Signposts to Finding Your Path
What we thought we wanted, we may not want anymore
Life is change.
Sometimes that change comes fluidly, with new opportunities and life stages arising organically. Sometimes we hit a metaphorical brick wall, and change is forced upon us.
How do we figure out how to adapt to a new situation, or choose between opportunities? Is there a signpost we can use to point our way in the direction leading to happiness and fulfillment?
The surprising signpost inside your brain
You may have a life purpose that fires you up. These are what are called Massively Transformative Purposes. You might want to stop racial injustice, or end hunger, or develop abundant clean energy.
Or you may have a vague sense that you want your life to have meaning, without knowing what the meaning is. The meaning could come from your job. Or your job could be a paycheck to fund your true meaning.
Many people loved studying a particular subject in school, but then find that the jobs are no fun.
In The Art of Impossible, Steven Kotler says the best predictor of life success is Match Fit.
What is Match Fit? It is how well your job matches your unique skills, interests, and passions.
There are plenty of online tests that claim to identify your strengths and skills. But there’s an easier way to do it. Look at your past. Especially, look at what you were doing when you were about 4–6 years old.
Your unique gifts
In the book Peak, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool describe the best ways to learn new skills. But there are some abilities, like having perfect pictch, which must be trained for at an early age.
In a study, all pre-school children who were trained in a certain way developed this ability. Their brains did this “by developing certain circuits that enabled perfect pitch.” These circuits needed to be formed by age 6, or they would not form.
Another area that needs to form early is the ability to think like a mathematician. My undergraduate degree is in math. I loved the idea that there were perfect and immutable ideals that our messy human world could aspire to. These ideals could never be achieved, except through math.
During a job interview, the interviewer was testing me on various areas of statistics. At one point, he mentioned something I was unfamiliar with, and described it briefly. I immediately got the point of what he was saying, and could relate it to other concepts I did know. His response was, “Oh, you have math brain.”
I knew exactly what he meant. There are the people who think math is the stuff you use to balance your checking account. Maybe you use it to calculate tips in restaurants. And there are the people who think math is an eloquent and beautiful language. That second group has “math brain”.
I hadn’t been born with this arcane talent. It’s because of how I was trained as a small child. I built math-specific circuits in my brain.
You, too, have unique circuits and pathways in your brain, based on your childhood. These circuits and pathways form the signposts that point to your Match Fit.
Finding your unique brain circuits
All of us have certain skills and aptitudes that others do not. For us, these skills are trivially easy. Often, we can’t understand why others struggle with what seems so basic and obvious.
As a child, my brother was gifted at model building. He could look at the picture on the front of a model kit. That was all he needed to know how all the pieces inside would combine to create that model. He never bothered reading the directions, even for models with hundreds of pieces. Even today, he can put together IKEA furniture faster than anyone I know. And he still doesn’t bother reading directions.
At the other end of the spectrum, my husband doesn’t understand spatial relationships. He once spent nearly an hour attempting to assemble an in-out desk tray. It had two identical trays and four identical legs connecting them. He gave up in disgust before figuring out how the pieces went together.
Whatever my brother sees when he looks at objects, my husband does not. Their brains contain different circuits.
Look to your daily behavior as a child
The secret to figuring out which circuits your brain contains is what you did on a daily basis as a small child. Ideally, this would be around the ages of 4–6.
Sometime around age 4, I discovered a book on “The New Math” on our living room coffee table. My father was trying to understand the math that replaced memorized arithmetic. (I assume he wanted to be able to help my brother with his homework.) I started reading that book, and was fascinated. Day after day, I went back to it, immersing myself in the basic concepts of math. I was wiring “math brain” circuits.
My brother’s favorite toys were building blocks of all varieties. He loved Lincoln Logs, generic blocks, cardboard bricks, and Legos. The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright played with Froebel blocks at an early age. He credited them with developing his own architectural thought. And Wright’s son is the one who invented Lincoln Logs. It’s no surprise, then, that my brother went on to study architecture. Or that his greatest architectural hero was Frank Lloyd Wright. They had similar circuits wired into their brains.
A launching point, not a limit
These early circuits that you wired into your brain are not limits. Armed with an understanding of learning, my husband is improving his spatial relationships. Some day soon, he may be able to pack his own suitcase, or fit groceries into a refrigerator.
They are, though, good guides to the special and unique way that you see the world. They show the way to your super power.
You probably won’t be repeating exactly what you did as a child. After all, there aren’t many jobs available for people who play with blocks. (“Not many” is not the same as “none”. The Legoland amusement park hires people to build constructions out of Lego blocks.)
But the way that you wired your brain as a child provides a great launching point. These circuits are ways that you can uniquely contribute to the world. They point the way to your life purpose. It shows you “how” you can do “what” you want to do.
Use your unique brain circuits as a launching pad to success!
A world of dinosaurs
My husband spent his early years playing with dinosaurs. But unlike many small children, he did not have dinosaur battles. No, he created fantastic imaginary worlds populated by dinosaurs. He designed an entire dinosaur civilization.
He loved dinosaurs. You might wonder what sort of a career he could have, other than paleontology. Given that he has asthma, digging in the dirt all day for fossils was never going to be a viable career choice.
But he wasn’t wiring his brain just for dinosaurs. He was wiring his brain to think in systems. He was learning to understand how all the different parts of a society worked together.
Those circuits helped him as a technical writer. He explained how different parts of a software or hardware package worked together. Those circuits helped him to write a unique financial advisory newsletter. He explained how changes in one area affected unexpected parts of the economy.
Finally, he embarked upon his life service, A Celebration Society. In it, he explains how the different parts of society can be reimagined. We can create a society that embodies better, more life-affirming values. Those circuits in his brain made him uniquely suited to combining interlocking systems.
So what is your world of dinosaurs?
What circuits did you train into your brain at a young age? And how does that give you a unique way of looking at the world?
Conclusion
You already have the secret pointing you to a meaningful life hidden inside your brain. The circuits that were wired at an early age form your unique way of looking at the world.
They also make up the patterns of thought where you can become a superstar. This is because you will have a great Match Fit between your career and your inclinations.
There were things you did as a small child, day after day. You may have done them simply because you loved them. Or you may have done them because your parents insisted that you do them.
As an adult, you have a deep understanding based on that training which others will never have. It shapes the way all other things you learned and experienced are understood.
That is how you can contribute to the world in a way no one else can.
Ready to have a better tomorrow?
I’ve created a guide to help you increase your confidence and improve your life. If you follow these tips, you will level up your life very quickly!
