如何选择职业（真正适合你的）How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)

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Your Life Path So Far迄今为止你的人生道路

For most of us, childhood is kind of like a river, and we’re kind of like tadpoles.对于我们大多数人来说，童年有点像一条河，而我们有点像蝌蚪。

We didn’t choose the river. We just woke up out of nowhere and found ourselves on some path set for us by our parents, by society, and by circumstances. We’re told the rules of the river and the way we should swim and what our goals should be. Our job isn’t to think about our path—it’s to succeed on the path we’ve been placed on, based on the way success has been defined for us.我们没有选择河流。我们突然醒来，发现自己正走在父母、社会和环境为我们设定的道路上。我们被告知河流的规则、我们应该游泳的方式以及我们的目标应该是什么。我们的工作不是思考我们的道路，而是根据我们对成功的定义，在我们所走的道路上取得成功。

For many of us—and I suspect for a large portion of Wait But Why readers—our childhood river then feeds into a pond, called college.1 We may have some say in which particular pond we landed in, but in the end, most college ponds aren’t really that different from one another.对于我们许多人来说——我怀疑大部分《Wait But Why》的读者也是如此——我们童年的河流最终汇入一个叫做大学的池塘。1我们可能对我们降落在哪个特定池塘有一些发言权，但最终，大多数大学池塘与彼此。

In the pond, we have a bit more breathing room and some leeway to branch out into more specific interests. We start to ponder, looking out at the pond’s shores—out there where the real world starts and where we’ll be spending the rest of our lives. This usually brings some mixed feelings.在池塘里，我们有更多的喘息空间和一些余地来拓展更具体的兴趣。我们开始思考，望着池塘的岸边——那里是现实世界的起点，也是我们将在那里度过余生的地方。这通常会带来一些复杂的感觉。

And then, 22 years after waking up in a rushing river, we’re kicked out of the pond and told by the world to go make something of our lives.然后，22年后，我们在湍急的河流中醒来，我们被从池塘里踢了出来，世界告诉我们要为自己的生活创造一些东西。

There are a few problems here. One is that at that moment, you’re kind of skill-less and knowledge-less and a lot of other things-less:这里有一些问题。一是在那一刻，你缺乏技能，缺乏知识，还有很多其他的东西：

But before you can even address your general uselessness, there’s an even bigger issue—your pre-set path ended. Kids in school are kind of like employees of a company where someone else is the CEO. But no one is the CEO of your life in the real world, or of your career path—except you. And you’ve spent your whole life becoming a pro student, leaving you with zero experience as the CEO of anything. Up to now, you’ve only been in charge of the micro decisions—”How do I succeed at my job as a student?”—and now you’re suddenly holding the keys to the macro cockpit as well, tasked with answering stressful macro questions like “Who am I?” and “What are the important things in life?” and “What are my options for paths and which one should I choose and how do I even make a path?” When we leave school for the last time, the macro guidance we’ve become so accustomed to is suddenly whisked away from us, leaving us standing there holding our respective dicks, with no idea how to do this.但在你能够解决你普遍的无用性之前，还有一个更大的问题——你预设的道路已经结束了。学校里的孩子有点像一家公司的员工，而其他人是首席执行官。但在现实世界中，没有人是你生活或职业道路的首席执行官——除了你自己。而且你一生都在成为一名专业学生，让你作为首席执行官的经验为零。到目前为止，你只负责微观决策——“作为一名学生，我如何在工作中取得成功？”——而现在你突然也掌握了宏观驾驶舱的钥匙，任务是应对压力诸如“我是谁？”之类的宏观问题以及“生活中什么是重要的事情？”以及“我的路径有哪些选择，我应该选择哪一条，以及如何创建一条路径？”当我们最后一次离开学校时，我们已经习以为常的宏观指导突然从我们身边消失了，让我们拿着各自的鸡巴站在那里，不知道该怎么做。

Then time happens. And we end up on a path. And that path becomes our life’s story.然后时间就发生了。我们最终走上一条路。这条道路成为我们人生的故事。

At the end of our life, when we look back at how things went, we can see our life’s path in its entirety, from an aerial view.当我们走到生命的尽头时，当我们回顾过去的事情时，我们可以从空中鸟瞰整个人生的轨迹。

When scientists study people on their deathbed and how they feel about their lives, they usually find that many of them feel some serious regrets. I think a lot of those regrets stem from the fact that most of us aren’t really taught about path-making in our childhoods, and most of us also don’t get much better at path-making as adults, which leaves many people looking back on a life path that didn’t really make sense, given who they are and the world they lived in.当科学家研究临终者以及他们对生活的感受时，他们通常会发现他们中的许多人都感到一些严重的遗憾。我认为这些遗憾很大程度上源于这样一个事实：我们大多数人在童年时期并没有真正接受过关于道路制定的教育，而且我们大多数人在成年后也没有在道路制定方面取得更好的成绩，这使得很多人回顾他们的身份和他们生活的世界，这条人生道路并没有真正的意义。

So this is a post about path-making. Let’s take a 30-minute pre-deathbed pause to look down at the path we’re on, and ahead at where that path seems to be going, and make sure it makes sense.所以这是一篇关于路径制定的文章。让我们在临终前暂停 30 分钟，看看我们正在走的路，看看这条路似乎将走向何方，并确保它是有意义的。

The Cook and the Chef—Revisited厨师和厨师——重温

In the past, I’ve written about the critical distinction between “reasoning from first principles” and “reasoning by analogy”—or what I called being a “chef” vs. being a “cook.” Since writing the post, I notice this distinction everywhere, and I’ve thought about it roughly 2 million times in my own life.过去，我写过“从第一原理推理”和“类比推理”之间的关键区别，或者我所说的“厨师”与“厨师”之间的区别。自从写这篇文章以来，我到处都注意到这种区别，并且在我自己的生活中我已经思考过大约 200 万次。

The idea is that reasoning from first principles is reasoning like a scientist. You take core facts and observations and use them to puzzle together a conclusion, kind of like a chef playing around with raw ingredients to try to make them into something good. By doing this puzzling, a chef eventually writes a new recipe. The other kind of reasoning—reasoning by analogy—happens when you look at the way things are already done and you essentially copy it, with maybe a little personal tweak here and there—kind of like a cook following an already written recipe.这个想法是，从第一原理出发的推理就是像科学家一样的推理。你获取核心事实和观察结果，并用它们拼凑出一个结论，有点像厨师摆弄原料，试图将它们变成美味的东西。通过这种令人费解的做法，厨师最终写出了一份新食谱。另一种推理——类比推理——发生在你查看已经完成的事情的方式，并且基本上复制它，也许在这里或那里进行一些个人调整——有点像厨师遵循已经写好的食谱。

A pure verbatim recipe-copying cook and a pure independently inventive chef are the two extreme ends of what is, of course, a spectrum. But for any particular part of your life that involves reasoning and decision making, wherever you happen to be on the spectrum, your reasoning process can usually be boiled down to fundamentally chef-like or fundamentally cook-like. Creating vs. copying. Originality vs. conformity.当然，一个纯粹的逐字复制食谱的厨师和一个纯粹的独立创造的厨师是这个范围的两个极端。但对于你生活中涉及推理和决策的任何特定部分，无论你碰巧处于这个范围内，你的推理过程通常可以归结为基本上像厨师或基本上像厨师。创造与复制。原创性与一致性。

Being a chef takes a tremendous amount of time and energy—which makes sense, because you’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, you’re trying to invent it for the first time. Puzzling your way to a conclusion feels like navigating a mysterious forest while blindfolded and always involves a whole lot of failure, in the form of trial and error. Being a cook is far easier and more straightforward and less icky. In most situations, being a chef is a terrible waste of time, and comes with a high opportunity cost, since time on Earth is immensely scarce. Right now, I’m wearing J. Crew jeans and a plain t-shirt and a hoodie and Allbirds shoes, because I’m trying to conform. Throughout my life, I’ve looked around at people who seem kind of like me and I’ve bought a bunch of clothes that look like what they wear. And this makes sense—because clothes aren’t important to me, and they’re not how I choose to express my individuality. So in my case, fashion is a perfect part of life to use a reasoning shortcut and be a cook.2成为一名厨师需要花费大量的时间和精力——这是有道理的，因为你不是在尝试重新发明轮子，而是在尝试第一次发明它。迷惑地得出结论感觉就像蒙着眼睛在神秘的森林中航行，并且总是会以反复试验的形式出现大量的失败。做一名厨师要容易得多、直接得多，而且也不那么讨厌。在大多数情况下，当一名厨师是一种可怕的时间浪费，而且机会成本很高，因为地球上的时间非常稀缺。现在，我穿着 J. Crew 牛仔裤、素色 T 恤、连帽衫和 Allbirds 鞋子，因为我想顺应潮流。在我的一生中，我一直在寻找那些看起来像我的人，并且我买了一堆看起来像他们穿的衣服。这是有道理的——因为衣服对我来说并不重要，它们也不是我选择表达个性的方式。所以对我来说，时尚是生活中完美的一部分，可以使用推理捷径并成为一名厨师。2

But then there are those parts of life that are really really deeply important—like where you choose to live, or the kinds of friends you choose to make, or whether you want to get married and to whom, or whether you want to have kids and how you want to raise them, or how you set your lifestyle priorities.但生活中的某些部分确实非常重要，比如你选择住在哪里，或者你选择结交什么样的朋友，或者你是否想结婚以及与谁结婚，或者你是否想要孩子以及你想如何抚养他们，或者你如何设定你的生活方式的优先顺序。

Career-path-carving is definitely one of those really really deeply important things. Let’s spell out the obvious reasons why:职业道路的开拓绝对是非常非常重要的事情之一。让我们详细说明一下明显的原因：

Time. For most of us, a career (including ancillary career time, like time spent commuting and thinking about your work) will eat up somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 hours. At the moment, a long human life runs at about 750,000 hours. When you subtract childhood (~175,000 hours) and the portion of your adult life you’ll spend sleeping, eating, exercising, and otherwise taking care of the human pet you live in, along with errands and general life upkeep (~325,000 hours), you’re left with 250,000 “meaningful adult hours.”3 So a typical career will take up somewhere between 20% and 60% of your meaningful adult time—not something to be a cook about.时间。对于我们大多数人来说，一份职业（包括辅助职业时间，例如通勤和思考工作所花费的时间）将消耗 50,000 到 150,000 个小时。目前，人类的寿命约为75万小时。当您减去童年（约 175,000 小时）和成年生活的部分时，您将花费在睡觉、吃饭、锻炼和以其他方式照顾您居住的人类宠物，以及差事和一般生活维护（约 325,000 小时），你还剩下 250,000 个“有意义的成人时间”。3因此，典型的职业将占用你成年后有意义的时间的 20% 到 60%，而不是厨师的事。

Quality of Life. Your career has a major effect on all the non-career hours as well. For those of us not already wealthy through past earnings, marriage, or inheritance, a career doubles as our means of support. The particulars of your career also often play a big role in determining where you live, how flexible your life is, the kinds of things you’re able to do in your free time, and sometimes even in who you end up marrying.生活质量。您的职业生涯也会对所有非职业时间产生重大影响。对于我们这些尚未通过过去的收入、婚姻或继承致富的人来说，职业生涯同时也是我们的养家糊口的手段。你的职业生涯的细节也常常在决定你住在哪里、你的生活有多灵活、你在空闲时间能做哪些事情，有时甚至决定你最终嫁给谁方面发挥着重要作用。

Impact. On top of your career being the way you spend much of your time and the means of support for the rest of your time, your career triples as your primary mode of impact-making. Every human life touches thousands of other lives in thousands of different ways, and all of those lives you alter then go on to touch thousands of lives of their own. We can’t test this, but I’m pretty sure that you can select any 80-year-old alive today, go back in time 80 years, find them as an infant, throw the infant in the trash, and then come back to the present day and find a countless number of things changed. All lives make a large impact on the world and on the future—but the kind of impact you end up making is largely within your control, depending on the values you live by and the places you direct your energy. Whatever shape your career path ends up taking, the world will be altered by it.影响。除了你的职业生涯是你花费大部分时间的方式和你其余时间的支持手段之外，你的职业生涯也是你产生影响力的主要方式。每个人的生命都以数千种不同的方式影响着成千上万的其他生命，而你改变的所有这些生命都会继续影响他们自己的成千上万的生命。我们无法测试这一点，但我很确定你可以选择今天活着的任何 80 岁老人，回到 80 年前，找到他们的婴儿，将婴儿扔进垃圾桶，然后回来直到今天，发现无数的事情发生了变化。所有的生命都会对世界和未来产生巨大的影响，但你最终产生的影响在很大程度上是在你的控制范围内的，这取决于你所遵循的价值观和你将精力投入到的地方。无论你的职业道路最终形成什么形状，世界都将因此而改变。

Identity. In our childhoods, people ask us about our career plans by asking us what we want to be when we grow up. When we grow up, we tell people about our careers by telling them what we are. We don’t say, “I practice law”—we say, “I am a lawyer.” This is probably an unhealthy way to think about careers, but the way many societies are right now, a person’s career quadruples as the person’s primary identity. Which is kind of a big thing.身份。在我们的童年，人们通过问我们长大后想做什么来询问我们的职业规划。当我们长大后，我们通过告诉人们我们是什么来告诉他们我们的职业。我们不会说“我从事法律工作”，而是说“我是一名律师”。这可能是一种不健康的职业思考方式，但按照现在许多社会的方式，一个人的职业生涯是这个人的主要身份的四倍。这是一件大事。

So yeah—your career path isn’t like my shitty sweatshirt. It’s really really deeply important, putting it squarely in “Definitely absolutely make sure to be a chef about it” territory.所以是的，你的职业道路不像我的破烂运动衫。这真的非常非常重要，将其完全置于“绝对绝对确保成为一名厨师”领域。

Your Career Map 你的职业地图

Which brings us to you. I don’t know exactly what your deal is. But there’s a good chance you’re somewhere in one of the blue regions—这让我们找到了您。我不知道你的交易具体是什么。但你很有可能位于蓝色区域之一的某个地方——

—which means your career path is a work in progress.4——这意味着你的职业道路是一项正在进行的工作。4

Whether you’re yet to start your career or well into it, somewhere in the back of your mind (or maybe in the very front of it) is a “Career Plans” map.无论您尚未开始您的职业生涯还是已经进入职业生涯，您脑海中的某个地方（或者可能在它的最前面）都有一张“职业规划”地图。

We can group map holders into three broad categories—each of which is well-represented in the river, in the pond, standing on the shore, and at every stage of adult life.我们可以将地图持有者分为三大类——每一类都在河流中、池塘中、站在岸边以及成年生活的每个阶段都有很好的代表。

One group of people will look at the map and see a big, stressful question mark.一群人查看地图时会看到一个巨大的、充满压力的问号。

These are people who feel indecisive about their career path. They’ve been told to follow their passion, but they don’t feel especially passionate about anything. They’ve been told to let their strengths guide them, but they’re not sure what they’re best at. They may have felt they had answers in the past, but they’ve changed and they’re no longer sure who they are or where they’re going.这些人对自己的职业道路犹豫不决。他们被告知要追随自己的热情，但他们对任何事情都没有特别的热情。他们被告知要让自己的优势来引导他们，但他们不确定自己最擅长什么。他们过去可能觉得自己已经有了答案，但他们已经改变了，他们不再确定自己是谁或要去哪里。

Other people will see a nice clear arrow representing a direction they feel confident is right—but find their legs walking in a different direction. They’re living with one of the most common sources of human misery, a career path they know in their heart is wrong.其他人会看到一个漂亮的清晰箭头，代表他们确信正确的方向，但发现他们的腿朝不同的方向行走。他们生活在人类苦难最常见的根源之一，他们内心知道这条职业道路是错误的。

The lucky ones feel they know where they want to go and believe they’re marching in that direction.幸运者觉得他们知道自己想去哪里，并相信自己正在朝那个方向前进。

But even these people should pause and ask themselves, “Who actually drew this arrow? Was it really me?” The answer can get confusing.但即使是这些人也应该停下来问问自己：“这支箭头到底是谁画的？真的是我吗？”答案可能会让人困惑。

I’m pretty sure all of these people would benefit from a moment of career path reflection.我很确定所有这些人都会从职业道路反思中受益。

The Okay But Why Do You Think You Can Help Me With My Career Reflection You Draw Stick Figures for a Living Blue Box好吧，但是你为什么认为你可以帮助我进行职业反思你为一个活生生的蓝盒子画了简笔画

Extremely fair question. One thing I always ask myself as I pick topics to write about is, “Am I qualified to write about this?” Here are the reasons I decided to take on this topic:非常公平的问题。当我选择要写的主题时，我总是问自己的一件事是：“我有资格写这个吗？”以下是我决定讨论这个主题的原因：

