Deciding To Go With My Passion. Fuck The Money.

[Vladz0r]

In hopes of inspiring people trying to discover their life purpose, I wanted to share my story. 

This is the story of someone who went into college for the money. He tried, under pressure, to turn his major into a passion, instead of turning his passions into a career.

 

My situation:

I'm finishing up college at a computer science major. I went into the field because I thought there'd be a lot of money in it, and that from going to school, I'd get my ass kicked into high gear and be able to get a good job. I was into PC gaming, like a lot of other CS majors, and chose the career because of that. I didn't think about being a creator, or the huge impact I could have or anything like that.

From at least 5 years back, I started really getting into anime and Japanese culture. I started studying the language 2 years ago, and I started to actually see the potential of what I can do with it. I enjoy reading and writing, and I enjoy a well translated manga or visual novel. I think that in a way, translation can be a form of art. A good translation of a translated manga can literally make or break the impact of the work. In this sense, as a translator, you're interpreting the original story and conveying it to an English (or whatever 2nd language) audience. It's a tireless and meticulous career, working on translation, but I also mastering the language will be viable long-term. I worry a bit for betting it all on mastering a language, but I don't believe that prose in Asian languages can be translated into English prose by AI in my lifetime. The written language is so contextual and requires a real brain to determine what's going on in context. 

Mastery: Whenever Leo talks about the mastery process and coming to enjoy the work itself, it just rung so true with my casual study of Japanese over the past 2 years. I started to actually enjoy looking up individual Japanese words just for the sake of knowing them well, and for the sake of mastery. The reason is fluency, but Japanese is something that I didn't angrily dread pouring hours of frustrating and dread into. I started to enjoy the process itself, and when I have the time, I would slow down to be more thorough studying.

Through the law of attraction, I started to get more interested in the culture, in cooking, I started meeting people at college who are into Japanese culture, and I started to look for mentors. All the sort of things that you're supposed to do when you enjoy something and want to master it, I was beginning to do with Japanese before I knew anything about self-actualization.

 

Struggles, details (you can skip to the next section, but it has some specific details on my thoughts about the different career/life purpose prospects:

My main difficulty now are some conflicting ideas about how to use the language to become a creator, outside of doing translation. I trust in the mastery process to eventually take care of my needs years down the road, so that I can become so skilled that I can translate, because my literal purpose for living is Japanese, but I've discovered my values and strengths, and I'm reviewing them daily. My life purpose statement I previously made was about programming, because I didn't even consider that I could turn my main hobby, the study of this language, into a career. I thought it was too impractical, and that programming was the logical, safe choice to quickly get that $40-70k job as a coder, as I let my years spent on interests just die completely, in hopes of discovering passion for programming.

Some other fundamental issues I have with Japanese - it is largely escapist fantasy. For any Redpill readers here, a lot of this content is pretty much "The Ultimate Blue Pill Fantasy." But I think that by focusing on the creative aspects on the medium, and by translating material that inspires people is ultimately a good thing. Movies and TV shows are also escapist fantasies, but not everyone takes the same thing out of a movie. From Leo, I learned that you can watch a movie with the goal of being inspired from it, like with Jodorowsky's Dune. It's a bit complicated, because I got into Japanese content through escapism, but I feel like studying the language and changing the mediums I consume (more visual novels now than anime) has reduced the dopamine spiking and raised my consciousness a bit. There's plenty of depraved Japanese content that gets associated with anime, and this parallels all the addicting software and social media that's out there with programming. There's pretty much no creative medium I enjoy that doesn't have cons to it. You can even use classical music and fine art as distractions from doing work. 

Some interesting aspects of Japanese - I find the mediums of manga and visual novels to be especially moving. They're not the same sort of quick, instant gratification experiences that you could get in video games. You'll often a dozen hours on a single story arc before any major climax happens in a visual novel. My highest emotional peaks and peak interests were hit when I was reading visual novels. I think that by spreading this medium to the West, gamers and people who enjoy anime will learn to enjoy the calmer, slower paced aspects of entertainment, and of life itself. 

