helipad per child. And they both would tell you that financial security is a value."
Achievement — Being seen as successful in conventional terms
"I've also had MBA students for which it's not a value at all. And when they see that result come back they're like 'yeah no wonder I feel like I'm wearing a suit that's three sizes too small every day.'"
Luminance — Fame, celebrity, being known
"We're in a generation where 75% of people have said that they want to be influencers as their job."
Voice — Creative self-expression, authenticity, letting your "freak flag fly"
"I can't tell you how often I get young women, typically women of color, very unfortunately, who have voice as a value of number one or number two, but how much they're living it, the variance between how much they have it and how much they're living it can be up to 98-99%."
Eudaimonia — Self-care, pleasure, leisure, feeling good
"Many of my students - in some classes more than 60% of them have eudaimonia as their number one value. They do not want to postpone joy. They don't want to postpone feeling good. You can't blame them given what they've seen in this world."
Place — Where you want to live, geographic preferences
"You've seen many people whose lives have been driven by just saying 'look I'm not leaving Milwaukee.'"
[Kris: I’m back. Notice how Suzy doesn’t judge or speculate on the source or content of the values. Depending on your own values, you might find some of these values to be defects, moral failings, or insecurities.
That right there is my diagnosis of our general malaise. Social media has thrown everyone into the same room, amplified the tails, and now there’s no way out. We found out who exists. It doesn’t matter what alignments you have, you now can see the anti-world.
But any long-time reader who knows my zeroth commandment, will understand why I accept Suzy’s proposal. Getting riled up over others’ values is pushing a boulder uphill forever. You will never be satisfied with the range of human values. You must find a way to proceed even though others are “wrong” because that’s never going to change. For most of humanity, there is no perceived distance between their agenda and the truth. The faster you accept this, the more you will make of your time on earth.]
Values Stability and Recognition
"I'm going to lovingly and gently push back for a moment and say I actually think our values are very stable and my guess is that it was always a value of yours probably from when you were a young boy and you sublimated it and crushed it and denied it and finally when you started living it you felt authentic."
"It's very very important for us to find out how closely we're living with each one of those values. You know what's our variance on each one? This is all data that we need to know if we want to figure out what our purpose is."
Discover your values with The Values Bridge assessment tool and how in harmony you are living with those values
Deep Dive: Aptitudes
Cognitive Wiring Examples
Generalist vs. Specialist
Brainstormer vs. Idea Contributor
Future Focuser vs. Present Focuser
"I really have a son who's a specialist and he's a classic specialist and he loves music and he knows absolutely every single thing about his type of music that he loves, every artist that's ever been in it, every, you know, buys vinyl albums and yet, when you go out to dinner with him and you start saying like, 'Wow, did you just hear about the new pope?' He may not know about it."
Personality as Aptitude
Critical Insight: Your personality is how the world experiences you, not how you think you are.
"Everybody tells you what their personality is. 'Oh I'm a good listener. I'm compassionate. I'm very kind. I'm funny.' Right? And that's maybe true maybe but actually your personality is how the world experiences you."
The Cost of Misalignment
"Sometimes you end up doing work for many more years and sometimes for your whole life long that is not - it's not an aptitude... and you do it because of expedience or you do it because of expectations. It can cause a great deal of discomfort and self-doubt."
The Dominant Hand Analogy
"When you sign your name with your dominant hand, it feels very natural. You could do it all day long, easy and fun. But if you put that pen in your non-dominant hand, you would eventually with practice be able to sign your name. It would never be natural. It would never be fun. It would never look exactly right…it's usually a lot more comfortable, enjoyable, and successful just emotionally to be working in concert with your aptitudes rather than against them."
Deep Dive: Economically Viable Interests
The Shrinking Aperture Problem
High school graduates know about 7 jobs on average
College students know 9-11 jobs
People in their 30s think there are only 3-4 viable jobs for them
Reality: 135 industries and 12 mega trends
"The idea is to make sure we haven't shut our aperture prematurely or for no reason."
"What ends up happening in life is our aperture gets smaller and smaller about what kind of work even exists."
The Practical Reality
"People search for certain kinds of work that calls them intellectually or emotionally but it has to be able to pay you according to what your value around affluence is. So it's both an understanding how big the economy is and also a listening to yourself about what is calling you."
Why "Follow Your Passion" Fails
"If you're good at your passion, do it. But the problem is a lot of people... You're just not good at it. That's why we got aptitudes in there. You got to be able to do it. Otherwise, you're setting yourself up to fail."
Assorted ideas
Relationships and Values
Most people spend their lives negotiating their values with partners, family, culture.
"Once you know your values, you want to talk about them with the person you're in relationship with."
"It's very very interesting to take the world on where you can actually, for the first time, live my values and express my values without having to negotiate my values."
The Awkward Dinner Party Revelation
"One member of the partnership would get a variance at the end of like 7% - you're living very close to your values, you're living an authentic life - and the other member of the couple would get like a 98% variance and there'd be this sort of stunned silence. They knew exactly what was going on."
"The husband said, 'Yes, that is correct. We are living Mary's dream of a life.'"
[Kris: Suzy regretted giving the evaluation at a dinner party and never did it again]
Universal Applicability
Age Range: Successfully used with people ages 16-78
"I don't think there's any time not to be asking these questions."
Demographics and Life Stages
Working Mothers: "They're working mothers generally... who are like, 'Okay, like I gave up this piece of myself because I'm going through that process. I'm in that period of my life where my kids need all of me and my work needs all of me and I can't figure out who I am or what I should be doing.'"
Men in Their 40s: "I think 40 is sort of when they're like 'is this all there is? I did - I mean I just' and so for some reason architects, product managers, sort of men in their 40s show up and do the workshop and say, 'Yep, okay, it has to be a reset here.'"
Retirees: "Sometimes people love this - love going through this protocol... who are just retired and they go, 'Okay, I'm going into my third half, if you will.' And 'I don't want to blow it. I don't want to blow it. What are my values? What are my aptitudes? What am I interested in?'"
People in Their 50s-60s: "This shit's real - like it's the clock is now ticking. I hear it. I may have 30 more years, but I don't want to waste them because I have not been."
Language and Transformation
"One of the reasons I like people doing the process in groups is because they need to have a language….I've seen though them come back once they get in and it's particular - get the language of values because it's sort of like the scales fall from their eyes and say, 'Oh my god, all along this was about radius or all along this was about cosmos or agency and I just didn't get it. But now I can.'"
Tools and Resources
The Values Bridge — Values assessment tool (thevaluesbridge.com)
Book: "Becoming You: The Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life"
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"You could be the master of your fate, you could be the captain of your soul. But you have to realize that life is coming from you and not at you, and that takes time"
Great write-up ! Many thanks for sharing ...
I loved this. I sit in my car for lunch breaks and typically ponder the existence of life's semantics. Each actor has the ability to find meaning; yet the loss of appetite to do so, or convincing themselves it is explicitly improbable seems to be trending - anecdotally speaking.
Ive adopted the belief that free will is non-existent, and through this, I gain some control over my future decision. Unfortunately most don't recognize that it takes time and effort to discover these virtues.