1) I have spent most of the last 20 years in a perpetual state of analyzing my own career path.1) 过去 20 年的大部分时间我都处于分析自己职业道路的永久状态。

2) My path has taken a lot of turns—from wanting to be a movie star when I was 7 to wanting to be the president when I was 17 to wanting to write film scores when I was 22 to wanting to be an entrepreneur when I was 24 to wanting to write musicals when I was 29 to most recently wanting to be a writer-ish guy.2) 我的人生道路经历了很多转折——从7岁想成为电影明星，到17岁想当总统，到22岁想写电影配乐，再到22岁时想成为一名企业家。当我29岁的时候，我24岁就想写音乐剧，最近想成为一名作家。

3) After being pretty all over the place about my career path for most of my life, I actually love my job now. That’s always subject to change, but being able to look at the decision-making processes that led me to confusing or frustrating places, side by side with the decisions that led me to a more fulfilling place, has offered me some wisdom on where people tend to go wrong.3) 在我一生的大部分时间里对我的职业道路都充满了兴趣之后，我现在实际上热爱我的工作。这总是会发生变化，但是能够审视那些导致我陷入困惑或沮丧的决策过程，以及那些让我走向更充实的地方的决策，这给了我一些关于人们倾向于做什么的智慧。出错。

4) On top of having my own story to look at, I’ve had a front-row seat for the stories of my dozen or so closest friends. My friends seem to share my career path obsessiveness, so between observing their paths and talking with them about those paths again and again along the way, I’ve broadened my views on the topic, which helps me to distinguish between the lessons that are my-life specific and those that are more universal.4）除了我自己的故事可供观看之外，我还可以坐在前排观看我十几个最亲密的朋友的故事。我的朋友们似乎和我一样对职业道路有着同样的痴迷，所以在观察他们的道路并与他们一次又一次谈论这些道路的过程中，我拓宽了我对这个话题的看法，这有助于我区分我的经验教训-特定生活和更普遍的生活。

5) Finally, this isn’t a post about which careers are better or worse than others or which career values are more or less meaningful—there are lots of social scientists and self-help authors out there with good data on that, and I’m not one of them. It’s instead a framework that I think can help a career-path reflector better see their own situation, and what really matters to them, clearly and honestly. This framework has worked really well for me, so I think it can probably be helpful for other people too.5) 最后，这篇文章不是关于哪些职业比其他职业更好或更差，或者哪些职业价值观或多或少有意义——有很多社会科学家和自助作者在这方面有很好的数据，我我不是他们中的一员。相反，我认为它是一个框架，可以帮助职业道路反思者更好地了解自己的处境，以及清晰而诚实地了解对他们真正重要的事情。这个框架对我来说非常有效，所以我认为它也可能对其他人有帮助。

Now that you’ve taken a fresh look at your Career Plans map, along with whatever arrow may or may not be on it, put it down and out of sight. We’ll come back to it at the end of the post. It’s time now for a deep dive—let’s think about this from scratch. From first principles.既然您已经重新审视了自己的职业规划地图，以及上面可能有或没有的任何箭头，请将其放下并放在看不见的地方。我们将在文章的最后再讨论这个问题。现在是深入研究的时候了——让我们从头开始思考这个问题。从第一原则出发。

___________

In the cook-chef post, I designed a simple framework for how a chef makes major career choices. At its core is a simple Venn diagram.在《厨师-厨师》一文中，我设计了一个简单的框架来指导厨师如何做出主要的职业选择。其核心是一个简单的维恩图。

The first part of the diagram is the Want Box, which contains all the careers you find desirable.该图的第一部分是“需求框”，其中包含您认为理想的所有职业。

The second part of the diagram is the Reality Box. The Reality Box is for the set of all careers that are realistic to potentially achieve—based on a comparison, in each case, between your level of potential in an area and the general difficulty of achieving success in that area.该图的第二部分是现实盒子。现实盒子适用于所有可能实现的现实职业——基于每种情况下您在某个领域的潜力水平与在该领域取得成功的一般难度之间的比较。

The overlapping area contains your optimal career path choices—the set of arrows you should consider drawing on your Career Map. We can call it the Option Pool.重叠区域包含您的最佳职业道路选择 - 您应该考虑在职业地图上绘制的一组箭头。我们可以将其称为期权池。

This is straightforward enough. But actually filling in these boxes accurately is way harder than it looks. For the diagram to work, it has to be as close to the truth as possible, and to get there, we have to lift up the hood of our subconscious and head down. Let’s start with the Want Box.这很简单。但实际上准确填写这些框比看起来要困难得多。为了使图表发挥作用，它必须尽可能接近事实，而为了实现这一目标，我们必须揭开潜意识的面纱并低下头。让我们从旺旺箱开始。

Deep Analysis, Part 1: Your Want Box深入分析，第 1 部分：您的需求盒

The hard thing about the Want Box is that you want a bunch of different things—or, rather, there are a bunch of different sides of you, and each of them wants—and fears—its own stuff. And since some motivations have conflicting interests with others, you cannot, by definition, have everything you want. Going for one thing you want means, by definition, not going for others, and sometimes, it’ll specifically mean going directly against others. The Want Box is a game of compromise.想要盒子的难点在于你想要一堆不同的东西——或者更确切地说，你有很多不同的方面，每个人都想要——并且害怕——自己的东西。由于某些动机与其他动机存在利益冲突，因此根据定义，你无法拥有你想要的一切。根据定义，追求你想要的一件事意味着不追求别人，有时，它特别意味着直接反对别人。旺旺盒是一个妥协的游戏。

The Yearning Octopus 向往的章鱼

To do a proper Want Box audit, you need to think about what you yearn for in a career and then unpack the shit out of it. Luckily, we have someone here who can help us. The Yearning Octopus.要进行适当的“旺旺箱”审核，您需要思考自己在职业生涯中渴望什么，然后将其解构。幸运的是，我们这里有人可以帮助我们。向往的章鱼。

We each have our own personal Yearning Octopus5 in our heads. The particulars of each person’s Yearning Octopus will vary, but people also aren’t all that different from each other, and I bet many of us feel very similar yearnings and fears (especially given that I find that Wait But Why readers tend to have a lot in common).我们每个人都有自己的渴望章鱼5。每个人的向往章鱼的细节会有所不同，但人与人之间也并没有那么不同，并且我敢打赌，我们中的许多人都有非常相似的渴望和恐惧（特别是考虑到我发现《Wait But Why》的读者往往有很多共同点）。

The first thing to think about is that there are totally distinct yearning worlds—each living on one tentacle. These tentacles often do not get along with each other.首先要考虑的是，存在着完全不同的渴望世界——每个世界都生活在一根触手上。这些触手常常无法相处。

It gets worse. Each tentacle is made up of a bunch of different individual yearnings and their accompanying fears—and these often massively conflict with each other too.情况变得更糟。每条触手都由一堆不同的个人渴望和随之而来的恐惧组成，而这些渴望也常常彼此发生巨大冲突。

Let’s take a closer look at each tentacle to see what’s going on.让我们仔细看看每条触手，看看发生了什么。

The Personal Yearnings tentacle is probably the hardest one to generalize here—it’s pretty particular to each of us. It’s a reflection of our specific personality and our values, and it bears the burden of probably the most complex and challenging human need: fulfillment. It’s also in the shit dealing with not only our current selves, but a bunch of our past selves too. The dreams of 7-year-old you and the idealized identity of 12-year-old you and the secret hopes of 17-year-old you and the evolving passions of your current self are all somewhere on the personal tentacle, each throwing their own little fit about getting what they want, and each fully ready to make you feel horrible about yourself with their disappointment and disgust if you fail them. On top of that, your fear of death sometimes emerges on the personal tentacle, all needy about you leaving your mark and achieving greatness and all that. The personal tentacle is why you don’t find very many billionaires content to spend the rest of their life sipping cocktails on the beach—it’s a highly needy tentacle.个人渴望触手可能是这里最难概括的触手——它对我们每个人来说都是非常特殊的。它反映了我们特定的个性和价值观，并且承担着可能是最复杂和最具挑战性的人类需求的负担：满足。它不仅涉及现在的自己，还涉及过去的自己。 7岁的你的梦想、12岁的你的理想化身份、17岁的你的秘密希望、以及现在的你不断变化的激情，都在个人触角的某个地方，每一个都抛出了自己的想法。他们对得到他们想要的东西感到有点不舒服，如果你让他们失望，他们就会让你感到失望和厌恶，让你对自己感到可怕。最重要的是，你对死亡的恐惧有时会出现在你的个人触手上，所有这些都需要你留下自己的印记，实现伟大等等。个人触手是为什么你不会发现很多亿万富翁满足于在海滩上喝鸡尾酒度过余生的原因——这是一个非常需要的触手。

And yet, the personal tentacle is also one that often ends up somewhat neglected. Because in many cases, it’s the ickiest set of yearnings to really go for; because the fears of this tentacle aren’t scary in an immediate way—they creep in out of the background over time; and because the personal tentacle is always at risk of getting bowled over early in your career by the powerful animal emotions of the other tentacles. This neglect can leave a person with major regrets later on once the dust settles. An unfulfilled Personal Yearnings tentacle is often the explanation, for example, behind a very successful, very unhappy person—who may believe they got successful in the wrong field.然而，个人触角也常常被忽视。因为在很多情况下，这是最难以真正追求的渴望；因为对这条触手的恐惧并不会立即令人恐惧——随着时间的推移，它们会从背景中悄悄显现出来；而且因为在你职业生涯的早期，个人触角总是面临着被其他触角强烈的动物情绪击倒的风险。一旦尘埃落定，这种忽视可能会给人带来巨大的遗憾。例如，一个未实现的个人渴望触手往往是一个非常成功、非常不快乐的人背后的原因——他们可能认为自己在错误的领域取得了成功。

The Social Yearnings tentacle is probably our most primitive, animal side, with its core drive stemming back to our tribal evolutionary past. On the tentacle are a number of odd creatures.社交渴望触手可能是我们最原始的动物一面，其核心驱动力可以追溯到我们部落的进化历史。触手之上，栖息着许多奇异的生物。

As we’ve discussed before on this blog, we all have a Social Survival Mammoth living in our heads who’s earth-shatteringly obsessed with what other people think of us. This means he craves acceptance and inclusion and being well-liked, while likewise being petrified of embarrassment, negative judgment, and disapproval. He really really really wants to be in the in-group and he really really really doesn’t want to be in the outgroup. He’s quite cute though.正如我们之前在本博客中讨论过的那样，我们所有人的脑海中都生活着一只社会生存猛犸象，它对别人对我们的看法有着惊天动地的痴迷。这意味着他渴望被接受、包容和受欢迎，同时也害怕尴尬、负面判断和反对。他真的真的真的很想加入内群体，但他真的真的真的不想加入外群体。不过他还挺可爱的。

Then there’s your ego, who’s a similar character but even more needy. Your ego doesn’t just want to be accepted; it wants to be admired, desired, and fawned upon—ideally, on a mass scale. More upsetting to it than being disliked is being ignored. It wants to be relevant and important and widely known.然后是你的自我，它的性格相似，但更需要帮助。你的自我不只是想被接受；你还想被接受。它希望受到钦佩、渴望和奉承——理想情况下，是大规模的。比不喜欢更令人沮丧的是被忽视。它希望具有相关性、重要性和广为人知。

There are other characters milling about as well. Somewhere else on the social tentacle is a little judge with a little gavel who gets very butthurt if it thinks people aren’t judging you fairly—if you’re not appropriately appreciated. It’s very important to the judge that people are aware of exactly how smart and talented you think you are. The judge is also big on holding grudges—which is the reason a lot of people are driven more than anything by a desire to show that person or those people who never believed in them.还有其他角色也在闲逛。在社会触手的其他地方，有一个拿着小木槌的小法官，如果它认为人们没有公平地评判你——如果你没有得到适当的赏识，他就会非常生气。对于法官来说，让人们准确地了解您认为自己有多聪明和有才华非常重要。法官也很记仇——这就是为什么很多人都想向那个人或那些从不相信他们的人展示的愿望。

Finally, some of us may find a loving little dog on our social tentacle who wants more than anything in the world to please its owner, and who just cannot bear the thought of disappointing them. The one problem with this adorable creature is that its owner isn’t you. It’s a person with so much psychological power over you that, if you’re not careful, you may dedicate your whole career to trying to please them and make them proud. (It’s probably a parent.)最后，我们中的一些人可能会在我们的社交触角上发现一只可爱的小狗，它最想要的就是取悦主人，并且无法忍受让主人失望的想法。这个可爱的生物的一个问题是它的主人不是你。这个人对你有如此大的心理力量，如果你不小心，你可能会奉献你的整个职业生涯来试图取悦他们并让他们感到自豪。（可能是父母。）

The Lifestyle Yearnings tentacle mostly just wants Tuesday to be a good day. But like, a really pleasant, enjoyable day—with plenty of free time and self-care and relaxation and luxuries.生活方式向往的触手大多只是希望周二是美好的一天。但就像，这是一个非常愉快、愉快的一天——有充足的空闲时间、自我照顾、放松和奢侈。

It’s also concerned with your life in the big picture being as great as possible—as far as your lifestyle tentacle is concerned, you should be able to do what you want to do in life, when and how you want to do it, with the people you like most. Life should be full of fun times and rich experiences, but it should also roll by smoothly, without too much hard work and as few bumps in the road as possible.它还关系到你的生活在大局中尽可能美好——就你的生活方式触手而言，你应该能够在你想要的时间、以你想要的方式做你在生活中想做的事情。你最喜欢的人。人生应该充满欢乐的时光和丰富的经历，但也应该一帆风顺，没有太多的辛苦，路上的坎坷也尽量少。

The issue is, even if you place a high priority on your lifestyle yearnings, it’s pretty difficult to keep the whole tentacle happy at the same time. The part of the tentacle that just wants to sit around and relax will hold you back from sweating to build the kind of career that offers long-term flexibility and the kind of wealth that can make life luxurious and cushy and full of toys. The part of the tentacle that only feels comfortable when the future feels predictable will reject the exact kinds of paths that may generate the long-term freedom another part of the tentacle longs for. The side of you that wants a stress-free life doesn’t get along very well with the side of you that thirsts to be hang gliding off a cliff in Namibia like Richard Branson.问题是，即使你高度重视自己对生活方式的向往，也很难同时保持整个触角的快乐。触手中只想坐下来放松的部分会阻止你出汗，建立那种提供长期灵活性的职业和那种可以让生活奢华、舒适、充满玩具的财富。只有当未来感觉可预测时，触手的那部分才会感到舒服，它将拒绝可能产生触手另一部分所渴望的长期自由的确切路径。想要无压力生活的那一面与像理查德·布兰森那样渴望在纳米比亚悬崖上滑翔的那一面并不能很好地相处。

The Moral Yearnings tentacle thinks the rest of the tentacles of your Yearning Octopus are a real pack of dicks—each one more self-involved and self-indulgent than the next. The parts of you on the moral tentacle look around and see a big world that needs so much fixing; they see billions of people no less worthy than you of a good life who just happened to be born into inferior circumstances; they see an uncertain future ahead that hangs in the balance between utopia and dystopia for life on Earth—a future we can actually push in the right direction if we could only get our other tentacles out of our way. While the other tentacles fantasize about what you would do with your life if you had a billion dollars in the bank, the moral tentacle fantasizes about the kind of impact you could make if you had a billion dollars to deploy.道德向往的触手认为你的向往章鱼的其余触手是一群真正的混蛋——每一个都比下一个更加自我投入和自我放纵。你道德触角上的部分环顾四周，看到了一个需要如此多修复的大世界；他们看到数十亿人不亚于你的美好生活，只是碰巧出生在较差的环境中；他们看到了一个不确定的未来，悬而未决的是地球上生命的乌托邦和反乌托邦之间的平衡——如果我们能够摆脱其他触手，我们实际上可以将这个未来推向正确的方向。其他触手幻想着如果你在银行里有十亿美元你会做什么，而道德触手则幻想着如果你有十亿美元可以部署你会产生什么样的影响。

