At least, if you happen to be near me in brain space.
What advice would you give your younger self?
That was the prompt for a class I taught at PAIR 2024. About a quarter of participants ranked it in their top 3 of courses at the camp and half of them had it listed as their favorite.
I hadn’t expected that.
I thought my life advice was pretty idiosyncratic. I never heard of anyone living their life like I have. I never encountered this method in all the self-help blogs or feel-better books I consumed back when I needed them.
But if some people found it helpful, then I should probably write it all down.
Why Listen to Me Though?
I think it’s generally worth prioritizing the advice of people who have actually achieved the things you care about in life. I can’t tell you if that’s me, but I can tell you a bit about my life, why I ended up developing the heuristics I did, and how that worked out for me.
I spawned in on the server I mean, I was born on a farm in a rural part of the Netherlands. My parents had more kids than money. We were Dutch poor, which is basically kind of fine. It means we all shared bedrooms, had boring food, and our car would break down… Then you’d get out and push the car. And I thought this was great cause I was the youngest of four kids, and everything was a game. My family doted on me, I had loads of friends, and everyone I knew was healthy. Overall, I’d give my childhood a 10⁄10 for happiness, love and quality of life.
On the other hand, growing up, no one in my family had a degree. My entire town was blue collar jobs. And if you didn’t want to go to school, you worked at one of the nearby factories. So when I graduated from high school and I wanted to apply to MIT, everyone told me that wasn’t real. That was a thing people did on TV. Normal people couldn’t do that. It’s like becoming a Hollywood actor or an astronaut.
So I didn’t apply.
Instead I went to the most prestigious college in the Netherlands, which was … fine?
That’s when I hit a wall. This wall consisted of many parts not relevant to this story. But one part was the absolute horror of picking any career to work for 40 hours a week for 40 years.
That’s what everyone did where I was from.
I could read books or the internet about people who did other things but I couldn’t imagine how to be like them. And besides, all that stuff was not “real”. Manual labor was real. 9-5s were real. Picking a trade was real.
I wanted to throw myself off a bridge.
Instead, among other things, I developed my own set of life wisdoms focused on finding a path when I couldn’t see any way to get where I wanted to go. There have been a lot of ups and downs since then, but in the first 10 years some wild stuff happened according to my small-town brain cause…
at 21, I was selected from 600 colleagues, becoming the second youngest Head Tester at Electronic Arts, managing teams of 4-16 testers.
at 24, I ran an experiment for the European Space Agency on Antarctica. Unrelatedly, I was also offered a lucrative monetization contract for my 3 month old Youtube channel.
At 25, I was offered a PhD and got my degree in Player Modeling in Video Games—a field I didn’t know existed till I got the offer.
At 28, I found out an essay I had written for fun had become part of the curriculum at the MIT Media Lab.
At 30, I became senior data scientist at one of the largest video game publishers in the world (Square Enix West). Later that year I became head of their Analytics team.
I’m not saying I had a dream career or am the highest performer you know. Actually, I often don’t know what I’m doing and a lot of my plans fail.
Gosh, honestly. Most of my plans fail.
But I mostly get where I want to go and this is how I do it.
Pick a direction instead of a goal
When people think about where to go in life, they tend to pick a specific goal: become a doctor, make a decent amount of money, or have 2.3 kids. It’s common for people without specific goals to feel like they are adrift and that it’s hard to achieve much of anything without such a guiding star.
Or maybe I’m projecting and that’s just how I felt.
I sucked at picking goals. Kid me wanted to be a brick layer because I thought it would be satisfying to make neat little patterns. Adolescent me had an existential crisis about no job in particular sounding like anything I’d want to do every day for the rest of my life.
So I developed the idea of picking a direction instead of a goal.
What does that mean?
A goal is a specific outcome with specific steps at which you can fail or succeed. A direction is a decision heuristic that moves you closer to a wide-range of options that all contain increasing amounts of the Thing You Actually Want.
Wanting to “become a doctor” is a goal. Wanting to “heal people” is a direction.
