Focus on What You Love
Go narrow and deep: explore different styles within the one thing you are passionate about rather than a thousand random things, and you make real progress in what you love.
Dandapani uses a piano example to show what a useful year of exploration looks like: four countries, four styles, one instrument you already love. He contrasts that with sampling random things you never wanted and never thought about beforehand.
What this talk covers
- One source of confusion is overwhelming the subconscious mind, which you do by consuming too much information or having far too many experiences.
- If his daughter loved playing the piano, he would send her for three months each to Eastern Europe, China, Africa and America to learn four different styles of playing.
- At the end of that year she can say which style she truly loves and which ones she does not, and that is what she goes deeper into.
- Exploring within a category is what makes real progress in a passion, and brings contentment, joy and fulfillment from just doing it.
- The alternative is trying random things that you never really wanted to do and never gave any thought to before doing them.
So go narrow and deep.Dandapani
Questions
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Pick something you are already passionate about and explore the different forms of it. His example is a year spent learning four styles of piano playing in four places, three months at a time.
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He asks you to go narrow and deep instead. Explore within the category you are passionate about, rather than trying a spread of random things you never gave any thought to.
Transcript
275 words · 1:33
One source of confusion is overwhelming the subconscious mind. And you can do that by consuming too much information or having way too many experiences in your life. If my daughter loved playing the piano,
then what I would say to her is, take a gap here. But in this gap here, why don't you go to Eastern Europe for three months
and learn Eastern European piano playing? Then go to China and learn the Chinese way of playing the piano, for example. then go here, maybe to Africa and learn this style of playing the piano and then maybe go
to America and learn this style of playing the piano for three months. So in a year you've gone to four different places, examined four different styles. Now my daughter is passionate about playing the piano and after she's done her gap year of exploring different styles of playing the piano, she can come back and say, you know, dad, I don't really like these three.
I mean, they're okay, but I really love the Eastern European way of playing the piano. And that's what I want to dive deeper into. And I said, that's great. So then you can explore within the category.
Then you are actually making progress in pursuing your passion and getting deeper into something that brings you a feeling of contentment, a feeling of joy, a feeling of being uplifted and fulfillment from just doing it, rather than trying out in different random things, none of which you really want to do, but you've never given any thought about it before even
doing it. So go narrow and deep.