1/ Do not try to understand your life in terms of your skills or passions. They are NOT predictive of what you'll end up doing.
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2/ The best predictor of your life outcome is what persistently annoys you about your life situation: your itches.
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3/ If nobody is trying too hard to stop you doing what you want, your itches will determine what you do.
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4/ Good exercise to figure out your itches is to ask what your life would have been like 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400 years ago
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5/ That's coming of age in: 1964, 1914, 1814, 1614, 1214, 414, 1187 BC, 4387 BC. All of post hunter-gatherer history basically.
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6/ Spanning all history averages out skills of era and grand narrative biases (passions). That leaves basic itches that drive you.
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7/ Do it with some, but not too much historical accuracy. Adopt artistic license. Then ask what's common to those counterfactual lives.
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9/ People sometimes say I'd have been academic or Dr. Johnson type in another era. That's skills. Only 1 of my what-ifs was even close.
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10/ Unless you're a true child prodigy type, skills you develop are context dependent. But itches are not.
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I've always imagined I'd be a Thomas Jefferson-like farmer ordering seeds and farming journals from overseas. Always experimenting.
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You have to get more historically accurate for the exercise to work. Enough that stories at diff time points differ.
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How well have you done at getting away from strong community ties?