Needless to say, the other tentacles of your Yearning Octopus find the moral tentacle to be insufferable. They also can’t begin to understand philanthropy for philanthropy’s sake—they think, “Other people aren’t me, so why would I spend my time and energy working to help them?”—but they can understand philanthropy for their own motive’s sake. While the moral and lifestyle tentacles tend to be in direct conflict, others may sometimes find common ground—the social tentacle can get very into philanthropy if it’ll happen to win you respect and admiration from a highly regarded social group, and some people’s personal tentacle may find the meaning or self-worth it so craves in a philanthropic endeavor.不用说，你的思念章鱼的其他触手发现道德触手是难以忍受的。他们也无法开始为了慈善而理解慈善事业——他们想，“别人不是我，那我为什么要花时间和精力来帮助他们呢？”——但他们可以为了自己的动机而理解慈善事业。虽然道德和生活方式的触角往往是直接冲突的，但其他触角有时可能会找到共同点——社会触角可以深入慈善事业，如果它碰巧为你赢得了一个备受尊敬的社会群体的尊重和钦佩，以及一些人的个人利益。触手可能会在慈善事业中找到它所渴望的意义或自我价值。

That’s why, when you do something philanthropic—or anything altruistic, really—there are a few separate things going on in your head. The part of you determined to get proper public credit for the deed lives on your social tentacle; the part of you that thinks “God I’m a good person” lives on your personal tentacle; and the part of you that really loves seeing the person or group you helped be better off lives on your moral tentacle. Likewise, not doing anything for others can hurt you on multiple tentacles—the moral tentacle because it feels guilty and sad, the social tentacle because this may cause others to judge you as a selfish or greedy person, and the personal tentacle because it may lower your self-esteem.这就是为什么，当你做一些慈善事业——或者说任何无私的事情——实际上，你的脑海里会发生一些不同的事情。你决心为自己的行为获得适当的公众信用，这部分生活在你的社会触角上；你认为“上帝，我是个好人”的那部分生活在你个人的触手上；而你真正喜欢看到你帮助的人或团体变得更好的那部分生活在你的道德触角上。同样，不为他人做任何事情可能会在多个触角上伤害你——道德触角，因为它感到内疚和悲伤；社会触角，因为这可能会导致别人认为你是一个自私或贪婪的人；个人触角，因为它可能会降低你的道德感。你的自尊。

Your Practical Yearnings tentacle thinks all of this is fine and great—but it would also like to point out that it’s March 31st and your rent is due tomorrow, and the funny thing about that is that it logged into your bank account and saw that the number of dollars in it is actually less than the number of dollars that your landlord will need from you sometime in the next 34 hours. And yeah it knows that you deposited that check on Thursday and that it’s supposed to clear tomorrow morning, but your practical tentacle also could have sworn that just last month, all the tentacles promised that they’d make some sacrifices in order to build up at least a little bank account cushion so that simply paying the rent wouldn’t have to be really fucking stressful every month. Your practical tentacle also can’t help but notice that your social tentacle offered to buy a round of drinks for all nine people you went to the bar with last Saturday so those people would think of you as a classy, generous person, and that your lifestyle tentacle chose to rent what sure seems like a pretty nice-ass apartment for someone now living check to check, and that the updates have gotten real quiet from your friend about that bagel delivery service he started six months ago that your moral tentacle happily invested $2,500 in to help it get off the ground, and oh also that meanwhile your personal tentacle has everyone sweating their dick off working at two comedy-writing internships simultaneously that somehow manage to bring in less money combined than you made dressing up as an Egyptian enchantress to wait tables at Jekyll & Hyde sophomore year of college.你的实用渴望触手认为这一切都很好，很棒，但它也想指出，现在是 3 月 31 日，你的房租明天就要到期，有趣的是，它登录到你的银行账户，看到其中的美元数量实际上少于您的房东在未来 34 小时内某个时间需要您提供的美元数量。是的，它知道你在周四存了那张支票，明天早上就会结清，但你的实际触手也可能在上个月发誓，所有触手都承诺他们会做出一些牺牲，以便在至少有一点银行账户缓冲，这样每个月就不用付房租了。你的实用触角也会情不自禁地注意到，你的社交触角主动提出为上周六你和你一起去酒吧的九个人买一杯饮料，这样那些人就会认为你是一个优雅、慷慨的人，而你的生活方式的触手选择租一套看起来相当不错的公寓，供现在生活检查的人使用，而且你的朋友关于他六个月前开始的百吉饼送货服务的最新消息已经变得非常安静，而你的道德触手很乐意投资2,500美元来帮助它起步，哦，还有，与此同时，你的个人触手让每个人都在同时参加两个喜剧写作实习，而不知何故，你赚到的钱加起来还比你装扮成埃及女巫赚的钱还要少。大学二年级时在 Jekyll & Hyde 餐厅当服务员。

At its basic level, your practical tentacle wants to make sure you can eat food and wear clothes and buy the medicine you need and not live outside. It doesn’t really care how these things happen—it just wants them to happen. But then everyone else on the octopus makes your practical tentacle’s life super hard by being fucky about things. Every time your income goes up, your lifestyle tentacle decides to raise the bar on what it wants and expects, leaving your practical tentacle continually in the shit trying to cover it all so you don’t have to run up your credit card debt. Your personal tentacle has all of these weird needs that take up a lot of time and more often than not aren’t exactly big money-makers. And while your practical tentacle would be totally down to just ask your rich uncle for money to help out, your social tentacle outlawed asking others for money because “it’s not a good look,” with your personal tentacle chiming in that “yeah, we’re better than that.”在基本层面上，你的实际触手想要确保你能吃东西、穿衣服、买你需要的药物，而不是住在外面。它并不真正关心这些事情如何发生——它只是希望它们发生。但章鱼上的其他人却因为对事情的搞怪而让你的实际触手的生活变得超级艰难。每当你的收入增加时，你的生活方式触手就会决定提高它想要和期望的标准，让你的实用触手不断陷入困境，试图涵盖这一切，这样你就不必增加信用卡债务。你的个人触角有所有这些奇怪的需求，这些需求占用了大量的时间，而且往往并不是真正的赚钱机器。虽然你的实际触角完全会向你富有的叔叔要钱来帮忙，但你的社交触角禁止向别人要钱，因为“这看起来不太好”，而你的个人触角会附和“是的，我们”比那更好。”

So that’s the situation. You’ve got this Yearning Octopus in your head with five tentacles (or however many yours has), each with their own agenda, that often conflict with each other. Then there are the distinct individual yearnings on each tentacle, often in conflict amongst themselves. And if that weren’t enough, you sometimes have furious internal conflict inside a single yearning. Like when your desire to pursue your passion can’t figure out what it’s most passionate about.情况就是这样。你的脑子里有一只渴望章鱼，它有五个触手（或者不管你有多少个），每个触手都有自己的议程，而且经常互相冲突。然后，每条触手上都有不同的个人渴望，这些渴望往往相互冲突。如果这还不够，你有时会在一个单一的渴望中产生激烈的内部冲突。就像当你追求自己的激情的愿望无法弄清楚它最热衷的是什么时。

Or when you want so badly to be respected, but then you remember that a career that wins the undying respect of one segment of society will always receive shrugs from other segments and even contemptuous eye rolls from other segments still.或者当你如此渴望受到尊重时，但你又想起，一项赢得社会某一阶层永恒尊重的职业总是会受到其他阶层的耸耸肩，甚至仍然受到其他阶层的轻蔑的白眼。

Or when you decide to satisfy your urge to help others, before realizing that the part of you that wants to dedicate your life to helping to mitigate humanity’s greatest existential risks has palpable disdain for the part of you that would rather make a tangible positive impact on your local community—while the part of you that can’t stand the thought of the millions of today’s humans without access to clean water finds both of those other yearnings to be pretty cold and heartless.或者，当你决定满足帮助他人的冲动时，在意识到你想要奉献一生来帮助减轻人类最大的生存风险的那部分之前，你对那些宁愿对人类产生切实的积极影响的那部分明显不屑一顾。你当地的社区——而你的一部分无法忍受当今数以百万计的人类无法获得清洁水的想法，发现这两种其他渴望都是相当冷酷无情的。

So yeah, your Yearning Octopus is complicated. And no human in history has ever satisfied their entire octopus—that’s why you’ll never find it fully smiling. Human yearning is a game of choices and sacrifices and compromise.是的，你的向往章鱼很复杂。历史上没有人能吃饱整只章鱼——这就是为什么你永远不会发现它完全微笑。人类的向往是一场选择、牺牲和妥协的游戏。

Dissecting the Octopus 解剖章鱼

With that in mind, let’s return to your Want Box. When we think about our career goals and fears and hopes and dreams, our consciousness is just accessing the net output of the Yearning Octopus—which is usually made up of its loudest voices. Only by digging into our mind’s subconscious can we see what’s really going on.6考虑到这一点，让我们回到您的需求箱。当我们思考我们的职业目标、恐惧、希望和梦想时，我们的意识只是获取渴望章鱼的净输出——它通常由它最响亮的声音组成。只有深入挖掘我们的潜意识，我们才能看到到底发生了什么。6

The cool thing is that we all have the ability to do that. The stuff in your subconscious is like stuff in the basement of a house. It’s not off-limits to us—it’s just in the basement. We can go look at it anytime—we just have to A) remember that the house has a basement, and B) actually spend the time and energy to go down there, even though going down there might suck.很酷的是我们都有能力做到这一点。你潜意识里的东西就像房子地下室里的东西。这对我们来说并不是禁区——只是在地下室。我们可以随时去看——我们只需要A）记住房子有地下室，B）实际上花时间和精力去那里，即使去那里可能会很糟糕。

So let’s head to the basement of your mind to look for the octopus. Unless you’re one of those people who’s really practiced at analyzing your subconscious, it might be dark in the basement, making it hard to see your octopus. The way to start turning the lights on is by identifying what your conscious mind currently knows about your yearnings and fears, and then unpacking it.那么，让我们前往你心灵的地下室寻找章鱼吧。除非你是真正擅长分析潜意识的人之一，否则地下室可能很黑，很难看到你的章鱼。开始打开灯的方法是确定你的意识目前对你的渴望和恐惧的了解，然后将其解开。

Like if there’s a certain career path that sounds fantastic to you, unpack that. Which tentacles in particular are yearning for that career—and which specific parts of those tentacles?就像如果有一条职业道路对你来说听起来很棒，那就解开它。哪些触手特别渴望这份职业——这些触手的哪些具体部分？

If you’re not currently working towards that career you supposedly yearn for, try to figure out why not. If you think it’s because you’re afraid of failing, unpack that. Fear of failure can emerge from any of the tentacles, so that’s not a specific enough analysis. You want to find the specific source of the fear. Is it a social tentacle fear of embarrassment, or of being judged by others as not that smart, or of appearing to be not that successful to your romantic interests? Is it a personal tentacle fear of damaging your own self-image—of confirming a suspicion about yourself that haunts you? Is it a lifestyle tentacle fear of having to downgrade your living situation, or of bringing stress and instability into a currently predictable life? Or maybe that fear of a living situation downgrade isn’t actually emerging from your lifestyle tentacle, but more so from your social tentacle—in other words, is it possible you’re indifferent about the apartment change itself but super concerned about the message a lifestyle downgrade sends to your friends and family? Or are there financial commitments you simply cannot back out of at the moment, and your practical tentacle is in a genuine panic about how you’ll make ends meet should this career switch take longer than expected to work out, or not work out at all? Or are a few of these combining together to generate your fear of making the leap?如果你目前没有为你所渴望的职业而努力，试着找出原因。如果你认为这是因为你害怕失败，那就打开它。对失败的恐惧可能会从任何触角中产生，因此这并不是一个足够具体的分析。你想要找到恐惧的具体来源。这是一种社交触角，害怕尴尬，害怕被别人认为不那么聪明，或者害怕在你的浪漫兴趣上显得不那么成功？是因为害怕损害自己的自我形象，害怕证实对自己的怀疑而困扰着你吗？这是一种生活方式的触手恐惧，担心不得不降低你的生活状况，或者担心给当前可预测的生活带来压力和不稳定？或者也许对居住环境降级的恐惧实际上并不是来自你的生活方式触手，而更多的是来自你的社交触手——换句话说，你是否有可能对换公寓本身漠不关心，但却非常关心关于搬家的信息。生活方式降级会发送给您的朋友和家人吗？或者是否有一些财务承诺是你目前无法撤销的，而你的实际触角真的对如何维持收支平衡感到恐慌，如果这种职业转换需要比预期更长的时间才能实现，或者根本无法实现？或者其中的一些因素组合在一起会让你害怕迈出这一步？

Perhaps you don’t really think it’s fear of failure that’s stopping you, but something else. Maybe it’s a dread of the change in identity—both internally and externally—that inevitably accompanies a career move like this. Maybe it’s the heavy weight of inertia—an intense resistance to change—that seems to exist in and of itself and overpowers all of your other yearnings. In either case, you’d want to unpack the feeling and ask yourself exactly which tentacles are so opposed to an identity shift, or so driven by inertia.也许你并不真正认为阻止你的是对失败的恐惧，而是其他原因。也许是对身份变化的恐惧——无论是内部还是外部——不可避免地伴随着这样的职业变动。也许是惯性的沉重负担——对改变的强烈抵制——似乎本身就存在并压倒了你所有其他的渴望。无论哪种情况，你都想解开这种感觉，并问问自己究竟哪些触手如此反对身份转变，或者如此受惯性驱动。

Maybe you pine to be rich. You fantasize about a life where you make $1.2 million a year, and you feel a tremendous drive to make it happen. All five tentacles can feel a desire for wealth under certain circumstances, each for their own reasons. Unpack it.也许你渴望变得富有。你幻想着年薪 120 万美元的生活，并且你感到有巨大的动力去实现它。所有五只触手在某些情况下都会感受到对财富的渴望，每种触手都有自己的原因。打开包装。

As you unpack an inner drive to make money, maybe you discover that at its core, the drive is more for a sense of security than for vast wealth. That can be unpacked too. A yearning for security at its simplest is just your practical tentacle doing what your practical tentacle does. But maybe it’s not actually basic security you want as much as a guarantee of a certain level of fanciness demanded by your lifestyle or social tentacle. Or perhaps what you really want is a level of security so over-the-top secure it can no longer be called a security yearning—instead, it may be an impulse by the emotional well-being section of your lifestyle tentacle to alleviate a compulsive financial stress you were raised to forever feel, almost regardless of your actual financial situation.当你挖掘出赚钱的内在动力时，也许你会发现，这种动力的核心更多是为了安全感，而不是为了巨额财富。这也能解压啊最简单的对安全的渴望就是你的实用触手做你实用的触手所做的事情。但也许它实际上并不是您想要的基本安全，而是您的生活方式或社会触手所要求的一定程度的幻想的保证。或者也许你真正想要的是一种安全感，这种安全感太过于安全，以至于不能再被称为安全感渴望——相反，它可能是你生活方式触角中情感健康部分的一种冲动，旨在缓解一种强迫性的感觉。几乎无论你的实际财务状况如何，你从小就受到的财务压力是永远感受到的。

The answers to all of these questions lie somewhere on the tentacles of your Yearning Octopus. And by asking questions like these and digging deep enough to identify the true roots of your various yearnings, you start to turn on the basement light and acquaint yourself with your octopus in all its complexity.所有这些问题的答案就在你的“向往章鱼”触手的某个地方。通过提出这样的问题并深入挖掘以找出各种渴望的真正根源，你开始打开地下室的灯并熟悉章鱼的所有复杂性。

You’ll also come to understand which of your inner yearnings seem to speak the loudest in your mind and carry the most pull in your decision-making processes. Pretty quickly, a yearning hierarchy will begin to reveal itself. You’ll identify yearnings that speak loudly and get their way; yearnings that cry at the top of their lungs but get continually elbowed out of the way by higher-prioritized parts of the octopus; yearnings that seem resigned to their low-status positions in the hierarchy.您还将了解到，您内心的哪些渴望似乎在您的脑海中表达得最响亮，并且对您的决策过程具有最大的吸引力。很快，一种渴望的等级制度就会开始显现出来。你会发现大声说出并实现的渴望；那些用尽全力呼喊的渴望，却不断被章鱼的优先级更高的部分推开；渴望似乎屈服于他们在等级制度中的低地位。

Searching for Imposters 寻找冒名顶替者

We’re making good progress—but we’re just getting started. Once you have a reasonably clear picture of your Yearning Octopus, you can start doing the real work—work that takes place another level down in your subconscious, in the basement of the basement. Here, you can set up a little interrogation room and one by one, bring each yearning down into it for a cross-examination.我们正在取得良好进展，但我们才刚刚开始。一旦你对你的向往章鱼有了相当清晰的了解，你就可以开始做真正的工作了——这些工作发生在你潜意识的另一个层面，在地下室的地下室。在这里，你可以搭建一个小审讯室，将每一个渴望都一一带进去进行盘问。