To become a doctor, you need to go to med school, pass all your exams, secure a position at a hospital or start your own practice. Then you will have achieved the goal of “becoming a doctor”. To heal people … you can do so many things. You could be a nurse or a medical technician. You could develop a new glucose pump for children with diabetes. You could research a cure for Corona, Ebola, or Pneumonia. You could raise awareness for Leukemia, Dyslexia, or Estonia. There are so many ways to help people get healthier, and if none of the existing ones suit you, you can literally try and invent a new way to contribute.
In essence, a direction let’s you figure out where your exact person-shape fits into the world to generate a ton of “heal people”—the actual thing you care about.
But how do you figure out your direction?
Well, all I can say is how I did it.
My direction ended up being “contribute to the development of AAA video games”.
Not that that was my first pick.
My first pick was “becoming a doctor” (which, for the record, is a goal. But this essay makes the development of these heuristics seem more clean and chronological than what the actual messy reality was like).
So I signed up for this pre-med track where you get to follow around a nurse for two weeks. It was in the gastroenterology department of the local hospital. To the surprise of absolutely no one, I was exactly as bad around human suffering and copious amounts of internal fluids entering the external world as you’d expect from someone with high disgust sensitivity and an overactive sense of emotional empathy. One lady needed sponges inserted 10 cm deep in her stomach wound. One man was afraid of needles and could be heard screaming from half the rooms on the floor as nurses spent 30 minutes attempting to insert an IV into his hand. None of this is unexpected, but actually seeing how you respond to it in reality is quite different trying to guess.
I responded by experiencing prodigious amounts of phantom pain and empathic resonance till my brain melted.
Till I met this elderly old lady there who was the sweetest thing and I asked her if I could do my 3-day case study on her, where I’d interview her for an hour every day. She was the absolute pinnacle of grandmotherly wisdom and warmth. And in return, I kept her company. Her husband and child had tragically passed away in recent years. No one else came to visit. Our conversations were an oasis in our day. We held hands while we talked about her youth, her family, and the joys of life as she had found it. Her mind was sharp. Her eyes were clear. But when I came back on the third day, her bed was empty—she had passed away from liver cancer that night.
I went home, lay down in bed and cried.
I also concluded I wasn’t cut out to be a doctor. But then I thought, maybe I could still be a surgeon instead. There was a second part to the pre-med track. A two week course at the morgue. Maybe that was my calling.
So I walked into the morgue where individual human body parts were sorted in IKEA-esque plastic containers: three intestines here, five livers there, and oh, an entire cadaver under that tarp.
I stood in shock.
For 40 minutes straight.
The cool thing of going in to shock around multiple doctors who have seen it all before is that they just let you stand there undisturbed. I think I didn’t close my mouth or move a muscle the entire time I stood frozen in the middle of the morgue. I watched as one student studied a length of human intestines and remarked that the end bit was tremendously squishy and flexible. She then proceeded to sock puppet it in mock dialogue to the student next to her. They both burst out laughing before returning to their studies.
“These are born surgeons,” I realized “Some minds are made for certain tasks.”
My mind on the other hand was made to be shuffled out of the morgue after an hour, handed a glass of water, and then plopped on my bike.
Suffice to say, I didn’t become a surgeon either.
I tried other things though.
I tried teaching. It was great, but I dreaded going over roughly the same material year after year.
I studied economics, philosophy, math, biology, Spanish, anthropology, psychopathology, neuroscience, and art.
I looked into material engineering, industrial design, 3D art, writing, and charity work building schools in poor countries.
But in the end I picked video games, cause I kept playing video games.
Now playing games and developing games are two very different activities—I know. So I read through the entire employee list of various game companies and tried to imagine which role would suit me. Designer? Programmer? Artist? Sound Engineer?
I tried out each one asking myself which position would be my calling. I drafted design docs, poked game engines, sketched dream worlds, and discovered auditory dyslexia does not proffer a comparative advantage in sound engineering.
All these roles made for intimidating goals. Game developer positions are as sought after as Hollywood jobs. So I took a step back and asked myself if it really mattered which of the roles I ended up with. I realized the thing that mattered to me was “work on a cool game” while “figure out how to do that” could be a work in progress as I went along.
So I set the direction of getting any job in the video game industry contributing to the development of a AAA video game title. This was my 10 year project.
