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Live your life your own way
Living your own way
Writer Christopher Morley put the thought in a line about the one success that matters. A room full of students at Wharton, Harvard, or Columbia probably has the intellect and work ethic to do it. What is left is finding something that plays to your strengths, avoids your weaknesses, and makes you happy.
That sounds obvious, but it rules out letting friends decide what to do, doing things because friends are doing them, and letting society or parents decide. It has to be thought out for yourself.
Why choosing is hard
It is hard because it is hard to know yourself, and in twenty years you will be a different person. Choosing today for that future person is very difficult.
The investor Howard Marks spent decades letting other people make the decision and making choices haphazardly, without applying intention. That ran until roughly 1995, when he left with Bruce Karsh to start Oaktree.
Why is self-knowledge so hard?
Psychologist Timothy Wilson argued in his 2002 book Strangers to Ourselves that much of mental life runs outside conscious awareness. In experiments, people often gave confident explanations for their choices that did not match the real influences on them. Wilson called this part of the mind the adaptive unconscious. Studies of this kind show that introspection is an unreliable guide to why people feel and act as they do.
Why do people underestimate how much they'll change?
Psychologists Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson reported in the journal Science in 2013 on a study of about 19,000 adults aged 18 to 68. People of every age said they had changed a lot in the past decade, yet predicted they would change little in the next one. The researchers named this the end of history illusion. Their data showed that people's reported values and preferences shifted at every age in the sample.