Some issues I have with programming and technology:

The impact that technology has had on our society, lowering our attention spans, lowering people's consciousness, and all these little quick apps, I feel have actually fucked over my generation in a lot of ways, and now people are dealing with heavy procrastination with all the free dopamine everywhere. Men don't have enough positive male figures in their life, and porn and entertainment is so easily accessible that technology leads to escapism. Of course, technology is a tool and this is a huge negative generalization of it. Mark Zuckerberg might've had a positive creative vision with Facebook and creating his company, and a lot of these companies might actually have great intentions. Being connected with tons of your friends online sounds great in theory, but the anxiety, the fake posts, the instant gratification and dopamine, the distraction element, the attention span and motivation reduction, and all these other side effects are just killers for me. 

Rather than working with social media or making some game apps, I would want to create some meaningful software, and to spread self-actualization ideals through the software, but I spent years trying to program and never came to really enjoy the process. I'm annoyed that I was so unconscious when building up all this resistance, and didn't understand how I could ever possibly come to WANT to program. I spent every day of my life for years comparing myself to others, thinking about the money, programming under pressure, all before I grasped these self-actualization fundamentals, that made me really believe that I could catch up to and even surpass these friends of mine who are going off to work at Google. Career counselors at my college told me "Not everyone can be like him, but you can still get a good job programming." 

I think now that if could even make some productivity-related software, it would be really beneficial for people, and it would convey things like discipline through usage and support of my software. I also think that programming will become really chaotic, and in order to gauge the marketplace, I have to really stay plugged in. I would end up being a problem solving sort of career rather than a creative one, at least for some years until I become good enough to gain career capital and creative control. My entry into a programming career could be be too rigid for too long before I can create anything that I feel is meaningful. They say programming is just problem solving, but I don't want to be some reactive problem solver for a company. The solution to this that I came up with was working with Startup companies, and focusing on the creative aspect of programming. 

I'm definitely capable of becoming an excellent programmer, I believe, but with my conflicting passion with Japanese, and my low consciousness resistance towards programming that I built up from coding under pressure for my classes, it's not right. 

10 years down the road, I think programming could be the better option, and I think in the near future I'll start doing it as a side hobby, so I can enjoy it and burn through my resistance. 10 years from now, it could become a new life purpose, or be combined with Japanese once I've become a master and have some economic security. There are other aspects of my life like health, fitness, and relationships that I need to work on, and having two exhausting mental hobbies, Programming and Japanese, isn't going to work out if I want to achieve those goals.

 

My Big Fuckups: (choosing what was possible as a career)

I didn't TRULY consider using my years spent on hobbies AS my career. I didn't believe I could do it. I didn't pitch the idea to my parents, even though I knew that I have a good 3-4 years of financial saving saved up. How was I going to tell them that this language I study for fun could actually become a career? Until last summer, I didn't have the confidence to speak up to my mom much at all, until I found TheRedPill and read No More Mr. Nice Guy and started building up my confidence. With learning Japanese, I sometimes guilted myself for spending too much time on it, instead of on college and my career. (NEVER GUILT YOURSELF). I went through Leo's Life Purpose Course and partially preselected Programming as the medium, though I had 3 or 4 other big ideas based on other interests and skills. I had Japanese as an idea on that list, along with writing, but I thought my parents wouldn't allow it and I don't have the financial freedom right now. There are a lot of other psychological investments I've made with Japanese that my ego won't let go of. I have friends of over 10 years that share the same interests as me. Trying to cut my ties with Japanese is equivalent to mental suicide at this point. At the end of my semester in college, I started having so much fun with people of similar interests, and I suddenly felt like "holy shit, I belong with these people." and was doing a lot of meta-analysis of the experience. I felt really overly attached to these people, because I felt like I would have to give up Japanese and sever connections with them next semester to transition into a programming regimen and career. When the semester ended, I felt extremely awful, worse than when my best friend died. I didn't even know that I could ever feel that level of emotional despair. I spent years repressing my hobbies and avoiding people with similar interests, investing into shallow one-sided friendships. At this point, I truly understood the inherent bias of having friends with similar interests - they actually care. Yes, it's a biased, neurotic, cliquey sort of caring that Leo talks about, because they value you because of your shared interests, but this leads to a real tight friendship. It's hard to find people who will be as egalitarian as you try to be, and will appreciate your interests the way you appreciate theirs. Sever attachments from people who don't love and support you, because life is too short to maintain so many shallow friendships.