You’ll start by asking each yearning: how did you end up here, and why are you the way you are? Desires, beliefs, values, and fears don’t materialize out of nowhere. They’re either developed over time by our internal consciousness as observations and life experience pour in, or they’re implanted in us from the outside, by someone else. In other words, they’re the product of either you the chef or you the cook.你首先要问自己的每一个渴望：你是怎么来到这里的，为什么会变成现在这个样子？欲望、信仰、价值观和恐惧不会凭空出现。它们要么是随着观察和生活经验的涌入而由我们的内部意识随着时间的推移而发展起来的，要么是由其他人从外部植入我们体内的。换句话说，它们要么是你厨师的产物，要么是你厨师的产物。

So the goal here in your creepy interrogation room is to tug on the faces of each of your yearnings to find out if it’s authentically you, or if it’s someone else disguised as you.所以，在你令人毛骨悚然的审讯室里，你的目标就是拉扯你每一个渴望的面孔，看看这是否是真正的你，或者是否是伪装成你的其他人。

You can pull on a yearning’s face by playing the Why Game. You’ll ask your initial Why—Why is this something I want?—and get to some kind of Because. Then you’ll keep going. Why did that particular Because lead you to want what you now want? And when did that particular Because gain so much gravity with you? You’ll get to a deeper Because behind the Because. And if you continue with this, you’ll usually discover one of three things:你可以通过玩“为什么”游戏来展现渴望的表情。你会问你最初的“为什么” ——为什么这是我想要的东西？——然后得到某种“因为”。然后你就会继续前进。为什么那个特定的原因会导致你想要你现在想要的东西？那个特别的“因为”什么时候对你产生了如此大的吸引力？你会发现“因为”背后更深层次的“因为”。如果你继续这样做，你通常会发现以下三件事之一：

1) You’ll trace the Why back to its origin and reveal a long chain of authentic evolution that developed through deep independent thought. You’ll pull on their face and confirm that the skin is real.1) 你将追溯“为什么”的起源，并揭示通过深刻的独立思考发展起来的一长串真实的演变。您将拉扯他们的脸并确认皮肤是真的。

2) You’ll trace the Why back to an original Because that someone else installed in you—I guess the only reason I actually have this value is because my mom kind of forced it on me—and you realize that you never really thought to consider whether you actually independently agree with it. You never stopped to ask yourself whether your own accumulated wisdom actually justifies the level of conviction you feel about that core belief. In a case like this, the yearning is revealed to be an imposter pretending to be an authentic yearning of yours. You pull on its face and it’s a mask that comes off, exposing the yearning’s original installer underneath.2) 你会追溯到一个最初的原因，因为其他人安装在你身上——我想我真正拥有这个价值的唯一原因是因为我妈妈强迫我这么做——而你意识到你从来没有真正想过考虑一下您是否真的独立同意它。你从未停下来问自己，你自己积累的智慧是否真的证明了你对核心信念的信念程度。在这种情况下，这种渴望就会被揭露为冒名顶替者，冒充你真正的渴望。你拉一下它的脸，它的面具就会脱落，露出下面的渴望的原始安装者。

3) You’ll trace the Why back and back and get kind of lost in a haze of “I guess I just know this because it’s true!” This could be an authentic you thing, or just another version of #2, in an instance where you can’t recall the moment this feeling was installed in you. Somewhere deep in you, you’ll have a hunch about which it is.3）你会一遍又一遍地追寻“为什么”，然后迷失在“我想我只是知道这个，因为它是真的！”的迷雾中。这可能是一个真实的你的事情，或者只是#2的另一个版本，在你不记得这种感觉被安装在你身上的那一刻的情况下。在你内心深处的某个地方，你会有一种预感。

In a #1 scenario, you can be proud that you developed that part of you like a chef. It’s an authentic and hard-earned feeling or value.在第一个场景中，您可以为自己像厨师一样发展了这一部分而感到自豪。这是一种真实且来之不易的感觉或价值。

In a #2 or maybe #3 scenario, you’ve discovered that you’ve been duped. You’ve let someone else sneak onto your Yearning Octopus while you weren’t looking. When it comes to that particular belief of yours, you’re a cook following someone else’s recipe—an obedient robot reciting desires and fears out of someone else’s brain.在#2 或#3 场景中，您发现自己被欺骗了。你让其他人趁你不注意的时候偷偷偷偷爬上了你的“向往章鱼”。当谈到你的特定信念时，你就像一个遵循别人食谱的厨师——一个听话的机器人，从别人的大脑中背诵欲望和恐惧。

There’s a chance you’re an unusually wise person whose examination reveals an octopus developed mostly by you and kept readily up to date. More likely, you’re like me and most of my friends—your interrogation room reveals some definite imposters, or at least a lot of ambiguity. Like, underneath one mask, you’ll find your mom.您很可能是一个异常聪明的人，您的检查发现了一种主要由您开发并随时保持最新状态的章鱼。更有可能的是，你就像我和我的大多数朋友一样——你的审讯室揭露了一些明确的冒名顶替者，或者至少有很多模棱两可的地方。就像，在一张面具下，你会找到你的妈妈。

You’ll pull off others to reveal the values and judgments of broader conventional wisdom, or the viewpoints of your more immediate community, or what’s considered cool by the dominant culture of your generation or the immediate culture within your closest group of friends.你会吸引其他人来揭示更广泛的传统智慧的价值观和判断，或者你更直接的社区的观点，或者你这一代的主流文化或你最亲密的朋友群体中的直接文化认为什么是酷的。

Sometimes you’ll get to the end of a Why-Because pathway only to find the philosophy in a famous novel, or something a celebrity hero of yours once said in an interview, or a strong opinion one of your professors always repeated.有时，你会走到“为什么-因为”路径的尽头，却发现一本著名小说中的哲学，或者你的一位名人英雄曾经在采访中说过的话，或者你的一位教授总是重复的强烈观点。

You might even find that some of your yearnings and fears were written by you…when you were seven years old. Like a childhood dream that was etched into the back of your consciousness as the thing you believe you really want, when you’re being truly honest.你甚至可能会发现你的一些渴望和恐惧是你七岁时写下的。就像儿时的梦想一样，当你真正诚实时，它就被铭刻在你的意识深处，成为你相信你真正想要的东西。

The interrogation room probably won’t be that fun a time. But it’s time well spent—because you’re not your 7-year-old self, just like you’re not your parents or your friends or your generation or your society or your heroes or your past decisions or your recent circumstances. You’re Current-Age You—the only person, and the only version of yourself, who is actually qualified to want and not want the things you want and don’t want.审讯室可能不会那么有趣。但这时间花得很值——因为你不再是 7 岁时的自己，就像你不再是你的父母、你的朋友、你的一代人、你的社会、你的英雄、你过去的决定或你最近的情况一样。你是当前年龄的你——唯一的人，也是你自己的唯一版本，实际上有资格想要和不想要你想要和不想要的东西。

To be clear, this isn’t to say that it’s wrong to live by the words of a wise parent or a famous philosopher or friends you respect or the convictions of a younger you. Humble people are by definition influence-able—influences are an important and inevitable part of who each of us is. The key distinction is this:需要明确的是，这并不是说按照明智的父母或著名哲学家或您尊敬的朋友或年轻人的信念生活是错误的。谦虚的人顾名思义是具有影响力的——影响力是我们每个人的重要且不可避免的一部分。关键区别在于：

Do you treat the words of your external influences as information, held and considered by an authentic inner you, that you’ve carefully decided to embrace? Or are your influences themselves actually in your brain, masquerading as inner you?你是否将外部影响的话语视为信息，由真实的内心持有和考虑，并仔细决定接受？或者你的影响本身实际上就在你的大脑中，伪装成你的内心？

Do you want the same thing someone else you know wants because you heard them talk about it, you thought about it alongside your own life experience, and you eventually decided that, for now, you agree? Or because you heard someone talk about what they want or fear, and you thought, “I don’t know shit and that person does, so if they say X is true, I’m sure they’re right”—and then you etched those ideas into your mind, never again feeling the need to question them?你是否想要和你认识的其他人想要的东西一样的东西，因为你听到他们谈论它，你结合你自己的生活经历思考它，并且你最终决定，现在，你同意？或者因为你听到有人谈论他们想要什么或害怕什么，然后你想，“我什么都不知道，而那个人知道，所以如果他们说 X 是真的，我确信他们是对的”——然后你将这些想法铭刻在您的脑海中，再也没有必要质疑它们？

The former is what chefs do. The latter is what you do when you’re being an obedient robot. And a robot is what you become when at some point you get the idea in your head that someone else is more qualified to be you than you are.前者是厨师所做的。当你成为一个听话的机器人时，后者就是你所做的。当你在脑海中某个时刻意识到其他人比你更有资格成为你时，你就会变成机器人。

The good news is that all humans make this mistake—and you can fix it. Just like your subconscious is right there for viewing if you want to view it—it’s also there for changing and updating and rewriting. It’s your head—you’re allowed to do with it what you want.好消息是，所有人都会犯这个错误，而且您可以纠正它。就像你的潜意识就在那里，如果你想看的话就可以观看一样——它也在那里可以改变、更新和重写。这是你的头脑——你可以用它做你想做的事。

So it’s time for some evictions. Masked imposters have to go. Even mom and dad.所以是时候进行一些驱逐了。蒙面骗子必须走。甚至是爸爸妈妈。

At the end of this, your octopus may look a little barren, leaving you feeling a little like you don’t know who you even are anymore. We usually think of this as a bad feeling, or even an existential crisis, but it actually means you’re doing better than most people.最后，你的章鱼可能看起来有点贫瘠，让你感觉有点不知道自己是谁了。我们通常认为这是一种不好的感觉，甚至是一种生存危机，但这实际上意味着你比大多数人做得更好。

The drop from naive over-confidence to wise, realistic humility never feels good, but pausing the roller coaster while it’s still on that first cliff and avoiding the pain—which turns out to be a lot of people’s move—isn’t a great strategy. Wisdom isn’t correlated with knowledge, it’s correlated with being in touch with reality—it’s not how far to the right you are on the graph, it’s how close you are to the orange line. Wisdom hurts at first, but it’s the only place where actual growth happens. The irony is that the cliff-pausers of the world like to make the wiser, braver valley-dwellers or continual-climbers feel bad about themselves—because they fundamentally don’t get how knowing yourself works. They haven’t reached that stage yet.从天真的过度自信下降到明智、现实的谦逊从来不会让人感觉良好，但在过山车仍在第一个悬崖时暂停并避免痛苦（事实证明这是很多人的举动）并不是一个好策略。智慧与知识无关，它与与现实的接触相关——这不是你在图表上离右边有多远，而是你离橙色线有多近。智慧一开始会带来伤害，但它是真正成长的唯一地方。具有讽刺意味的是，世界上的悬崖峭壁喜欢让那些更聪明、更勇敢的山谷居民或不断攀登的人对自己感到难过——因为他们从根本上不明白如何了解自己。他们还没有达到那个阶段。

Getting to know your real self is super hard and never complete. But if you’ve tumbled off the cliff, you’ve gone through a key rite of passage and progress is now possible. As you climb up the orange line, you’ll slowly but surely begin to repopulate your Yearning Octopus with your real self.了解真实的自己是非常困难的，而且永远不会完成。但如果你从悬崖上掉了下来，那么你就已经经历了一个关键的成人仪式，现在就有可能取得进步。当你爬上橙色线时，你会慢慢但肯定地开始用真实的自我重新填充你的向往章鱼。

At the moment, it probably won’t be obvious what those missing yearnings of yours are exactly—because they’re on an even deeper floor of your subconscious. They’re in the basement of the basement of the basement—in a place called Denial Prison.目前，你可能还不清楚那些缺失的渴望到底是什么——因为它们位于你潜意识的更深层次。他们在地下室的地下室的地下室里——一个叫做“拒绝监狱”的地方。

Denial Prison 拒绝监狱

Our brain’s Denial Prison is a place most of us don’t even know is there—it’s where we put the parts of us we repress and deny.我们大脑的“拒绝监狱”是一个我们大多数人甚至都不知道的地方——它是我们关押我们压抑和否认的部分的地方。

The authentic yearnings of ours that we’re in touch with—i.e. those that proved to be authentic during interrogation—were easy parts of our true selves to find in our subconscious, lying in plain sight, right below the surface of our consciousness. Even our conscious mind knows these yearnings well, because they frequently make their way upstairs into our thoughts. These are the parts of us we have a healthy relationship with.我们所接触到的真实渴望——即那些在审讯中被证明是真实的渴望——是我们真实自我的一部分，很容易在我们的潜意识中找到，就在我们意识表面之下的显而易见的地方。甚至我们的意识也很清楚这些渴望，因为它们经常进入我们的思想。这些是我们与我们有着健康关系的部分。

But then there are the parts of you that weren’t living on your octopus where they’re supposed to be—instead, you found an imposter in their place. These lost parts of you are often incredibly hard to access, because they’ve been living deep in your subconscious, on a floor so low it’s almost not there at all. Almost.但你身上的某些部分并没有生活在章鱼身上，而是在它们应该存在的地方，你发现了一个冒名顶替者。你的这些失去的部分往往非常难以接近，因为它们一直生活在你的潜意识深处，在一个如此低的楼层，几乎根本不存在。几乎。

Some parts of us are banished down on basement #3 because they’re extraordinarily painful for us to acknowledge or think about. Sometimes new parts of us are born only to be immediately locked up in prison as part of a denial of our own evolution—i.e. out of stubbornness. But there are other times when a part of us is in Denial Prison because someone else locked it up down there. In the case of your yearnings, some of them will have been put there by whatever masked intruder had been taking its place. If dad has successfully convinced you that you care deeply about having a prestigious career, he probably has also convinced you that the part of you that, deep down, really wants to be a carpenter isn’t really you and isn’t what you really want. At some point during your childhood, he threw your passion for carpentry into a dark, dank Denial Prison cell.我们的某些部分被放逐到了三号地下室，因为承认或思考它们对我们来说是极其痛苦的。有时，我们的新部分诞生后，却立即被关进监狱，作为对我们自身进化的否认的一部分——即出于固执。但也有一些时候，我们的一部分被关进拒绝监狱，因为有人把它锁在那里。就你的渴望而言，其中一些会被取代它的蒙面入侵者放在那里。如果爸爸成功地让你相信你非常关心拥有一份有声望的职业，那么他可能也让你相信，你内心深处真正想成为一名木匠的部分并不是真正的你，也不是你真正的样子。想。在你童年的某个时刻，他把你对木工的热情扔进了一间黑暗、潮湿的拒绝监狱牢房。

So let’s gather your courage and head down to the basement of the basement of the basement of your mind and see what we find.所以，让我们鼓起勇气，前往你心灵的地下室的地下室，看看我们会发现什么。

You may pass some unpleasant characters.你可能会遇到一些不愉快的角色。

Leave them for another time—right now, search for locked-away career-related yearnings. Maybe you’ll find a repressed passion to teach. Or a desire to be famous that your particular tribe has shamed you out of. Or a deep love of long blocks of free, open leisure time that your hornier, greedier teenage self kicked downstairs in favor of a raging ambition.把它们留到下次吧——现在，寻找与职业相关的封闭的渴望。也许你会发现压抑的教学热情。或者是你的特定部落让你感到羞耻的想要出名的渴望。或者是对漫长的自由、开放的休闲时间的深深热爱，你更饥渴、更贪婪的青少年自我将其踢下楼，以支持汹涌的野心。

There will be certain parts of your authentic self you won’t be able to uncover in Denial Prison—it’s pretty dark down there. But be patient—now that you’ve done your audit and cleared space for them on your octopus, they may begin to emerge.在拒绝监狱中，你将无法发现真实自我的某些部分——那里非常黑暗。但请耐心等待，既然您已经完成了审核并在章鱼上为它们清理了空间，它们可能会开始出现。

Priority Rankings 优先顺序

The other part of our Yearning Octopus audit will address the hierarchy of your yearnings. Almost as important as the yearnings themselves is the priority they’re given. The hierarchy is easy to see because it’s revealed in your actions. You may like to think a desire to do something bold is high up on your hierarchy, but if you’re not currently working on something bold, it reveals that however important boldness is to you, something else—some source of fear or inertia in you—is currently being prioritized above it.我们的“向往八达通”审核的另一部分将解决您的向往的层次结构。几乎与渴望本身一样重要的是它们被赋予的优先级。层次结构很容易看到，因为它在你的行为中显现出来。你可能认为做大胆事情的愿望在你的层次中处于较高的地位，但如果你目前没有做一些大胆的事情，这表明无论大胆对你来说有多重要，其他事情——恐惧或惰性的一些来源你——目前的优先级高于它。