And 10 years later I got hired as a Data Scientist at Square Enix, where I analyzed data from Tomb Raider, Just Cause, Deus Ex, Life is Strange, and Hitman. My reports went to producers and designers, who then integrated the information in their decision process on how to develop these franchises further.
I didn’t know that job existed when I started out. I didn’t know I’d be particularly suited for it either. And yet I made it. Using this one simple trick entirely convoluted set of heuristics that happen to work for my brain.
Do what you love but always tie it back
When I came up with all this stuff, I was very tired of fighting my brain. I was in college, absolutely amazing at forcing myself to do stuff I hated, and exactly the level of tortured you’d expect to see as a result. Then I decided life just sucked too much that way, and I’d rather do stuff I want to be doing and risk it being dumb than live out my life like that.
Honestly, I was a little bit grander about the whole thing. I realized I wanted to figure out how a Shoshannah-shaped brain can end up doing uniquely Shoshannah-shaped stuff, and basically explore the part of reality and possibility space that can only be explored by someone with my exact brain and circumstances.
This logic can apply to everyone. You are the only person who ever lived and will ever live who can explore what it’s like to do stuff exactly your way, with your brain, and get the exact results you will get.
So I stared at my brain and noticed I had a bunch of natural motivations. Things I wanted to do to farm reward signals for myself—the motivational equivalents of a perpetuum mobile. What could I do with these?
Exploit them!
So imagine the red arc is your direction and the green ball is you. The arrow is your “compass” and the orange balls are distractions your natural interests—all the things you find yourself doing if left to your own devices with not a care in the world. This is the stuff that intrinsically motivates you. The stuff that has you moving without effort. The stuff that seeps into every minute of every day if you let it.
Now here are mine:
I love to socialize, to read, to write, to learn new things, to draw, work out, and logic hard about stuff. Honestly, I love to play around as well, especially in video games. But that was my direction already so that didn’t count as a distraction competing interest I was looking to wrangle into my grand life plan.
So how does the actual wrangling work?
Simple—for every activity you naturally want to do, try to figure out a way to apply it to your direction. Your direction is sort of like a theme—if your direction is X and your interest is Y, then go do X-flavored Y-things.
I suspect this works for brains that are not mine. But either way, here are examples of how I did it:
Drawing: Buy game art books, study concept art and 3D modeling, watch making-of videos of video game artists, learn the basics of color theory and composition, explore visually artistic games.
Working Out: Gamefy all my workouts, create my own rewards and counters, create physical games for my friends, play video games with workout elements, and imagine how to design games that truly capture the joy of various workouts.
Logic: Learn programming, poke around in game engines, create diagrams of game design elements, play games that are logic-heavy, study game theory (not the same thing, but really much more relevant than people make it out to be!)
Writing: Write a blog about the psychology of video games (that’s the one that got picked up by the MIT Media Lab), chat a lot with people about games, write scripts for my youtube videos about games, put game reviews on reddit.
Learning New Fields: For each new topic I studied I would reflect on how it can be related to video games. E.g., after a class on economics, I checked out the mechanics of Eve Online, when studying philosophy I looked into conceptual representation in video games, when exploring biology or chemistry I’d try to think about how the same topics could be taught or simulated with games.
Reading: Transform much of my media and literature diet into game-relevant material like Dungeons and Dragons books, isekai stories, video game blogs, books on video game design, and some of the fiction that many designers used as source material.
Socializing/Organizing: Focus on expanding my social play by joining and then creating a clan, starting my own youtube channel, and later setting up a gaming data collection campaign (which unexpectedly turned in to my PhD).
Was that enough to fulfill my 10-year plan of contributing to AAA video games?
Not entirely.
I still got stuck sometimes. When I couldn’t come up with a project, or I really needed to find a job but nothing seemed relevant, or I was unhappy with the thing I was doing but didn’t know what to do instead. I’d look for advice, or try to reason through my problems. But sometimes that didn’t work either.
When all else fails, apply random search
I first used random search as a college student because I was actually tremendously and obstructively unhappy. I had tried sleeping more, exercising frequently, eating healthier, meditating deeply, asking for help, getting a medical check up, spending more time with friends, doing volunteer work, soaking up more sunlight, and every other self-help, self-care, and self-improvement technique on the face of the earth.
And I still felt terrible.