Investment is probably why Leo chose to combine his Sage advice with Actualized.org, rather than leave and become a sage himself, because he's become really invested in helping us, and he'd be abandoning the life purpose he adopted.  On the other end of my own ego investment, I have a ton of negative ego investments against programming. I projected all my pain and anxiety towards it, by feeling like it's taking away time from my hobbies, and is creating all of my anxiety and unhappiness. I'd overeat just to be able to program more and get past the pain. I exhibited pretty much every neurotic behavior in the book to many extremes, when it came to programming. I would talk shit behind people's back because they were successful at programming and I wasn't. I thought that since these guys didn't do anything besides programming, they "didn't have a life," because they didn't have other hobbies. In reality, these programmers who enjoy their work and understand the mastery process are actually the happiest people I've ever met. Understanding the mastery process and my own potential to master anything, I feel that my biggest regret was pouring so much negative emotion into something that I actually always wanted to become good at. I felt like I wasn't talented, that it didn't come natural, or that I would lose myself and my hobbies if I dedicated all my time to programming. I realized that these beliefs are something your mind has built, especially with things you've attempted over and over again before learning about self-actualization, and so even with newfound objective information on the hours it takes to master something, and a path to doing it, it will still feel like we sometimes inherently can't do it. 

 

tldr; Basically, I see the beauty in Japanese culture, spreading it, focusing on lower dopamine mediums in Japanese, using translation and the written word as a medium, and I've got some intrinsic motivation for mastering the language. Hour for hour, the money will probably come later with Japanese for me, and I might be working slave wages until I'm truly excellent. I'd rather master Japanese and translate, starting at slave wages, than go into programming for the money like everyone wants me to. I'd rather "waste my degree" and follow my bliss, because it lights my fire. I recognize my own bias towards people who share the same interests as me and the connection I feel with those people, and my bias towards anything Japanese. I enjoy plenty of things outside of Japanese, even moreso thanks to self-actualization, and I enjoy talking with people who don't share my interests at all, thanks to mindfulness. I'm utilizing this subjective and biased reality of mine in order to master Japanese. I can't realistically do both programming and Japanese to a high degree, and Leo explained this. The mind subconsciously homes in on ways to optimize learning and retention when you have a singular purpose. It's like a heat-seaking missile, as he says. You start finding the most optimal methods, and because your purpose is so important to you, you see the longterm payoff and invest in those better methods, because of the long-term payoff for the effort in advance. Your time becomes precious. Being married to your life purpose and being disciplined to it gives you the freedom to relent to it. I have to redo part of Leo's Life Purpose Course with Japanese in mind, as I work towards mastery.

My recommendations for those seeking their life purpose:

Look for what you've done the most in life, something where you feel like you've gone through steps of the mastery process, and have begun to enjoy. Truly forget the money. Get a part-time job or some financial security (refer to Maslow's Hierarchy and what Leo says about supporting yourself first, and then going on to be a creator). Don't go to college until you're ABSOLUTELY sure about what you want to do, and I recommend dedicating hundreds of hours on your own into working on your skill you plan to Master before majoring in that field in college, so that you don't fall into the traps of working for the money. See what other people are doing with your productive hobbies - look at the creators on YouTube. Look at the people who teach your hobby, if it's something like that. Ideally it should be a hobby that's somewhat productive. You can even combine 2 things you enjoy, like watching movies and writing reddit replies --> into doing some sort of meta-analysis of movies as a video career or something.