It’s important to remember that a ranking of yearnings is also a ranking of fears. The octopus contains anything that could make you want or not want to pursue a certain career, and the reverse side of each yearning is its accompanying fear of the opposite. The reverse side of your yearning to be admired is a fear of embarrassment. If you flip over your desire for self-actualization, you’ll see a fear of underachieving. The other half of your craving of self-esteem is a fear of feeling shame. If your actions don’t seem to match what you believe is the internal hierarchy of your yearnings, usually it’s because you’re forgetting to think about the role your fears are playing. What looks like a determined drive for success, for example, might actually be someone running away from a negative self-image or trying to escape feelings like envy or under-appreciation. If your actions seem beholden to yearnings that you don’t believe you actually care that much about, you’re probably not looking closely enough at your fears.重要的是要记住，渴望的排名也是恐惧的排名。章鱼含有任何可能让你想要或不想追求某种职业的东西，而每一种渴望的反面都是伴随着对相反的恐惧。你渴望被钦佩的另一面是害怕尴尬。如果你转变对自我实现的渴望，你就会看到对成就不佳的恐惧。你对自尊的渴望的另一半是对羞耻感的恐惧。如果你的行为似乎与你所认为的渴望的内部层次不符，通常是因为你忘记了考虑你的恐惧所扮演的角色。例如，看似坚定地追求成功的人，实际上可能是一个人在逃避负面的自我形象，或者试图逃避嫉妒或不被欣赏等感觉。如果你的行为似乎是出于你的渴望，而你并不认为自己真的那么在乎，那么你可能没有足够仔细地审视自己的恐惧。

With both yearnings and fears in mind, think about what your internal hierarchy might look like, and return that same important question: “Who made this order? Was it really me?”考虑到渴望和恐惧，想想你的内部层次结构可能是什么样子，然后回答同样重要的问题：“谁下的这个订单？真的是我吗？”

For example, we’re often told to “follow our passion”—this is society saying “put your passion yearnings at the top of your hierarchy.” That’s a very specific instruction. Maybe that’s the right thing for you, but it also very well might not be. It’s something you need to independently evaluate.例如，我们经常被告知要“追随我们的激情”——这就是社会所说的“把你的激情渴望放在你的等级制度的顶端”。这是一个非常具体的指令。也许这对你来说是正确的，但也很可能不是。这是你需要独立评估的事情。

To get this right, let’s try to do a fresh ranking, from first principles, based on who we really are, how we’ve evolved over time, and what really matters to us most, right now.为了做到这一点，让我们尝试根据我们的真实身份、我们随着时间的推移如何演变以及现在对我们最重要的事情，从首要原则出发，进行一次新的排名。

This isn’t about which yearnings or fears have the loudest voices or which fears are most palpable—if it were, you’d be letting your impulses take the wheel of your life. The person doing the ranking is you—the little center of consciousness reading this post who can observe your octopus and look at it objectively. This involves another kind of compromise. On one side, you’ll try to tap into all the wisdom you’ve accumulated throughout your life and make active decisions about values—about what you really believe is important. On the other side, it’s about self-acceptance and self-compassion. Sometimes you’ll have strong undeniable yearnings that you’re not super proud of—whether you like it or not, those are part of you, and when you neglect them, they may cause a continual stink and make you miserable. Creating your yearning hierarchy is a give and take between what’s important and what’s you. It’s probably a good goal to give higher priority to your more noble qualities, but it’s okay to throw a bone to some of your not-so-noble sides as well—depending on where you decide to draw the line. There’s a wisdom to knowing when to accept your not-so-noble side and when to reject it entirely.这并不是关于哪种渴望或恐惧的声音最大，或者哪种恐惧最明显——如果是这样，你就会让你的冲动掌控你的生活。进行排名的人就是你——阅读这篇文章的小意识中心，可以观察你的章鱼并客观地看待它。这涉及另一种妥协。一方面，你将尝试利用你一生中积累的所有智慧，并就你真正认为重要的价值观做出积极的决定。另一方面，这是关于自我接纳和自我同情。有时你会有强烈的、不可否认的渴望，但你并不为此感到自豪——无论你喜欢与否，这些都是你的一部分，当你忽视它们时，它们可能会导致持续的臭味，让你痛苦。创建你渴望的层次结构是重要事物和你自己之间的一种让步。优先考虑你更高尚的品质可能是一个很好的目标，但也可以对你一些不那么高尚的方面进行批评——这取决于你决定在哪里划清界限。知道什么时候接受自己不那么高尚的一面，什么时候完全拒绝它，是一种智慧。

To get all of this in order, we want a good system. You can play around with what works for you—I like the idea of a shelf:为了让这一切井井有条，我们需要一个好的系统。您可以尝试适合您的方法——我喜欢架子的想法：

This divides things into five categories. The absolutely highest priority inner drives get to go in the extra special non-negotiable bowl. The NN bowl is for yearnings so important to you that you want to essentially guarantee that they’ll happen—at the expense of all other yearnings, if necessary. This is why so many of history’s legends were famously single-minded—they had a very intense NN bowl yearning and it led them to world fame, often at the expense of relationships, balance, and health. The bowl is small because it should be used very sparingly—if at all. Like maybe only one thing gets it. Or maybe two or three. Too many things in the NN bowl cancels out its power, making that the same as having nothing in the bowl at all.这将事物分为五类。绝对最高优先级的内部驱动器可以放入额外特殊的不可协商的碗中。 NN碗代表对你来说如此重要的渴望，以至于你想从根本上保证它们会发生——如果有必要的话，以牺牲所有其他渴望为代价。这就是为什么如此多的历史传奇人物都以一心一意而闻名——他们对 NN 碗有着非常强烈的渴望，这让他们获得了世界声誉，但往往以牺牲人际关系、平衡和健康为代价。碗很小，因为如果有的话，应该非常节省地使用它。就像也许只有一件事能得到它。或者也许是两三个。 NN碗里的东西太多会抵消它的力量，这和碗里什么都没有一样。

Your group of top shelf yearnings is mostly what will drive your career choices—but top shelf placement should also be doled out sparingly (that’s why it’s not a very large shelf). Shelf placement is as much about de-prioritizing as it is about prioritizing. You’re not just choosing which parts of you are the most important to make you happy, you’re choosing which parts of you to intentionally leave wanting or even directly opposed. No matter what your hierarchy looks like, some yearnings will be left feeling very unhappy and some fears will feel like they’re being continually assaulted. This is inevitable.你对顶级货架的渴望很大程度上会推动你的职业选择，但顶级货架的位置也应该谨慎分配（这就是为什么它不是一个很大的货架）。货架放置既是关于取消优先级，也是关于确定优先级。你不仅要选择自己的哪些部分对让自己快乐最重要，还要选择故意让自己的哪些部分缺乏甚至直接反对。无论你的等级制度是什么样的，有些渴望会让人感到非常不高兴，有些恐惧会让人感觉自己正在不断受到攻击。这是不可避免的。

That’s why most yearnings should be on the middle shelf, the bottom shelf, or the trash can. The middle shelf is good for those not-so-noble qualities in you that you decide to accept. They deserve some of your attention. And they’ll often demand it—core parts of you won’t go quietly into non-prioritization, and they sometimes can really ruin your life if they’re neglected.这就是为什么大多数渴望应该放在中间的架子、最底层的架子或垃圾桶上。中间的架子适合你决定接受的那些不那么高贵的品质。他们值得你的一些关注。他们经常会要求它——你的核心部分不会悄悄地进入非优先考虑的状态，如果它们被忽视，有时它们真的会毁掉你的生活。

Most of the rest will end up on the bottom shelf. Putting a part of you on the bottom shelf is telling it, “I know you want these things, but for now, I’ve decided other things are more important. I promise to revisit you a little later, after I’ve gotten some more information, and if I change my mind, you’ll get a shelf upgrade then.” The best way to think of the bottom shelf is this: the more yearnings you can convince to accept a bottom shelf rating, the better the chances your top shelf and NN bowl yearnings have of getting what they want. Likewise, the fewer yearnings you put on the top shelf, the more likely those on the top shelf will be to thrive. Your time and energy are severely limited, so this is a zero-sum compromise. The amateur mistake is to be too liberal with the NN bowl and top shelf and too sparing with the large bottom shelf.其余的大部分最终都会放在最底层的架子上。把你的一部分放在最底层就是告诉它：“我知道你想要这些东西，但现在，我认为其他东西更重要。我保证稍后会在获得更多信息后再次拜访您，如果我改变主意，您将获得货架升级。”考虑底层货架的最佳方式是这样的：你能说服越多的渴望接受底层货架评级，你的顶层货架和 NN 碗渴望得到他们想要的东西的机会就越大。同样，你放在顶层的渴望越少，顶层的那些就越有可能蓬勃发展。你的时间和精力都受到严重限制，所以这是一个零和妥协。业余爱好者的错误是对 NN 碗和顶架过于自由，而对大底架过于保守。

Then there’s the trash can, for the drives and fears you flat-out reject—those parts of you that fundamentally violate the person your wisest self wants to be. A good amount of inner conflict emerges from people’s trash cans, and trash can control is a major component of integrity and inner strength. But like the rest of your hierarchy decisions, your criteria for what qualifies as trash should be derived from your own deep thought, not from what others tell you is and is not trash.然后是垃圾桶，用于存放你断然拒绝的驱动力和恐惧——这些部分从根本上违背了你最明智的自我想成为的人。人们的很多内心冲突都是从垃圾桶中产生的，而垃圾桶控制是正直和内在力量的主要组成部分。但就像你的其他层次结构决策一样，你对垃圾的标准应该来自你自己的深刻思考，而不是别人告诉你是垃圾还是不是垃圾的标准。

As you go through this difficult prioritizing process—inevitably, at times, against the screaming protests of unhappily deprioritized yearnings—remember that you’re the only wise one in the room. Yearnings and fears are impatient and bad at seeing the big picture. Even a seemingly high-minded yearning, like those on the moral tentacle, can’t understand the complete picture in the way you can. Many of the people who have done wonders to make the world better got there on a path that started with selfish motives like wealth or personal fulfillment—motives their moral tentacle probably hated at first. The octopus won’t be the wise adult in the room—that’s your job.当你经历这个困难的优先顺序过程时——有时不可避免地会反对那些不幸的被剥夺优先顺序的渴望的尖叫抗议——请记住，你是房间里唯一明智的人。渴望和恐惧都是不耐烦的，不善于看到大局。即使是看似崇高的向往，就像那些道德触手上的向往，也无法像你那样了解整个画面。许多为让世界变得更美好而创造奇迹的人，都是以财富或个人成就等自私动机开始的，而他们的道德触角一开始可能讨厌这些动机。章鱼不会成为房间里聪明的成年人——那是你的工作。

Finally, as we’ll discuss more later, this is not a permanent decision. It’s the opposite—it’s a rough draft written in light pencil. It’s a hypothesis that you’ll be able to test and then revise based on how actually living this hierarchy feels in practice.最后，正如我们稍后将讨论的那样，这不是一个永久性的决定。恰恰相反——这是用轻铅笔写的草稿。这是一个假设，您将能够测试并根据这种层次结构在实践中的实际感受进行修改。

Your Want Box is ready to go. Now let’s turn to your Reality Box.您的旺旺箱已准备就绪。现在让我们转向你的现实盒子。

Deep Analysis, Part 2: Your Reality Box深入分析，第 2 部分：你的现实盒子

The Want Box deals with what you find desirable. The Reality Box deals with what’s possible.想要的东西可以处理你想要的东西。现实盒子处理的是可能的事情。

But when we examined the Want Box, it became clear that it’s not necessarily based on what you actually want—it’s based on what you think you want—what you’re in the habit of wanting.但当我们检查“想要的盒子”时，我们发现它不一定基于您真正想要的东西，而是基于您认为自己想要的东西，即您习惯想要的东西。

The Reality Box is the same deal. It doesn’t show you reality, it shows your best crack at what reality might be—your perception of reality.现实盒子也是同样的情况。它并不向你展示现实，它展示了你对现实可能是什么的最佳破解——你对现实的看法。

The goal of self-reflection is to bring both of these boxes as close to accuracy as possible. We want our perceived yearnings to be a true reflection of our authentic inner selves, and we want our beliefs about what’s possible to come close to mirroring what’s actually possible. For our Want Box audit, we looked under the hood of the Want Box and found its settings—your yearnings and fears. When we open the hood of your Reality Box, we see a group of beliefs.自我反思的目标是使这两个框尽可能接近准确性。我们希望我们所感知到的渴望能够真实反映我们真实的内在自我，我们希望我们对可能性的信念能够接近反映实际可能性。在我们的旺旺箱审核中，我们深入了解了旺旺箱的内部情况，找到了它的设置——您的渴望和恐惧。当我们打开现实盒子的引擎盖时，我们会看到一组信念。

When it comes to your career possibilities, you’re dealing with two sets of beliefs: beliefs about the world and beliefs about your own potential. For a career option to qualify for your Reality Box, your potential in that career area has to measure up to the objective difficulty of achieving success in that area.当谈到你的职业可能性时，你面临着两套信念：对世界的信念和对自己潜力的信念。对于符合“现实盒子”资格的职业选择，您在该职业领域的潜力必须符合在该领域取得成功的客观难度。

Us being us, we’re probably pretty bad at assessing either side of this comparison accurately.我们就是我们，我们可能很难准确评估这种比较的任何一方。

I don’t know how you think about career path difficulty, but in my experience, people often see it like this:我不知道你如何看待职业道路的困难，但根据我的经验，人们经常这样看待它：

There are traditional careers—stuff like medicine or law or teaching or a corporate ladder, etc.—and these careers have predictable, set paths. If you’re decently smart and work hard, you’ll end up in a successful, stable situation.有一些传统的职业——比如医学、法律、教学或公司阶梯等——而且这些职业都有可预测的、既定的路径。如果你足够聪明并且努力工作，你最终会获得成功、稳定的局面。

Then there are less traditional careers—the arts, entrepreneurship, non-profit work, politics, etc.—and these are wildcards. Success and stability are no guarantee, and to reach great heights, it’s either a lottery ticket game of luck, a genetic lottery game of innate talent, or some combination of the two.还有一些不那么传统的职业——艺术、创业、非营利工作、政治等等——而这些都是通配符。成功和稳定并不能保证，要达到伟大的高度，要么是运气的彩票游戏，要么是天赋的基因彩票游戏，要么是两者的某种结合。

These are perfectly reasonable assumptions—if you live in 1952. Your beliefs about the world of careers and about what it takes to succeed need just as thorough an unmasking as your yearnings did—and I suspect that behind most of them, you’ll find big, fat conventional wisdom. You might first pull off the mask of one of your beliefs and find your parents or your friends or your college career coach—but if you keep going and pull on their face, you’ll usually see that it’s also a mask, and conventional wisdom is there hiding behind it. A general conception, a common opinion, an oft-cited statistic7—none of which have actually been verified by you, but all of which are treated as gospel by society.这些都是完全合理的假设——如果你生活在 1952 年。你对职业世界以及成功所需条件的信念需要像你的渴望一样彻底揭开——我怀疑在大多数信念的背后，你会发现又大又肥的传统智慧。你可能会首先摘下你的一个信仰的面具，找到你的父母、你的朋友或你的大学职业教练——但如果你继续前进，摘下他们的脸，你通常会发现这也是一个面具，而传统的智慧背后隐藏着什么吗？一个普遍的概念、一个共同的观点、一个经常被引用的统计数据7 —这些都没有被你实际验证过，但都被社会视为福音。

Today’s world goes through dramatic changes each decade, which usually leaves conventional wisdom wildly outdated. But we’re wired for a more ancient world where almost nothing ever changed, so we all reason like cooks and treat conventional wisdom as equivalent to truth.当今世界每十年都会经历巨大的变化，这通常使传统智慧变得非常过时。但我们渴望的是一个更古老的世界，那里几乎什么都没有改变，所以我们都像厨师一样推理，并将传统智慧视为等同于真理。

These problems then extend to how we view our own potential. When you overrate the impact of innate talent on how people fare in their careers—and you also conflate talent and skill level—it won’t leave you feeling great about your chances at many paths. Because we better understand the trajectory of traditional careers, we’re less prone to do this with them. A first-year medical student sees an experienced surgeon at work and thinks, “I can get there one day—just need to do about 20 years of hard work.” But when a young artist or entrepreneur or software engineer looks at the equivalent of the experienced surgeon in their field, they’re more likely to think, “Wow look how talented they are—I’m nowhere near that good,” and get all hopeless. There’s also the other common notion, that people who thrive in non-traditional careers had some “big break” at some point, like hitting a lucky scratch card jackpot—and I don’t know many people who want to risk their careers on scratch cards.这些问题进而延伸到我们如何看待自己的潜力。当你高估了天赋对人们职业生涯的影响，并且你还将天赋和技能水平混为一谈时，你不会对自己在许多道路上的机会感到满意。因为我们更了解传统职业的轨迹，所以我们不太可能对他们这样做。一名一年级医学生看到一位经验丰富的外科医生正在工作，他想：“我有一天可以到达那里——只需要大约 20 年的努力。”但是，当年轻的艺术家、企业家或软件工程师看到他们领域中经验丰富的外科医生的同等水平时，他们更有可能会想，“哇，看看他们多么有才华——我远没有那么好”，然后就得到了所有绝望。还有另一个常见的观念，即那些在非传统职业中茁壮成长的人在某些时候会经历一些“重大突破”，比如中了幸运的刮刮卡大奖——而且我不知道有多少人愿意拿自己的职业生涯冒险。牌。

