Three ideas from three books that redefined how I think about learning, work, and passion

Adaptability is the most important skill

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari redefines what it takes to thrive in today’s fast-evolving world:

“The most important skills for surviving and flourishing in the 21st century are not specific skills. Instead… how to master new skills again and again throughout your life.”

Constant learning is an inescapable reality. But can you do it laterally? Can you pick a new subject and build a working understanding of it? How quickly can you do it? To be able to pick a new skill in any field, learn fast and apply becomes the most valuable (meta) skill to have.

Find your natural inclinations (and build upon them)

So, how do you learn faster? And what should you learn to make work feel like play? In Mastery, Robert Greene offers a powerful starting point: look inward to your past.

“The first step then is always inward. You search the past for signs of that inner voice or force. You clear away the other voices that might confuse you—parents and peers.”

Find what you did just for the sake of doing the thing, in the absence of external validation and reward. What were you doing even if no one was watching. That is your natural inclination. That is where you can move fast. And moving fast is important because as the novelty of a new endeavour wears off, if you're not yet good enough, you'll either have to push through with will power (limited resource) or you will drop it altogether (high friction).

Pursue your passion is bad advice.

I know because I did. I backpacked across the country and made youtube videos. I thought I was passionate about making videos. I got a few thousand subscribers. Not enough to pay the bills. And it got tiring. Passion became work and then the passion vanished.

In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport flips the feel-good advice:

“The ‘passion hypothesis’ … is based on a false premise: that preexisting passions are both common and preordained. In reality, true passion is rare—and often unreliable—and it’s extremely hard to identify it before putting in the hard work.”

To be certain of what you are passionate about is extremely difficult, and you are often unknowingly lying to yourself. And even if you do identify your passion, if you attach the expectation of an outcome to it, how long does it take before the passion fizzles out?

Instead, get really good at something. Passion will follow.