Follow instructions, shut up, do as you’re told, don’t stand out too much, don’t ask too many questions, use a blue ink pen, do not color over the lines, go to university, get a “good job” and you’ll be taken care of. This is what they teach us in school.

They don’t teach us to lead, make art, and solve interesting problems - to walk a road without a map.

This is not how it works. Nobody will take care of you. Nobody will come and save you. You either find your own path, or you don’t. Nobody cares if you don’t.

You can get the best education from the best university, but it doesn’t guarantee anything. It’s just paper. What really matters is not the paper, but how well we can do our work.

To be the absolute best in our field, we have to do what really fascinates us. So that we can put countless hours of study and work into it effortlessly, so it wouldn’t be a drag - a chore. We would do the work because we want to do it not because we have to do it.

This is step number 1 to mastery: know yourself, find out your “why (you get up in the morning).” Step number 2 would be to start walking that road - alone.

What if it’s the dead end? Go back to step 1. I guess the solution is to do this as many times until we find what clicks.

( I wrote about this before, “but since no one was listening, it needs to be told again” (André Gide) I believe this is the future; there will be two types of people: the successful who are the creators and/or are highly qualified specialists of their field and secondly, the people who receive basic income, consume what the creators make and mostly watch ads on their smartphones.

Machines are the future as well. Most things will be automated, so the typical factory-type simple jobs will all disappear. However, someone needs to handle complex machines - which will be done by the highly specialized people.

If we do what we don’t like, then we can’t be anything but mediocre at it. Mediocre can be easily replaced by (slightly) less mediocre people or (later) by computers/machines.

This is the new economy and reality we live in - everyone has to make their own fortune. There is absolutely no guarantee that an angel employer will take you under its wing and feed you until you retire. You could be out the next day.

KRISTJAN
Taipei, 3am in the morning