How do you know what you care about?

This was an answer I wrote to a friend that asked me how we’re supposed to know what we care about before we choose to work on something? These were my thoughts…

The first heuristic that comes to mind is Feynman’s. What do you find yourself treating like play? I always think that when you feel like you have to separate “work” from “free-time”, you’re not doing something that you care about. Because when you’re working on stuff you care about, every minute is literally free time. Heuristic 1: What we like to play with is what we care about most.

There are certain things you can’t do without thinking a few standard deviations differently to your peers. For example, academic or industrial research, founding startups, creating art et cetera. This implies that the barrier to entry is sufficiently high for these fields of work. Crossing this barrier to entry implies that you really care about what you’re doing. Heuristic 2: An inclination to do things with an unusually high barrier-to-entry.

Specific curiosity. Everyone has general curiosity about lots of things, but the curiosity is usually superficial and limited to one or two layers of understanding. When you care about something, you will display specific curiousity. For example, when I wanted to get better at shooting the football, I asked lots of people about lots of parameters, from their weight training regimen to the kind of shinpads they wore in the hope that I get better at it. Heuristic 3: You display an intense level of curiousity when you care about something.

Corollary to heuristic 3: The feeling of being a newbie never leaves you when you care about something. You are always aware that there’s more to learn. Heuristic 3.1: You care about things you’re most insecure about.