So either there was no way to feel better, or the way to feel better lay in the space of actions I had never tried before.
And thus, I set out to try one new thing every day, for 30 days. The new thing could take 30 seconds, 3 minutes, or 3 hours. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it was something I hadn’t tried before. I would decide on the day what it would be—Sometimes it was a whim. Sometimes it was a project. All of it was new.
Things I tried included …
Eating a new fruit
Exploring a new part of the city
Teaching myself cartwheels
Reading about a new topic
Talking to a new person
Climbing a new tree
Drawing on my window
Writing a new fiction story
Trying a new figure drawing method
Attending my first yoga class
Buying balloons and randomly handing them out in the street
Was I happier after those 30 days?
Yeah. Sort of. Not super happy. But a bit.
Some things worked. Some things I still do to this day. I apparently like eating bananas. I like climbing random objects. I like meeting new people. Mostly I discovered that novelty in itself actually makes me happier and is a nutrient I can become low on, and this can make me sad.
I think the random search did something else as well though: It gave me practice in just doing stuff, and specifically in doing weird stuff, and then also in noticing what the genre of weird stuff is that my brain likes to do.
But how did this help me move along in my life direction?
I think it loosened me up, increased the Overton window of what I felt was possible, and made me feel I was free to do things in the world that I wanted—Like sending in my CV for a Localization Tester job at Electronic Arts the next month. They offered me the job at the end of the interview… if I was willing to move to Spain within three weeks. Somehow that didn’t seem stranger than randomly handing out balloons in the city cause I felt like it. So I said yes.
My guess is that random search is a way to get your brain unstuck. I think it’s similar to how artists may doodle to warm up before a session. Or how people like to drink alcohol to disinhibit themselves. Except it applies to all of life, and gets you looking at the world with a question mark on your brain, wondering what tiny new thing you could do today.
Overall, these were mostly stories about my life, but the stories illustrate the lessons I wish I had learned a lot earlier and a lot faster. Specifically, if you don’t know what to do with your life, consider picking a direction instead of a goal, then embrace your natural motivations, indulging them while bending them toward your life direction.
And when all else fails, apply random search.
Richard Hamming:
I’m curious, what course is this from?
https://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming_1997_-_The_Art_of_Doing_Science_and_Engineering.pdf#page=16
Found this on gwern.net/on-really-trying
There’s a relevant concept that I keep meaning to write about, which I could summarize as: create gradients towards your long-term aspirations.
Humans are general intelligences, and one of the core properties of general intelligence is not being a greedy-optimization algorithm:
We can pursue long-term goals even when each individual step towards them is not pleasurable-in-itself (such as suffering through university to get a degree in a field jobs in which require it).
We can force ourselves out of local maxima (such as quitting a job you hate and changing careers, even though it’d mean a period of life filled with uncertainty and anxieties).
We can build world-models, use them to infer the shapes of our value functions, and plot a path towards their global maximum, even if it requires passing through negative-reward regions (such as engaging in self-reflection and exploration, then figuring out which vocation would be most suitable to a person-like-you).
However, it’s hard. We’re hybrid systems, combining generally-intelligent planning modules with greedy RL circuitry. The greedy RL circuitry holds a lot of sway. If you keep forcing yourself to do something it assigns negative rewards to, it’s going to update your plan-making modules until they stop doing that.
It is much, much easier to keep doing something if every instance of it is pleasurable in itself. If the reward is instead sparse and infrequent, you’d need a lot of “willpower” to keep going (to counteract the negative updates), and accumulating that is a hard problem in itself.
So the natural solution is to plot, or create, a path towards the long-term aspiration such that motion along it would involve receiving immediate positive feedback from your learned and innate reward functions.
A lot of productivity advice reduces to it:
Breaking the long-term task into yearly, monthly, and daily subgoals, such that you can feel accomplishment on a frequent basis (instead of only at the end).
Using “cross-domain success loops”: simultaneously work on several projects, such that you accomplish something worthwhile along at least one of those tracks frequently, and can then harness the momentum from the success along one track into the motivation for continuing the work along other tracks.
I. e., sort of trick your reward system into confusing where exactly the reward is coming from.
(I think there was an LW post about this, but I don’t remember how to find it.)