These are only a few examples of the slew of delusions and misconceptions we tend to have about how great careers happen. So let’s brainstorm how it might actually work:这些只是我们对伟大职业如何发生的一系列妄想和误解的几个例子。那么让我们集思广益一下它实际上是如何运作的：

The Career Landscape 职业前景

I have no idea, mostly. And I think most people have no idea. Things are just changing too quickly.大部分情况下我不知道。我想大多数人都不知道。事情变化得太快了。

But that’s kind of the key point. If you can figure out how to get a reasonably accurate picture of the real career landscape out there, you have a massive edge over everyone else, most of whom will be using conventional wisdom as their instruction booklet.但这是关键点。如果你能弄清楚如何相当准确地了解真实的职业前景，那么你比其他人有巨大的优势，他们中的大多数人都会使用传统智慧作为他们的指导手册。

First, there’s the broad landscape—the set of all the jobs someone could possibly have in today’s society. My current job description is: “Writer of 8,000-to-40,000-word articles about a bunch of different topics, with cursing and stick figures, on a remarkably sporadic schedule.” Think conventional wisdom has any job openings for me with that description? The landscape today is made up of thousands of options—some 40 years old, some made possible only three months ago because of the advent of some new technology—and the way things work today, if there’s an option you want that’s not already out there, you can probably create it for yourself. Pretty stressful, but also incredibly exciting.首先，有广阔的前景——当今社会中某人可能从事的所有工作的集合。我目前的工作描述是：“撰写 8,000 到 40,000 字的文章，涉及一堆不同的主题，带有咒骂和简笔画，日程安排非常零散。”根据这种描述，传统观点认为我有任何职位空缺吗？今天的景观由数千种选择组成——有些已经有 40 年历史了，有些因为一些新技术的出现才在三个月前成为可能——以及今天事情的运作方式，如果有一个你想要的选择目前还没有出现，您也许可以自己创建它。压力很大，但也非常令人兴奋。

Then, there’s each specific career path. A career path is like a game board. The conventional wisdom bookshelf contains instruction booklets for only a small fraction of today’s available game boards—and those that it does have usually tell you how that game was played in the past, even though the current game board has evolved significantly into something with new kinds of opportunities and different rules and loopholes. When you consider a career path today, to make an accurate assessment of what the path looks like and what kinds of strength-weakness profiles it favors, you have to understand what that career’s current game board looks like. Otherwise, it’s like trying to evaluate your chances of being a professional basketball player based on your height and strength without realizing that, say, basketball has evolved and is now played on oversize courts that contain 10 different 7-foot hoops, and the current game favors speed over height and strength.然后，还有每条具体的职业道路。职业道路就像一个游戏板。传统的智慧书架只包含当今可用游戏板的一小部分的说明手册，并且它所包含的那些通常会告诉您过去如何玩该游戏，即使当前的游戏板已显着发展为新类型的东西机会以及不同的规则和漏洞。当你今天考虑一条职业道路时，为了准确评估这条道路是什么样子以及它喜欢什么样的优势-劣势特征，你必须了解该职业当前的游戏板是什么样子的。否则，这就像试图根据你的身高和力量来评估你成为职业篮球运动员的机会，却没有意识到，比如说，篮球已经进化，现在在包含 10 个不同 7 英尺篮筐的超大球场上进行，而当前的比赛注重速度胜过身高和力量。

This is promising news. There are likely dozens of awesome career paths that beautifully match your natural strengths, and it’s likely that most other people trying to succeed on those paths are playing with an outdated rulebook and strategy guide. If you simply understand what the game board really looks like and play by modern rules, you have a huge advantage.这是一个有希望的消息。可能有几十条很棒的职业道路与你的自然优势完美匹配，而且大多数试图在这些道路上取得成功的人很可能都在使用过时的规则手册和策略指南。如果您简单地了解游戏板的实际情况并按照现代规则进行游戏，那么您将拥有巨大的优势。

Your Potential 你的潜力

And this brings us to you and your particular strengths. Not only do we assess our strengths based on the wrong game boards (like in our basketball example)—even when we have the right game board in mind, we’re often bad at identifying the real strengths that that game calls for.这让我们认识了您和您的特殊优势。我们不仅根据错误的游戏板（就像我们的篮球示例）来评估我们的优势，即使我们心中有正确的游戏板，我们也常常不善于识别该游戏所需的真正优势。

When assessing your chances on a certain career path, the key question is:在评估您在某条职业道路上的机会时，关键问题是：

With enough time, could you get good enough at this game to potentially reach whatever your definition of success is in that career?如果有足够的时间，你能否在这个游戏中表现得足够好，从而有可能达到你对职业生涯成功的定义？

I like to view this journey to “good enough at the game to succeed” as a distance. The distance starts with where you are now—point A—and ends with you reaching your definition of success, which we can draw with a star.我喜欢将这段“在比赛中表现出色并取得成功”的旅程视为一段距离。距离从您现在所在的位置（A 点）开始，到您达到成功的定义为止（我们可以用星星来画出成功的定义）。

The length of the distance depends on where point A is (how far along you are at the current moment) and where the star is (how lofty your definition of success is).距离的长短取决于A点在哪里（你当前的距离有多远）和星星在哪里（你对成功的定义有多高）。

So if you’re a college graduate who majored in computer science and your career goal is to be a middle-of-the-ladder engineer at Google, your distance might look like this:因此，如果你是一名计算机科学专业的大学毕业生，并且你的职业目标是成为 Google 的中层工程师，那么你的距离可能是这样的：

But if you’ve never done any kind of computer science before, and your career goal is to be the top engineer at Google, you’ve got a much longer road ahead:但如果你以前从未从事过任何类型的计算机科学，并且你的职业目标是成为 Google 的顶级工程师，那么你前面的路还很长：

If your goal is to create the new Google, the road gets much, much longer.如果你的目标是创建新的谷歌，那么这条路就会变得非常非常漫长。

At this point, conventional wisdom might emerge as a voice in your head and point out that simply getting good enough at a certain skill doesn’t actually guarantee success—you might reach the star on a career path and still find that you haven’t “made it” yet.此时，传统智慧可能会在你的脑海中浮现，并指出仅仅在某项技能上足够优秀并不能真正保证成功——你可能在职业道路上达到了明星的地位，但仍然发现自己还没有成功。 “成功”了。

That’s mostly wrong, because it’s misunderstanding the star. The star isn’t about a particular skill level—e.g. coding ability or acting skills or business savvy—it’s about the entire game. In traditional careers, the games tend to be more straightforward—if you want to be a top surgeon, and you get incredibly good at surgery, you’ve probably hit your star and you’ll have your career. But the game boards in less traditional careers often involve many more factors. Reaching the “I want to be a famous actor” star doesn’t simply mean getting as good at acting as Morgan Freeman, it means getting as good at the entire actor game as most movie stars get by the time they break through. Acting ability is only one piece of that puzzle—you also need a knack for getting yourself in front of people with power, a shrewdness for personal branding, an insane amount of optimism, a ridiculous amount of hustle and persistence, etc. If you get good enough at that whole game—every component of it—your chances of becoming an A-list movie star are actually pretty high. That’s what hitting the star means.这基本上是错误的，因为它误解了明星。明星与特定的技能水平无关——例如编码能力、表演技巧或商业头脑——而是与整个游戏有关。在传统的职业生涯中，游戏往往更加简单——如果你想成为一名顶级外科医生，并且你在手术方面表现得非常出色，那么你可能已经达到了你的明星水平，你就会拥有自己的职业生涯。但在不那么传统的职业中，游戏板往往涉及更多因素。成为“我想成为一名著名演员”的明星并不仅仅意味着要像摩根·弗里曼一样擅长表演，还意味着要像大多数电影明星在突破时一样在整个演员游戏中表现出色。表演能力只是这个难题的一小部分——你还需要一种让自己出现在有权势的人面前的技巧、对个人品牌的精明、疯狂的乐观、荒谬的忙碌和坚持等等。如果你对整个游戏（其中的每个组成部分）都足够好，那么你成为一线电影明星的机会实际上相当高。这就是击中星星的意思。

But conventional wisdom doesn’t get how non-traditional careers work—it only thinks in terms of a narrow aspect of success: talent and hard work. When career paths have game boards with much more going on, conventional wisdom just throws its hands up and calls it “luck.” To conventional wisdom, becoming a movie star requires some talent, but mostly, hitting a rare scratch ticket jackpot.但传统智慧并不了解非传统职业是如何运作的——它只考虑成功的狭隘方面：天赋和努力。当职业道路上有更多的事情发生时，传统智慧就会举手并称其为“运气”。按照传统观点，成为电影明星需要一定的天赋，但最重要的是赢得罕见的刮刮乐大奖。

So how do you figure out your chances of getting to any particular star? It’s all about a simple formula:那么你如何计算出获得某一特定明星的机会呢？这一切都与一个简单的公式有关：

Distance = Speed x Time.距离 = 速度 x 时间。

In our case, the more apt wording might be:在我们的例子中，更恰当的措辞可能是：

Progress = Pace x Persistence.进步=速度×坚持。

Your outlook on any career quest depends on A) the pace at which you’ll be able to improve at playing that career’s “game” and B) the amount of time you’re willing to persist in chasing that star. Let’s talk about both of these:你对任何职业追求的看法取决于A）你在职业“游戏”中能够提高的速度和B）你愿意坚持追逐那颗星星的时间。我们来谈谈这两个问题：

Pace 步伐

What makes someone slower or faster at improving at a career game? I’d say it comes down to three factors:是什么让一个人在职业比赛中进步得更慢或更快？我想说这归结为三个因素：

Your level of chefness. As we discussed earlier, chefs look at the world with fresh eyes and build conclusions based on what they observe and what they’ve experienced. Cooks arrive at conclusions by following someone else’s recipe—in the case of careers, the recipe is usually conventional wisdom. Careers are complex games that almost everyone starts off bad at—then the chefs improve rapidly through a continual loop…你的厨师水平。正如我们之前讨论的，厨师以新的眼光看待世界，并根据他们的观察和经历得出结论。厨师通过遵循别人的菜谱得出结论——就职业而言，菜谱通常是传统智慧。职业生涯是一场复杂的游戏，几乎每个人一开始都表现不佳，然后厨师通过不断的循环迅速提高......

…while cooks improve at a snail’s pace, because their strategy is just following a recipe which itself barely changes. What’s more, in a world where career games are constantly evolving and morphing, the chef’s tactics can evolve in real time and keep up. Meanwhile, the cook’s recipe just grows more and more outdated—a problem they remain oblivious to. This is why I’m pretty convinced that at least for less traditional careers, your level of chefness is the single most important factor in determining your pace of improvement.…而厨师的进步速度却非常缓慢，因为他们的策略只是遵循食谱，而食谱本身几乎没有改变。更重要的是，在职业游戏不断发展和变化的世界中，厨师的策略可以实时演变并跟上。与此同时，厨师的食谱变得越来越过时——他们仍然忽视了这个问题。这就是为什么我非常确信，至少对于不太传统的职业来说，你的厨师水平是决定你进步速度的最重要因素。

Your work ethic. This one is obvious. Someone who works on their career 60 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, is going to move down the path almost four times faster than someone who works 20 hours a week, 40 weeks a year. Someone who chooses a balanced lifestyle will move slower than a single-minded workaholic. Someone with a propensity towards laziness or procrastination is going to lose a lot of ground to someone who’s good at putting in consistent work days. Someone who frequently breaks from work to daydream or pick up their phone is going to get less done in each work hour than someone who practices deep focus.你的职业道德。这是显而易见的。每周工作 60 小时、每年 50 周的人在职业生涯中的进步速度几乎是每周工作 20 小时、每年 40 周的人的四倍。选择平衡生活方式的人会比一心一意的工作狂行动得慢。那些有懒惰或拖延倾向的人会比那些善于连续工作的人失去很多优势。那些经常在工作中休息做白日梦或拿起手机的人在每个工作小时内完成的工作量会比那些进行深度专注的人完成的工作要少。

Your natural abilities. Talent does matter. Smarter, more talented people will improve at a game at a faster rate than less naturally gifted people. But intelligence and talent are only two types of natural ability that come into play here. Cleverness and savvy matter too, and those qualities don’t always correlate with raw intelligence. Depending on the type of career, social skills can be critically important as well. In many careers, likable (or subtly manipulative) people have a big advantage over less likable people—and those who enjoy socializing will put in more people hours over time, and build deeper relationships, than antisocial types.你天生的能力。天赋确实很重要。更聪明、更有才华的人在比赛中的进步速度会比天赋较差的人更快。但智力和天赋只是在这里发挥作用的两种自然能力。聪明和悟性也很重要，但这些品质并不总是与原始智力相关。根据职业类型，社交技能也至关重要。在许多职业中，讨人喜欢（或巧妙地操纵他人）的人比不讨人喜欢的人有很大的优势，而那些喜欢社交的人会比反社会的人花更多的时间在人际交往上，并建立更深层次的关系。

Other things, like existing connections, existing resources, and existing skills matter, of course, but they’re not components of pace—they’re part of the location of point A.其他的东西，比如现有的联系、现有的资源和现有的技能当然也很重要，但它们不是速度的组成部分——它们是 A 点位置的一部分。

Persistence 坚持

When I say persistence, I’m referring to long-term persistence (as opposed to day-to-day work ethic). Persistence is simpler than pace. The more years you’re willing to commit to chasing a star, the farther along the road towards the star you’ll get. A car going 30 mph that quits driving after 15 minutes gets a lot less far than a car that drives 10 mph for two hours.当我说坚持时，我指的是长期坚持（而不是日常工作道德）。坚持比步伐更简单。你愿意花更多的时间去追逐一颗星星，你在通往星星的路上就会走得更远。一辆以 30 英里每小时的速度行驶 15 分钟后停止行驶的汽车，比一辆以 10 英里每小时的速度行驶两小时的汽车行驶的距离要短得多。

And this is why persistence is so important. Someone who has decided they’re only willing to give a dream career a shot for three years before they’ll go for their fallback plan has essentially disqualified themselves from a chance at their dreams. It doesn’t matter how awesome you are—if you’ll give up after two or three years of not breaking through, you’re unlikely to succeed. A few years is just not enough time to traverse the typically long distances it takes to get to the raddest success stars, no matter how impressive your pace.这就是为什么坚持如此重要。如果一个人决定只愿意在三年内尝试自己的梦想职业，然后再开始他们的后备计划，那么他基本上就失去了实现梦想的机会。不管你有多出色，如果你在两三年没有突破后就放弃，你就不太可能成功。无论您的步伐多么令人印象深刻，几年的时间都不足以跨越通常需要的长途跋涉才能成为最疯狂的成功明星。

Your Real Strengths and Weaknesses你真正的优点和缺点

With our pace-times-persistence equation in mind, let’s revisit the concept of strengths and weaknesses. It’s not that “strengths and weaknesses” is a bad concept—it’s that we think about it all wrong. When we list our strengths, we tend to list our areas of existing skill more than anything else. Instead, strengths should be all about pace and persistence qualities. Originality or lack thereof should be a critical component of the discussion, making qualities like agility and humility (trademark chef traits) notable strengths, and qualities like stubbornness8 or intellectual laziness (classic cook traits) important weaknesses. The subtleties of work ethic, like a knack for deep focus or a propensity to procrastinate, should also be a major part of the discussion, as should natural abilities beyond talent, like savvy and likability. Qualities related to persistence, like resilience and determination and patience, should be thought of as promising strengths, while a social tentacle clamoring to appear successful as quickly as possible should be viewed as a bright red flag.考虑到我们的速度-时间-持久性等式，让我们重新审视优势和劣势的概念。这并不是说“优点和缺点”是一个糟糕的概念，而是我们对它的看法完全错误。当我们列出自己的优势时，我们更倾向于列出我们现有的技能领域。相反，优势应该是速度和毅力。原创性或缺乏原创性应该成为讨论的关键组成部分，使敏捷和谦逊（厨师的标志性特质）等品质成为显着的优势，而8或智力懒惰（典型的厨师特征）重要弱点。职业道德的微妙之处，例如深度专注的技巧或拖延的倾向，也应该成为讨论的主要部分，除了天赋之外的自然能力，比如悟性和可爱性，与毅力相关的品质，比如韧性、决心和耐心，应该被视为有前途的优势，而社会触角则迫切需要出现。尽快成功应该被视为一个明亮的危险信号。