I think that if you've taken one of your hobbies so far that you find yourself saying "I can't live without this," you may find that you have already selected your life purpose. Tap into that, and go all in and see how much energy you can summon into working towards that hobby every day. See how confident you feel when you imagine "I can just utilize this one main hobby of mine, increase the priority to the top, and I can let the other ones go."  

Also, as a general thing: Watch Leo's Foundational videos on YouTube. They helped give me a clear picture of self-actualization. Also, don't fall into the trap of settling for a shitty life purpose or career simply because of having the goal of Enlightenment and enjoying the Now. The whole point of Actualized.org is to become the best that you can be, not become some enlightened guy at 7-Eleven. The Maslow's Hierarchy video was also really helpful in this regard, since I was actually debating between mediocrity + enlightenment. 

Also, not to sound like a shill, but the Life Purpose Course helps a lot of things click together. I think I learned to some extent like 50-70% of the theory from Leo's videos. I think a key to taking the course is to do it when you feel you're financially stable, or if you're in high school or college. The confidence you get from having a more complete picture, though, is worth the $250. You have to think of it as an investment in yourself, just like the food you eat, the house you live in, the books and video games and coffee mugs and crap you buy. Don't be afraid to invest in yourself, especially for the long-term. You only get one life.

 

I can finally proudly share this video from Alan Watts, because I feel that I'm living it now - 

 

And if you still want to convince me how easy it is to become a programmer, I'll check some resources you send to try and do it on the side, but my life purpose is to master Japanese and become a creator with it.

[Phrae]

Can you answer yes to the following questions?

• Would tears of joy pour out of you when you think about what you've done years later in your life?
• Is this your greatest passion and joy in life?
• Is this the most meaningful thing that you can do in this single life that you had
• If I had to pay to do this, would I do it?

I think you're giving advice about a career course.

No, you don't need to be in a financially stable situation to do the course. Just make sure you've got the time to do it and not be rushing yourself for an answer.

The breaking factor is when, while doing the course, a question like what is the most meaningful thing you could be doing comes up, YOU HAVE TO ANSWER THAT ACTUAL QUESTION. Are you telling me you did the course and answered these questions and you came up with some blob about writing? Were you doing the course like you're a fucking emperor?

[eskwire]

28 minutes ago, Phrae said:

Are you telling me you did the course and answered these questions and you came up with some blob about writing? Were you doing the course like you're a fucking emperor?

I love this so much. 

@Vladz0r You don't have to wait to go to college until you're sure of anything. Waiting to go to school is how people get pregnant, I swear. That's a joke, of course, but many people get lost by waiting and settle. School is part of the exposure and maturation process.

@Phrae has a point. Give it some time and more thought. It sounds like you are qualifying this whole thing.

Edited January 14, 2017 by eskwire

[Vladz0r]

Eh, I was gonna write a long reply to this, but I'll try to keep it concise. I've contemplated this idea for years, as a way to turn my interests into a career. 

I have specific goals with learning and mastering the language, but I went through the course keeping anything Japanese-related on the backburner, because I didn't believe I could make a living through it, or do it with an impending student debt, especially before understanding the Mastery process.

I enjoy looking at all different cultures and seeing what different world views are. I don't "just" like Japanese culture. At college I've learned about African American Culture, different religions, Latin American culture, and my own city's history. I've also built up an appreciation for the learning process itself through Japanese. Learning this language has given me first-hand proof of the Mastery process and self-actualization. I was already finding ways to keep me on track with the process, by finding mentors, taking advantage of opportunities, making friends of connections.

Is this your greatest passion and joy in life?  Being able to make the mediums that I enjoy the most become more accessible to other people would give me a huge amount of passion and joy, yes.

