What Remains
Day 6 - 12 / 1000
Most of us are living by definitions we never actually chose for ourselves.
What success looks like. What confidence really is. What passion is supposed to feel like. Who deserves a place in your life.
This week, I am questioning all of it.
What has been on my mind this week:
Confidence vs. Ego
What is left of you that is valuable?
What is the lie about “passion”?
The gap between your taste and your current skill
What is the role of boredom?
Quitting
What is the most underrated trait to look for in a friend?
1. Confidence vs. Ego
How can a young person spot the difference in themselves?
There is a thin line between confidence and ego.
Sometimes it is hard to distinguish which is which.
From my perspective, confidence is like a feedback loop. After we have done something enough times and gathered some data from it, we become confident in that particular thing because we proved to ourselves that we are capable of doing it over and over. We can also have confidence in ourselves without that feedback loop, but this is the point where things might get blurry and hard to differentiate between confidence and ego sometimes.
A person can believe in themselves, and therefore be confident even before starting the task. In this case it is more like hope in one’s own capabilities, either gained from a previous experience, or just naturally believing that if the last task was managed, why would this one be any different.
It is often necessary to have confidence, or hope, before starting something, because otherwise we wouldn’t try anything new.
If I had to define confidence, I would define it as self-belief and hope for things to go the right way and in our favor. This creates positive thoughts which help overcome the challenge, support us during hard times, and push us through to make it to the end.
Ego, on the other hand, is often labeled as something negative. Especially when thinking about egotistical people who can’t behave in society, are rude, disrespectful, and the worst combination of all is when these people happen to be rich and famous as well.
I’m not surprised that we give ego such a negative label. But ego in its nature is neither good nor bad, and we all have it.
Everyone, to some extent, is comparing themselves to someone else, bragging about something, proclaiming things, and thinking they are better than others. Especially in Western society, it is a big part of culture to do so.
So what is the difference between confidence and ego?
I would describe it this way.
Confidence is built and gained over time from our own experience. Ego is empty, self-promoting, and often misleading behavior that is not always backed by real results or experiences from one’s own life.
2. What is left of you that is valuable?
If you stripped away your job title and your hobbies, what is left of you that is valuable?
Everything.
Job title, hobbies, friend groups, or family members don’t define whether I’m valuable. Every person on this planet has value from the moment they are born. Philosophers and scientists say that the chance of even being born as a human is extraordinary, roughly 1 in 4 trillion. The very fact that we are all here today is a miracle. Yet, we often tie our value to something external that we don’t control.
Take the job title. We identify with our job titles so deeply that when we lose our jobs, some of us become paralyzed, depressed, or even lose touch with ourselves.
The same counts for hobbies. We might get injured and lose the ability to engage in our favorite activities. We feel we have lost our value because we can no longer do what always defined us.
I want you to remember this. You are valuable by nature. You are enough as you are, without any change to the inside or the outside.
We often get dragged down by the opinions of others, by someone else having a bad day and telling us something that hurts, or putting expectations on us which are not ours but theirs.
We are meant to learn, grow, build, and aim for higher things, but that doesn’t mean your value is out there to be achieved.
You are valuable every minute of your life.
So don’t forget that. Be better for yourself and know your worth.
3. What is the lie about “passion”?
What is the lie about “passion” that young professionals need to stop believing?
Passion doesn’t come first.
We were told that we should follow our passion and find work that resonates with that. But how can we know that something is our passion without spending enough time doing it, examining it, trying different angles of it, and last but not least, asking ourselves if this is something that has passion potential?
I believed this myth for a very long time myself. I wanted to follow my passion and do work that was seamlessly intertwined with it. Well, I found out that the work I thought was going to be my passion wasn’t it. It didn’t happen just once but multiple times, and the lesson was kind of the same.
What I learned from my past experiences is that we need to go and try things to see if we like them so much that we can see ourselves there long-term, if it feels like a game instead of work, if we are looking forward to going there every day or only on Fridays because of the Swedish tables for lunch.
It is necessary for young professionals, including myself, to learn from this and stop believing the myth that passion is going to appear just like that in our heads with the first choice of work.
The same principle goes for hobbies as well. How can you know if you love boxing if you have never trained? How can you know if you love mountain biking if you have never gone on a ride and don’t even own such a bike?
You said your passion is art. What does it mean? Do you go to galleries every week, do you study art on your own, do you paint at home every spare moment you can find, or does it just sound cool and sophisticated to look at old paintings while you have no idea what you are supposed to do there with your time and your own thoughts?
On the other hand, to be transparent, passion doesn’t have a universal formula or explanation.
My passion for basketball can be that I just love to shoot a ball in the backyard. Your passion for basketball can be that you watch every match of the NBA season, know the performance of all the players of your favorite team, and have an NBA jersey framed on the wall of your living room.
We can both say we are passionate about basketball, but our definition of passion is fundamentally different.
Or is it passion at all, in the end?
4. The gap between your taste and your current skill
How should a young person handle the gap between their taste (what they like) and their current skill (what they can create)?
This is a question I would like to find an answer to myself. I feel that my taste is up to date, that I have a feel for design, but my skills are not yet good enough for me to create such things myself.
Let’s deconstruct this together.
Despite the fact that I don’t know the answer, my hypothesis is simple and rooted in logic.
Keep working on those skills and you will bridge the gap. Having taste is one thing, but having actual skills that take whatever is in the mind and bring it to life is another. No one magically went from being a beginner to being a pro in one evening session of watching YouTube tutorials.
To master anything, it takes a heap of time.