Eating something tasty, or going to a party, or otherwise “indulging” yourself, every time you do something that contributes to your long-term aspiration.
Finding ways to make the process at least somewhat enjoyable, through e. g. environmental factors, such as working in a pleasant place, putting on music, using tools that feel satisfying to use, or doing small work-related rituals that you find amusing.
Creating social rewards and punishments, such as:
Joining a community focused on pursuing the same aspiration as you.
Finding “workout buddies”.
Having friends who’d hold you accountable if you slack off.
Having friends who’d cheer you on if you succeed.
And, as in Shoshannah’s post: searching for activities that are innately enjoyable and happen to move you in the direction of your aspirations.
None of the specific examples here are likely to work for you (they didn’t for me). But you might be able to design or find an instance of that general trick that fits you!
(Or maybe not. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and go through a rewardless stretch of landscape, if you’re not willing to budge on your goal/aspiration.)
Other relevant posts:
Venkatesh Rao’s The Calculus of Grit. It argues for ignoring extrinsic “disciplinary boundaries” (professions, fields) when choosing your long-term aspirations, and instead following an “internal” navigation system when mapping out the shape of the kind-of-thing that someone-like-you is well-suited to doing.
Note that this advice goes further than Shoshannah’s: in this case, you don’t exert any (conscious) control even over the direction you’d like to go, much less your “goal”.
It’s likely to be easier, but the trade-off should be clear.
John Wentworth’s Plans Are Predictions, Not Optimization Targets. This connection is a bit more rough, but: that post can be generalized to note that any explicit life goals you set for yourself should often be treated as predictions about what goal you should pursue. Recognizing that, you might instead choose to “pursue your goal-in-expectation”, which might be similar to Shoshannah’s point about “picking a direction, not a goal”.
Thank you for the in-depth thoughts!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
...
Uh, to contribute something useful: good piece! I love the idea of aiming for any goal in a broader direction, landing even close to an idealized “perfect goal” is probably still OOMs better than trying for the perfect goal, failing, and going “eh, well, guess I’ll lay bricks for 40 years”.
I also like the section on intrinsic motivation—describing it as “all the things you find yourself doing if left to your own devices”. I do fear that, for many, this category contains things that can’t be used to support you, though, but then your diagram showing the dots outside the bounds of “video games” but pointing back to it I think nicely resolves that conundrum.
Hell yes. Speaking from my own experience here, whatever you do, don’t get stuck. Random search if you have to, but if you’re unhappy, keep moving.
Curated. This was a practically useful post. A lot of the advice here resonated with stuff I’ve tried and found valuable, so insofar as you were like “well I’m glad this worked for Shoshannah but I dunno if it’d work for me”, well, I personally also have found it useful to:
have a direction more than a goal
do what I love but always tie it back
try random things and see what affordances they give me
I’m curious about the part where You wrote: “You could raise awareness for Leukemia, Dyslexia, or Estonia.”
Estonia is a country. Leukemia and Dyslexia are not countries. Was it a typo? Or did you actually want to raise awareness about Estonia?
(I’m from Estonia myself)
Nice article though, thanks!
Thank you!
It was a joke :) I had been warned by my friends that the joke was either only mildly funny or just entirely confusing. But I personally found it hilarious so kept it in. Sorry for my idiosyncratic sense of humor ;)
I am an American who knows what Estonia is, and I found the joke hilarious.
This made me unreasonably happy. Thank you :D
Synchronicity- I was literally just thinking about this concept.
Variety isn’t the spice of life so much as it is a key micronutrient. At least for me.
Shoshannah, your reflections on choosing a direction over specific goals resonate deeply, particularly your ability to integrate intrinsic motivations in a sustainable way. This adaptability aligns with a concept we explore in the VinteX project called ‘antifragility’—where each new challenge, even if it involves failure, strengthens the overall system. Your method of ‘random search’ for novelty is also reminiscent of evolutionary strategies, introducing small, controlled variations to discover new pathways. You capture an essential truth: resilience isn’t about having perfect plans but rather about continually moving forward in ways that play to our unique strengths. Your story is a powerful model for navigating complex and often unpredictable paths, especially for those of us in collaborative and exploratory fields.