Most importantly, these items shouldn’t be discussed as a snapshot of where they are now, but rather in terms of your potential for improvement in each of them. If you handed 25-year-old Michael Jordan a basketball for the first time, he’d suck. But calling basketball a “weakness” of his would be getting it very wrong. Instead, you’d want to watch him practice over the next six weeks and evaluate the slope of his improvement. This lesson applies to specific skills—but most general pace and persistence qualities can also be worked on and improved if you focus on them.最重要的是，这些项目不应该作为它们现在状况的快照来讨论，而应该根据您在每个项目上的改进潜力来讨论。如果你第一次递给 25 岁的迈克尔乔丹一个篮球，他会很糟糕。但将篮球称为他的“弱点”就大错特错了。相反，你想观察他在接下来的六周内的训练并评估他的进步斜率。本课程适用于特定技能，但如果您专注于大多数一般步伐和坚持不懈的品质，也可以得到锻炼和提高。

Filling in the Reality Box填写现实框

Your true Reality Box would literally include all career paths for which you think a highly improved version of yourself could, with an entire lifetime of effort, reach the minimum star you’d be comfortable defining as success. This would be an impossibly big list, only ruling out paths that are clearly far too long for you to traverse at your maximum possible pace on the path (like me chasing a career as an Olympic figure skater). But it’s still useful to pause for a minute and reflect on the vast extent of your full Reality Box—just acknowledging how many options are truly open to you can put you in the right mindset.9你真正的现实盒子实际上包括你认为自己的高度改进版本可以通过一生的努力达到你可以轻松定义为成功的最低星的所有职业道路。这将是一个大得难以置信的清单，只是排除了那些显然太长的路径，以至于你无法以最大可能的速度在路径上行走（就像我追逐奥林匹克花样滑冰运动员的职业生涯）。但停下来思考一下你的现实盒子的广阔范围仍然很有用——只要承认有多少选择真正对你开放，就可以让你处于正确的心态。9

So to be a bit more efficient, let’s worry about the parts of the Reality Box that might actually end up in your Option Pool (the middle of the Venn diagram where the Want and Reality Boxes overlap). To complete our Reality Box audit with that caveat, we need to evaluate:因此，为了提高效率，让我们担心现实盒子中可能最终出现在选项池中的部分（维恩图的中间，想要的盒子和现实盒子重叠的地方）。为了完成我们的现实盒子审计并注意这一点，我们需要评估：

1) The general landscape. Take our best crack at evaluating the world’s current career landscape—the full range of options available (or create-able).1）总体景观。尽最大努力评估世界当前的职业前景——可用（或可创造）的全方位选择。

2) Specific game boards. For any careers that sound remotely interesting, ponder what the deal might be with that career’s current game board—the parties involved, the way success seems to be happening for others recently, the most up-to-date rules of the game, the latest new loopholes that are being exploited, etc.2）特定的游戏板。对于任何听起来有点有趣的职业，思考一下该职业当前的游戏板可能会发生什么——所涉及的各方、最近其他人似乎取得成功的方式、最新的游戏规则、最新的规则正在被利用的新漏洞等

3) Starting point. For those paths, evaluate your starting point, based on your current skills, resources, and connections relevant to that field.3）起点。对于这些路径，根据您当前与该领域相关的技能、资源和联系来评估您的起点。

4) Success point. Think about end points and where on each line your star should be placed. Ask yourself what’s the minimum level of success you’d need to achieve in order to feel happy about having chosen that career path.4）成功点。考虑端点以及每条线上星星应该放置的位置。问问自己，为了对选择这条职业道路感到高兴，你需要实现的最低成功水平是多少。

5) Your pace. Make an initial estimate for what your pace of improvement might be on these various game boards, based on your current pace-related strengths and how much you think you can improve at each of them (in other words, how much your speed might be able to accelerate).5）你的步伐。根据您当前与速度相关的优势以及您认为自己可以在每个游戏板上提高多少（换句话说，您的速度可能能够提高多少），对您在这些不同游戏板上的改进速度进行初步估计加速）。

6) Your level of persistence. Evaluate the amount of time you think you’ll be willing to put into each of these respective paths.6）你的坚持程度。评估您认为自己愿意在每条路径上投入的时间。

Now it’s just math. You take your game board and make it a line, you plot starting points and success stars that together generate the various distances in front of you, and for each, you multiply your pace by your level of persistence. If it seems like the product of your pace and persistence for a given career path might be able to measure up to the path’s total length, that career lands in your Reality Box. Of course, it’s impossible to get exact values for any of the above factors, but it’s good to at least know the equation you’re working with.现在这只是数学。你拿着你的游戏板，把它画成一条线，你画出起点和成功星星，它们一起在你面前产生不同的距离，对于每一个距离，你都将你的步伐乘以你的坚持水平。如果你对某条职业道路的步伐和坚持的结果似乎能够达到这条道路的总长度，那么该职业就落在了你的现实盒子里。当然，不可能获得上述任何因素的精确值，但至少知道您正在使用的方程是有好处的。

A from-first-principles Reality Box audit may bring some overly optimistic people down to Earth, but I suspect that for most, an audit will leave them feeling like they have a lot more options than they realized, empowering them to set their sights on a bolder direction.从第一原则开始的现实盒子审计可能会让一些过于乐观的人脚踏实地，但我怀疑对于大多数人来说，审计会让他们感觉自己有比他们意识到的更多的选择，使他们能够将目光投向现实更大胆的方向。

A good Reality Box reflection warrants yet another Want Box reflection. Reframing a bunch of career paths in your mind will affect your level of yearning for some of them. One career may seem less appealing after reminding yourself that it will entail thousands of hours of networking or multiple decades of pre-success struggle. Another may seem less daunting after changing your mind about how much luck is actually involved. There will be other career paths you hadn’t considered wanting because you hadn’t considered them as real options, but some deep reflection has opened your mind to them.一个好的现实盒反映值得另一个愿望盒反映。在你的脑海中重新规划一堆职业道路会影响你对其中一些职业道路的向往程度。在提醒自己一项职业需要数千小时的社交或数十年的成功前奋斗之后，它可能看起来不再那么有吸引力。当你改变了对运气的看法之后，另一个可能看起来不那么令人畏惧了。还会有其他你没有考虑过想要的职业道路，因为你没有将它们视为真正的选择，但一些深刻的反思已经让你对它们敞开了心扉。

This brings us to the end of our long, two-part deep dive. After a fairly exhausting box-auditing process, we can return to our Venn10 diagram.这使我们结束了我们漫长的、由两部分组成的深入研究。经过相当疲惫的盒子审核过程后，我们可以回到我们的维恩10 个图表。

Assuming some things have changed, you have a new Option Pool to look at—a new list of options on the table that seem both desirable to your high-priority rankings and possible to achieve. We’re ready now to return to where we were before we started our analysis: the present moment. With these options in front of us, we’re ready to lift our heads up out of analysis and look forward into the future.假设有些事情发生了变化，你就有了一个新的选项池可供查看——桌面上有一个新的选项列表，这些选项似乎既符合你的高优先级排名，又可能实现。我们现在准备好回到开始分析之前的位置：当前时刻。有了这些选择，我们就可以从分析中抬起头来展望未来。

Connecting the Dots into the Future连接点与未来

It’s time to bring back your Career Plans map that I made you put down at the beginning of the post—the one with the arrow or the question mark. If there had been a clear arrow on your map before your audit, check out your new Option Pool. Given everything you’ve reflected upon, does your current career plan still qualify to be there? If so, congrats—you’re ahead of most of us.是时候带回我让你放在帖子开头的职业规划地图了——带有箭头或问号的地图。如果在审核之前您的地图上有一个清晰的箭头，请检查您的新选项池。考虑到您所反思的一切，您当前的职业计划是否仍然符合要求？如果是这样，那么恭喜你——你领先于我们大多数人。

If not, well that’s shitty news, but it’s also good news. Remember, going from a false arrow to a question mark is always major progress in life.如果没有，那是个坏消息，但也是个好消息。请记住，从错误的箭头到问号始终是生活中的重大进步。

And actually, a new question mark implies having made the key cliff jump on two roller coasters: getting to know yourself and getting to know the world. Major step in the right direction. Cross out the arrow and join the question mark crowd.事实上，一个新的问号意味着已经在两个过山车上完成了关键的悬崖跳跃：了解自己和了解世界。朝着正确方向迈出的重要一步。划掉箭头并加入问号人群。

Now the question mark crowd has a tough choice. You gotta pick one of the arrows in the Option Pool.现在问号人群面临着一个艰难的选择。您必须选择选项池中的箭头之一。

It’s a tough choice—but it should be way less tough than it is. Here’s why:这是一个艰难的选择——但它应该没有现在那么艰难。原因如下：

Careers used to be kind of like a 40-year tunnel. You picked your tunnel, and once you were in, that was that. You worked in that profession for 40 years or so before the tunnel spit you out on the other side into your retirement.职业生涯曾经有点像一条 40 年的隧道。你选择了你的隧道，一旦你进去了，就这样了。你在这个行业工作了大约 40 年，然后隧道将你吐到了另一边，进入退休生活。

The truth is, careers have probably never really functioned like 40-year-tunnels, they just seemed that way. At best, traditional careers of the past played out kind of like tunnels.事实是，职业生涯可能从未真正像 40 年隧道一样运作，它们只是看起来如此。过去的传统职业充其量只是像隧道一样。

Today’s careers—especially the less traditional ones—are really really not like tunnels. But crusty old conventional wisdom has a lot of us still viewing things that way, which makes the already hard job of making big career path choices much harder.今天的职业——尤其是那些不那么传统的职业——真的不像隧道。但顽固的旧传统智慧让我们很多人仍然以这种方式看待事物，这使得做出重大职业道路选择这一本来就很困难的工作变得更加困难。

When you think of your career as a tunnel, it causes an identity crisis in anyone who doesn’t feel sure of who exactly they are and who they’ll want to be decades from now—which is most sane people. It enhances the delusion that what we do for work is a synonym for who we are, making a question mark on your map seem like an existential disaster.当你将自己的职业视为一条隧道时，对于那些不确定自己到底是谁以及几十年后自己想成为谁的人来说，这会导致身份危机——这是最理智的人。它增强了一种错觉，即我们所做的工作就是我们是谁的同义词，使地图上的问号看起来像是一场生存灾难。

When you think of your career as a tunnel, the stakes to make the right choice seem so high that it explodes the feeling of tyranny of choice. For perfectionist types especially, this can be utterly paralyzing.当你将自己的职业生涯视为一条隧道时，做出正确选择的风险似乎如此之高，以至于会爆发出选择专制的感觉。尤其是对于完美主义者来说，这可能会让人完全瘫痪。

When you think of your career as a tunnel, you lose the courage to make a career switch, even when your soul is begging for it. It makes switching careers feel incredibly risky and embarrassing, and it suggests that someone who does so is a failure. It also makes all kinds of multi-faceted, vibrant, mid-career people feel like they’re too old to make a bold switch or start a whole new path afresh.当你把自己的职业视为一条隧道时，你就会失去转行的勇气，即使你的灵魂在乞求它。这让转行感到极其危险和尴尬，并且表明这样做的人是一个失败者。它还让各种多面性、充满活力、职业中期的人觉得自己太老了，无法做出大胆的转变或重新开始一条全新的道路。

But conventional wisdom still tells many of us that careers are tunnels. As the icing on its shit cake—on top of helping us yearn for things we don’t actually want, deny yearnings that we feel deep down, fear things that aren’t dangerous, and believe things about the world and our potential that aren’t accurate—conventional wisdom tells us that careers are a tunnel to help us daunt the shit out of ourselves unnecessarily.但传统智慧仍然告诉我们许多人，职业生涯是隧道。作为锦上添花——除了帮助我们渴望我们实际上并不想要的东西之外，否认我们内心深处的渴望，害怕不危险的事情，并相信关于世界的事情和我们的潜力。不准确——传统智慧告诉我们，职业生涯是一条隧道，可以帮助我们不必要地吓倒自己。

Today’s career landscape isn’t a lineup of tunnels, it’s a massive, impossibly complex, rapidly changing science laboratory. Today’s people aren’t synonymous with what they do—they’re impossibly complex, rapidly changing scientists. And today’s career isn’t a tunnel, or a box, or an identity label—it’s a long series of science experiments.今天的职业前景不再是一排隧道，而是一个巨大的、极其复杂的、快速变化的科学实验室。今天的人们并不等同于他们所做的事情——他们是极其复杂、瞬息万变的科学家。今天的职业不是一条隧道、一个盒子或一个身份标签——而是一长串的科学实验。

Steve Jobs compared life to connecting the dots, pointing out that while it’s easy to look at your past and see how the dots connected to lead you to where you are, it’s basically impossible in life to connect the dots forwards.史蒂夫·乔布斯将生活比作连接点，他指出，虽然很容易回顾你的过去，看看这些点如何连接起来，引导你到达现在的位置，但在生活中，将这些点连接起来基本上是不可能的。

If you look at the biographies of your heroes, you’ll see that their paths look a lot more like a long series of connected dots than a straight and predictable tunnel. If you look at yourself and your friends, you’ll probably see the same trend—according to data, the median time a young person stays in a given job is only 3 years (older people spend a longer time on each dot, but not that much longer—10.4 years on average).如果您查看英雄的传记，您会发现他们的道路看起来更像是一长串相连的点，而不是一条笔直且可预测的隧道。如果你看看你自己和你的朋友，你可能会看到同样的趋势——根据数据，年轻人在某项工作上停留的中位时间只有 3 年（年长的人在每个点上花费的时间更长，但并非如此）更长——平均 10.4 年）。

So seeing your career as a series of dots isn’t a mental trick to help you make decisions—it’s an accurate depiction of what’s actually happening. And seeing your career as a tunnel isn’t just unproductive—it’s delusional.因此，将你的职业生涯视为一系列点并不是帮助你做出决定的心理技巧，而是对实际发生情况的准确描述。将你的职业生涯视为一条隧道不仅没有成效，而且是一种妄想。

Likewise, you’re limited to focusing mainly on the next dot on your path—because it’s the only dot you can figure out. You don’t have to worry about dot #4 because you can’t anyway—you’re literally not qualified to do so.同样，你只能主要关注路径上的下一个点，因为它是你唯一能弄清楚的点。你不必担心第 4 点，因为无论如何你都不能——你实际上没有资格这样做。

By the time dot #4 rolls around, you will have learned stuff about yourself you don’t know now. You’ll also have changed from who you are now, and your Yearning Octopus will reflect those changes. You’ll know a lot more than you currently do about the career landscape and the specific game boards you’re interested in, and you’ll have become a much better game player. And of course, that landscape—and those game boards—will have themselves evolved.当第 4 点出现时，你将会了解一些你现在不知道的关于你自己的事情。您也将与现在相比发生变化，您的向往章鱼将反映这些变化。您将比目前更了解职业前景和您感兴趣的特定游戏板，并且您将成为一名更好的游戏玩家。当然，这种景观——以及那些游戏板——本身也会进化。

The fantastic website 80,000 Hours (which exists to help young, talented people work through their career choices) has compiled a lot of data to back this up: data on the fact that you’ll change, that the world will change, and that you’ll only learn with time what you’re actually good at. Popular psychologist Dan Gilbert also eloquently describes just how bad we are at predicting what will make us happy in the future.出色的网站80,000 Hours （该网站的存在是为了帮助年轻、有才华的人完成他们的职业选择）收集了大量数据来支持这一点：关于你会改变、世界会改变以及你会改变这一事实的数据。只有随着时间的推移，你才会知道自己真正擅长什么。受欢迎的心理学家丹·吉尔伯特也雄辩地描述了我们在预测未来让我们快乐的事情方面是多么糟糕。

Pretending you can figure out what dot #2 or #4 or #8 should be now is laughable. Future dots are the worry of a future, wiser you living in a future world. So let’s focus on dot #1.假装你现在可以弄清楚点#2、#4 或#8 应该是什么是可笑的。未来点是对未来的担忧，生活在未来世界的你更聪明。所以让我们关注点#1。