Would tears of joy pour out of you when you think about what you've done years later in your life? I already tear up when I see the contribution I have in the community, when I put a lot of effort into a recent project on the learnjapanese subreddit. I made an impact with a post I made for improving at Japanese with a certain flash card deck I spent days constructing, and it received thousands of views and downloads, and it's helping people accomplish their goal of learning the language. I did it because I wanted to help people, and quality checked it a lot, and I didn't even expect as many views as it got. Impact is important, and I'm still seeing how else I can help people who are learning languages. I see the impact that polyglots have on the language learning community, and the impact of Westerners who have become fluent in the language, and serve as mentors and inspiration for people.

Is this the most meaningful thing that you can do in this single life that you had. Right now I think it is. The only other ideas I've had felt lofty, or as if I had just taken them from people and friends who have done the same work already. I can use this language to become a creator, because I see the beauty in it beyond just the anime stuff. 

If I had to pay to do this, would I do it? I'm essentially doing that now, by going with this instead of a more conventional career. I could easily go make more money while doing IT work. I invest money into learning the language already. I've sacrificed grades and sleep for it. 

What exactly is my passion or fascination with the language? It's something that just evolved over time and changed forms. I started out just watching anime and reading manga like everyone else. I got interested in the language and I kept at learning it. I started actually learning about the country, the good and the bad.I learned about how safe Japan is, the low gun ownership, the beauty and simplicity of the Japanese countryside and of Japanese lifestyle, the mindset of eating less, Okinawa being the place in the world where one can live the longest.  I learned about the often insane work hours, the xenophobia, the poverty, the gaijin hunters, the women who trap men, the low birth rates and the sexual decline. 

I started cooking, got into cooking Thai, Chinese, and Japanese food, along with a lot of more common recipes, and people really enjoy my cooking. I thought I might become a chef or try to fuse cuisine or something. I thought "Well, if I can enjoy a show in Japanese, why not a movie in French or Portuguese? Why not documentaries in other languages, about other countries? Why don't I try to learn other languages besides Japanese? What about different food culture? What about all the great culture in my city that I'm missing out on? What about history, a subject I used to hate learning about in school?" It opened a lot of doors and new perspectives for me. Ultimately, a lot of it boils down to a fixation on the language, and it's given my life a lot of meaning. It feels so ridiculous to try and change my interests to something way different in order to tap into this drive to succeed and create with this hobby. I need to master the language as my main domain, and create using the language in some form, and see the ideas that arise that are aligned with my values. Leo said to "take care of your basic needs first, and then worry about your impact on the world," and that's why I'm focusing on mastering the language first, to build the career capital, but then avoid simply stagnating as a translator or interpreter, so that I can become a creator.

 

All I wanted to say was that, I think people are too quick to write off their hobbies as unproductive, or obsessive or childish. When I started actually learning the language and discussing culture with people, instead of just recommending anime, people started to take me seriously, instead of just being "that weaboo." I developed discipline and interest in lower dopamine activities. The language and culture obviously have a lot of stigma, and I knew I'd get criticism from this post, so I had to make it.

 

Edited January 14, 2017 by Vladz0r

[Evilwave Heddy]

So you want to master the Japanese language, better than Japanese people themselves and better than the best Japanese speaker in Japan? 

Go for it.  If that is what will make you smile before you die.

Or is it to master the art of interpreting Japanese to English...?

But what is your Life Purpose then?  To do some programming in Japan? To write manga or whatever?  To master Japanese? To fuck an Asian chick?

 

You need more time to find out exactly what you want to devote your life to.  You are on the right track with programming, but when you say you have this thing for the Japanese culture and language, it just seems too broad.  What you really need to do first is spend a year in Japan or something and get used to its culture.  Get a direct experience of it rather than what you think it is.  I can tell you it will be a different experience than what you see in them mangas/animes you watch and read. lol

It'll be much the same as where you are now.