You need to be willing to invest that time to develop those skills so you can bridge the gap between taste and actual delivery. Or, if you have money and that particular skill is something you don’t need personally in the long-term, you can always just pay someone skilled in that industry to bring your ideas to life.
But speaking of actual skill you want to have in the future, I believe that the only way to master it is to spend time learning, trying, failing, and going beyond that.
Find a mentor, ask your favorite creator, test things yourself.
All of this, the whole journey from where you are now to where you want to be, is just patience, time, and actual work invested in what you want.
Where is your current gap?
5. What is the role of boredom?
What is the role of boredom in a high-performance life, and why should we stop running from it?
Boredom is our gateway drug that we forgot we have access to.
Stoics in Greece, Romans, and many others from a couple of thousand years ago saw boredom as something beneficial for humans. The fact is that they didn’t even know that what they were experiencing was boredom. They were deep thinkers, and boredom was a time when they would think about life, think about the next steps, think about philosophy, think about strategy, think about creative acts.
Some of the most unique human creations were born from boredom.
In today’s world, it is increasingly hard to be bored because of all the media and devices surrounding us constantly at every moment of our daily lives. Today’s role of boredom is like a gateway drug, with the small note that it should be used more often and by everyone.
Boredom brings clarity to our minds without outside stimulation. Boredom gives us time to look inside ourselves for answers to our questions.
In a high-performance life, it is the key to staying at the same level and moving to the next one. We should stop running from it because it is the only way to stay connected to ourselves. Not only when we are making big decisions, but often enough for our own sanity of mind.
Boredom also doesn’t need to be boring.
Use the time to go for a walk in nature, without music, without your phone. Just you, your own thoughts, and the nature around you. It is increasingly important to find moments like these in our everyday lives, because otherwise we will be slowly but certainly eaten alive by the amount of media coming our way if we don’t learn how to regulate it and how to regulate ourselves.
So, go and be bored.
6. Quitting
When is “quitting” a sign of intelligence rather than a sign of weakness?
Quitting is a sign of intelligence when you leave behind something that isn’t serving you anymore in any way. A job that only stresses you, doesn’t pay you enough for your value, and whose colleagues suck, is a job that is asking to be quit.
People often fear quitting. They feel insecure about their life and next steps. Despite the fact that their job is bad and they hate it, they stay there and convince themselves that it is not so bad, just so they don’t have to quit. Rather, they stay and keep suffering and wasting time on something absolutely not worth their time and effort.
Quitting not only a job, but also relationships, deals, collaborations, even family, is completely fine when we understand the circumstances and nature of these situations and relationships.
Every one of us can be happy and deserves to be happy, but you are the one behind the steering wheel, not anyone else.
On the other hand, there are many weak people who quit way too fast and for the wrong reasons. If you haven’t invested any effort to solve things first and you’re heading straight to quitting, then it is weakness driving that decision, not intelligence.
If you give up too quickly and without reason on people just because of small things and without a proper try first, that is weakness too.
Don’t mix quitting with weakness. It can be the best thing you can do for your life. In the right situation and at the right time, it is intelligent to do so and you should go after it.
7. What is the most underrated trait to look for in a friend?
What is the most underrated trait to look for in a friend or business partner?
We all know the story.
When we are growing up and during our school years, most of us have a lot of friends. There is almost always someone to go out with, go for a coffee, or just hang out and play video games or something. We don’t really look intellectually at this friend and examine them in a way that considers all of their potential flaws, bad habits, and in the worst case, bad influence on us.
We have something in common. We can hang out with them, so we just do it. We are also at an early age where we haven’t yet experienced much of the bad side of the world.
Everything changes once we finish school and leave home to go live the adult life we had been waiting for so long.
As we get our first jobs, meet new colleagues who aren’t all our age, and have neighbours, things start to feel different. People hurt us, they are mean to us, they betray us. Suddenly, we feel we can’t trust anyone just like that anymore. Life connections become transactional and strategic. We choose more carefully with whom we spend our time, the topics we discuss, and how deep we let others see into us during these conversations.
We are connecting, in a certain way, to our hunter-gatherer instincts. We are looking for the right people to build our tribe with.
The trait to look for in a friend is, first and foremost, loyalty and truth-telling.
We want to spend time and build relationships with someone who is willing to invest their time into us the same way as we are willing to invest our time into them. We don’t want to be building tribes or friendships with someone who is always late, or always has excuses for why they can’t show up, or with someone who is using us only for their own gain, or someone who is always lying to us about all sorts of things, or someone who is always talking about others behind their back.
Long-lasting friendships are built on the ability to open up to each other about our deepest thoughts, fears, and joys.
It is about traits that allow us to build stronger bonds with others, and allow us to be who we really are without masks or barriers.
We want to feel heard, understood, and to have a sense of belonging. This makes us stronger together with these individuals, which would then lead to building long-term partnerships and collaborations that, over time, build a community of like-minded people and finally tribes that can not only survive but thrive together.
A similar principle applies to business partners.
We want to be able to fully trust this person, know who this person is, what to expect in hard times, and share the same long-term vision for the future.
Without this, the business will break. The adrenaline from the beginning, where everything was about this beautiful vision, eventually turns into stress and problems. And if those aren’t solved efficiently and with calmness, the business will go down, and the relationship with this person most probably too.
What trait in friendships is the most underrated for you?
I aim to deliver the most personal stories, insights, and lessons from real-world experiences I have lived through over more than a decade. As I continue building my life and trying to be a better version of myself, I am documenting this journey and the lessons from my life for people who might need to hear them.
- Lukáš