#178 - Find-Your-Why Is Nonsense
n his book “Find Your Why,” Simon Sinek popularized the idea that you need to “find your why”—find how you are helping others—as that is the driving force that will motivate you to keep going. I realized it was nonsense when he started hypothesizing about how Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, found his “why.”
I started programming a few years after Bill Gates on similar computers.
You wanted to figure out how to do something on these computers. And having seen other computer programs operate, you wanted to figure out how other programmers had pulled that off. You typed some commands and saw things move on a screen. It was magic and had nothing to do with helping other people at all.
Later, I studied physics, which is about figuring out how our universe works.
Later, I became a manager, and it was about figuring out how to lead a team.
Later, I became enamored with a certain genre of art and wanted to figure out how to draw that way.
It may work like that for you, too; you’ve seen art you’re completely enamored with and want to figure out how to do that yourself.
The driving force is curiosity. It gets you jumping out of bed, continuing where you left off yesterday. Curiosity chases away feelings of emptiness.
That’s how movies and novels hook us. They keep us at the tip of our seats, wanting to know how the story will end.
Curiosity prevents you from putting down a book or switching TV channels.
That’s why you must keep pushing yourself slightly out of your comfort zone, or rather be curious about things; you must explore new and exciting venues. You need an insatiable curiosity.
Curiosity is a healthy addiction. You feel miserable without it.
The book should have been titled “Find Your Curiosity.” I’ll write that book one day. How does one write non-fiction? I wonder.