If we’re thinking of ourselves as scientists and of society as a science lab, we should think of your current freshly revised Want-Reality Venn Diagram as nothing more than an early, rough hypothesis. Dot #1 is your chance to test it out.如果我们将自己视为科学家，将社会视为科学实验室，那么我们应该将当前新修订的需求现实维恩图视为一个早期的、粗略的假设。第 1 点是您进行测试的机会。

Hypothesis testing is intuitive in the dating world. If a friend were toiling over what kind of person she wants to marry but never went out with anyone, you’d tell her, “You can’t figure this out on your couch—you’ve gotta start going on dates, and that’ll teach you what you want in a partner.” If that friend then went on a solid first date and returned home to toil for hours about whether or not this new person was The One, you’d again have to correct her. You’d say, “There’s no way you can know that from just one date! You have to get some experience dating this person to learn what you need to learn to make that decision.”假设检验在约会世界中是直观的。如果一个朋友正在苦苦思索她想嫁给什么样的人，但从未和任何人出去过，你会告诉她，“你不可能在沙发上解决这个问题——你必须开始约会，而那他会告诉你你想要什么样的伴侣。”如果那个朋友进行了一次扎实的第一次约会，然后回到家花了几个小时苦苦思索这个新朋友是否是那个人，你就必须再次纠正她。你会说：“你不可能只从一次约会就知道这一点！你必须获得一些与这个人约会的经验，才能了解你需要学习什么才能做出决定。”

We can all agree that this hypothetical friend is pretty nuts and is lacking a fundamental understanding of how you find a happy relationship. So let’s not be like her when it comes to picking our career. Dot #1 is a chill situation—it’s just a first date.我们都同意，这个假设的朋友非常疯狂，并且对如何找到幸福的关系缺乏基本的了解。所以，在选择职业时，我们不要像她一样。第 1 点的情况很冷淡——这只是第一次约会。

This is awesome news—because it makes it a lot less scary to draw an arrow on your map if it’s only an arrow to dot #1 of your future. The real cause of tyranny of choice is accurately seeing the sheer number of options you have in today’s world while delusionally seeing those careers as the 40-year tunnels of yesterday’s world. That’s a lethal combo. Reframing your next major career decision as a far lower-stakes choice makes the number of options exciting, not stressful.这是一个很棒的消息——因为如果它只是指向你未来的第一个点的箭头，那么在你的地图上画一个箭头就不那么可怕了。选择暴政的真正原因是准确地看到了当今世界拥有的众多选择，同时又妄想将这些职业视为昨天世界的 40 年隧道。这是一个致命的组合。将你的下一个重大职业决策重新定义为一个风险低得多的选择，这会让选择的数量令人兴奋，而不是有压力。

And that’s all great in theory. But now comes the hard part.从理论上讲，这一切都很棒。但现在困难的部分来了。

Making Your Move 行动起来

You’ve reflected and reflected and reflected and weighed and measured and predicted and considered. You’ve chosen a dot and drawn an arrow. And now you have to actually make the move.你已经反思、反思、反思、权衡、测量、预测和考虑。您选择了一个点并绘制了一个箭头。现在你必须真正采取行动。

We’re super bad at this. We’re frightened people. We don’t like icky things and making a bold, real-life step is icky. If there’s any ounce of procrastination susceptibility in us, here’s where it’ll show itself.我们在这方面非常糟糕。我们是害怕的人。我们不喜欢令人讨厌的事情，在现实生活中迈出大胆的一步是令人讨厌的。如果我们有一丝拖延症的倾向，它就会在这里表现出来。

The Yearning Octopus can help. As we discussed earlier, your behavior at any given point simply displays the configuration of your octopus. If you’ve decided on a life step and you can’t quite take it, it’s because the parts of you that don’t want to make a move are ranked higher in your subconscious than the parts of you that do. Your conscious mind may have tried to assign lower shelf ratings to the parts of your octopus that lean towards inertia, but your yearnings have rebelled. You’re a CEO not in control of their staff.向往章鱼可以提供帮助。正如我们之前讨论的，您在任何给定点的行为只是显示您的章鱼的配置。如果你已经决定了人生的一个步骤，但又不能完全采取，那是因为你不想采取行动的部分在你的潜意识中比愿意采取行动的部分排名更高。你的意识可能试图给你的章鱼中那些倾向于惰性的部分分配较低的货架评级，但你的渴望却反抗了。你是一位首席执行官，无法控制员工。

To fix this problem, think like a kindergarten teacher. In your class, a faction of the 5-year-olds is rebelling against your wishes. What do you do?要解决这个问题，请像幼儿园老师一样思考。在你们班上，一群 5 岁的孩子正在反抗你们的意愿。你做什么工作？

Go talk to the 5-year-olds that are causing the trouble. They’re unpleasant, defiant simpletons, but they can still be reasoned with. Talk to them about why you’ve ranked them lower than others in the octopus hierarchy. Describe to them the insights you gained from your Reality Box reflection. Remind them about how connecting the dots works and about the chillness of dot #1. You’re the teacher—figure it out.去和那些造成麻烦的 5 岁孩子谈谈。他们是令人不愉快、目中无人的傻瓜，但仍然可以跟他们讲道理。与他们讨论为什么你在章鱼等级中将他们的排名低于其他人。向他们描述你从现实盒子反思中获得的见解。提醒他们如何连接这些点以及第 1 点的寒冷。你是老师——弄清楚吧。

The older I get, the clearer it becomes that our internal battle as the kindergarten teachers of our mind is like 97% of life’s struggle. The world is easy—you’re difficult. If you find yourself continually not executing your plans in life and your promises to yourself, you’ve uncovered your new #1 priority—becoming a better kindergarten teacher. Until you do, your life will be run by a bunch of primitive, short-sighted 5-year-olds, and your whole shit will suck. Trust me, I know.随着年龄的增长，我越来越清楚，作为我们心灵中的幼儿园老师，我们内心的斗争就像生活中97%的斗争一样。世界很简单，你却很困难。如果你发现自己不断地没有执行你的生活计划和你对自己的承诺，你就发现了你新的第一要务——成为一名更好的幼儿园老师。除非你这样做，否则你的生活将由一群原始、目光短浅的五岁孩子掌控，你的一切都会很糟糕。相信我，我知道。

If your inner analysis does call for a career leap to a new dot, I hope that at some point, you’re able to make the jump.如果你的内心分析确实要求职业生涯飞跃到一个新的点，我希望在某个时候，你能够实现这一飞跃。

After the Move 搬家后

Jumping to a new dot is a liberating feeling, usually side by side with some substantial internal havoc.跳到一个新的点是一种解放的感觉，通常伴随着一些严重的内部混乱。

First of all, for a while at least, you’ll probably suck at what you’re doing on your new dot. While your wise self will know that’s exactly how it should be, your less wise selves will go into full existential meltdown mode. All of the fears you so thoughtfully deprioritized in your octopus ranking will think someone is murdering them and they’ll start trying to call 911. The yearnings you did prioritize won’t be feeling much gratification yet, and they’ll wonder if they were wrong all along about what they thought they wanted. The yearnings you didn’t prioritize will get out the guitar and start singing love songs for the greener-seeming grass you deprived them of. It won’t be much fun.首先，至少在一段时间内，你可能会对你在新点上所做的事情感到很糟糕。虽然你明智的自我会知道事情应该如此，但你不太明智的自我将进入完全的存在主义崩溃模式。你在章鱼排名中如此深思熟虑地取消优先级的所有恐惧都会认为有人谋杀了他们，他们会开始尝试拨打 911。你优先考虑的渴望还不会感到太多满足，他们会想知道它们是否是他们认为自己想要的东西一直都是错误的。你没有优先考虑的渴望会拿出吉他，开始为你剥夺的那些看起来更绿的草唱情歌。这不会很有趣。

Even if things do go well, you’ll be quickly reminded of the fact that the Yearning Octopus is a generally unhappy creature. Core pieces of the octopus will feel neglected or even assaulted, and every day that goes by, you’ll be bearing the opportunity cost of the paths you were considering but chose not to walk down—the versions of you in parallel universes where you made other choices. You’ll think about their hypothetical advancement in the world and worry about what you may have passed up.即使事情进展顺利，你也会很快想起一个事实：思念章鱼通常是一种不快乐的生物。章鱼的核心部分会感到被忽视甚至受到攻击，每一天过去，你都会承受你正在考虑但选择不走的道路的机会成本——你在平行宇宙中的版本。其他选择。你会思考他们在世界上假设的进步，并担心你可能已经放弃了什么。

As you get wiser, you’ll learn to view a largely unhappy octopus with acceptance. You’ll let it whine and get good at tuning it out, knowing that it’s whining in the exact way you planned for it to be.当你变得更聪明时，你会学会以接受的态度看待一只不开心的章鱼。你会让它抱怨，并善于将其消除，因为你知道它会按照你计划的方式抱怨。

The whining octopus is a reminder of why pure, elated happiness is never a reasonable goal. The times you feel pure happiness are temporary, drug-induced delusions—like the honeymoon phase of a new relationship or new job or the high following a long-awaited success. Those moments are the perfect golf shots of a mediocre golfer’s outing—they’re awesome, and you should enjoy the shit out of them—but they’re not the new normal, and they never will be.哀鸣的章鱼提醒我们，为什么纯粹、兴高采烈的幸福从来都不是一个合理的目标。你感到纯粹幸福的时刻是暂时的、由药物引起的错觉——就像一段新关系或新工作的蜜月期，或者是期待已久的成功后的兴奋。这些时刻是一个平庸高尔夫球手的完美高尔夫击球——它们很棒，你应该享受其中的乐趣——但它们不是新常态，也永远不会成为新常态。

A better goal is contentment: the satisfying feeling that you’re currently taking the best crack you can at a good life path; that what you’re working on might prove to be a piece of an eventual puzzle you can feel really proud of. Chasing happiness is an amateur move. Feeling contentment in those times when your choices and your circumstances have combined to pull it off, and knowing you have all that you could ever ask for, is for the wise.更好的目标是满足：一种满足感，即你目前正在尽最大努力走上一条美好的人生道路；你正在做的事情可能会成为你真正感到自豪的最终拼图的一部分。追逐幸福是一种业余行为。当你的选择和你的环境结合起来实现目标时，感到满足，并且知道你拥有你所要求的一切，这是明智的做法。

People talk about being present in the moment, but there’s also the broader concept of macro-presence: feeling broadly present in your own life. If you’re on a career dot that, when you’re being really honest with yourself, feels right, you get to stop thinking and stop planning for a while and just dig in. You’ll come back to the big picture later—for now, you can put the macro picture aside, put your head down, and dedicate all of your energy to the present. For a while, you can just live.人们谈论“活在当下”，但还有更广泛的“宏观存在”概念：感觉自己广泛地存在于自己的生活中。如果你正处于一个职业生涯中，当你对自己非常诚实时，感觉是对的，你就可以暂时停止思考和计划，然后专心致志。稍后你会回到大局——现在，你可以把宏观的事情放在一边，低下头，把所有的精力都奉献给当下。暂时，你可以活下去。

These moments don’t always last that long, so sink your teeth in. Put everything you’ve got into the dot you’ve chosen. As far as you know, you might be Michael Jordan holding his first basketball, so start playing.这些时刻并不总是持续那么久，所以要全力以赴。把你所拥有的一切都投入到你所选择的点上。据您所知，您可能是迈克尔乔丹拿着他的第一个篮球，所以开始玩吧。

The Next Dot? 下一个点？

At some point, your good feelings about the macro picture may sour. And when they do, you’ll have to get back into analysis mode and figure out what, in particular, is causing the restlessness.在某些时候，你对宏观形势的良好感觉可能会变坏。当他们这样做时，你必须回到分析模式并找出具体是什么导致了不安。

Sometimes, the macro mission won’t be the problem. It’ll be that the chef in you has decided that the mission itself calls for a strategic dot jump. In these cases, jumping dots isn’t a release of persistence but the stuff of persistence. This is the mission-enhancing type of dot jump.有时，宏观任务并不是问题。你的主厨已经决定任务本身需要战略性的点跳跃。在这些情况下，跳点并不是毅力的释放，而是毅力的体现。这是任务增强类型的点跳跃。

Other times, you’ll feel a darker kind of restlessness—the suspicion that you may need to change up the macro mission. When this happens, you’ll have to figure out if that feeling is emerging from the wise parts of you or simply from your restless, deprioritized yearnings. A mission-changing dot jump may be in order, but depending on which parts of you are asking for it, it may also be the wrong move.其他时候，你会感到一种更黑暗的不安——怀疑你可能需要改变宏观使命。当这种情况发生时，你必须弄清楚这种感觉是来自你明智的部分，还是仅仅来自你不安的、不重要的渴望。改变任务的点跳跃可能是正确的，但根据你的哪些部分要求它，它也可能是错误的举动。

In these moments, it’s important to consider where you tend to be on this spectrum:在这些时刻，重要的是要考虑您在这个范围内的倾向：

The people on the left side of this spectrum are jump-shy. The cement-footed. Their pitfall is staying way too long in the wrong things. The people on the right are jump-happy—the wing-footed—and they have the opposite pitfall: they’re quick quitters.11 (You should be especially wary of cement feet—psychologists believe that people at the end of their lives are most likely to regret living by inertia: a commonly voiced regret is “I wish I had quit earlier,” and the most common advice of the elderly is, “Don’t stay in a job you dislike.“)处于这个范围左侧的人是胆怯的。水泥脚的。他们的陷阱是在错误的事情上停留太久。右边的人是快乐的人——翼足——但他们有相反的陷阱：他们很快就放弃了。11 （你应该特别警惕水泥脚——心理学家认为，人在生命的尽头最有可能后悔靠惯性生活：最常见的遗憾是“我希望我早点辞职”，而老年人最常见的建议是“不要继续做你不喜欢的工作”）。

This is why these internal frameworks are important. They give you the ability to analyze the source of your impulses. In our example, the question is whether your impulse to jump missions is the result of genuine evolution or quick-quitter bias. So think about your diagram. Is your restlessness just the expected incessant whining of an octopus still correctly configured? The weariness from a long trudge on what’s still the right path for you? Or have you learned new information about yourself or the world during the trudge that has corrected some off-base initial assumptions? Or maybe something is fundamentally evolving—some blue or yellow loop activity:这就是为什么这些内部框架很重要。它们使您能够分析冲动的来源。在我们的例子中，问题是你跳过任务的冲动是真正进化的结果还是快速放弃偏见的结果。所以想想你的图表。你的焦躁不安是否只是一只配置正确的章鱼不断发出的哀鸣？长期跋涉而感到疲倦，那条路对你来说仍然是正确的吗？或者你在长途跋涉中是否学到了关于自己或世界的新信息，从而纠正了一些错误的最初假设？或者也许某些东西正在从根本上发展——一些蓝色或黄色循环活动：

If you feel that things have genuinely changed, you may decide to zoom out even further and think about the big red loop, which deals with fundamentally changing your mission:如果你觉得事情确实发生了变化，你可能会决定进一步缩小范围并思考大红色循环，它涉及从根本上改变你的使命：

If a career is like connecting the dots, we should probably rank “getting wise about dot-jumping” pretty high on our to-do list. The best place to start is by looking at your own past. Studying your own past decisions, with the flashlight of hindsight and accumulated wisdom, is like an athlete studying game tape.如果职业就像把点连起来，我们可能应该把“明智地跳跃”放在我们的待办事项清单上相当靠前的位置。最好的起点是回顾自己的过去。通过事后诸葛亮和积累的智慧来研究自己过去的决定，就像运动员研究比赛录像一样。

Looking at my own past, I can see a lot of dot jumps (or, while I was still in school, career plan adjustments), and some of them look pretty unwise in retrospect. But the clearer a picture I can see of my past bad decisions and the thought patterns and behavioral habits that built them, the less likely I’ll be to repeat them in the future.回顾我自己的过去，我可以看到很多点跳跃（或者，当我还在学校时，职业规划的调整），其中一些现在看来相当不明智。但是，我越清楚地了解自己过去的错误决定以及形成这些决定的思维模式和行为习惯，我将来重复这些决定的可能性就越小。

Remembering that you’re kind of dumb is also a critical humbling exercise. The insecurity of humility doesn’t feel very good, and the burden of having to continually invent your own life map is never easy—but insecurity and difficulty are the feelings of driving your own ship. It’s when we feel too good that we run the risk of becoming overconfident, intellectually complacent, and set in our ways. It’s exactly when we think we have life all figured out that we end up losing our way.记住自己有点愚蠢也是一项重要的谦卑练习。谦卑带来的不安全感感觉不太好，而且必须不断地创造自己的生活地图的负担从来都不是一件容易的事——但不安全感和困难就是驾驶自己的船的感觉。当我们感觉太好的时候，我们就有可能变得过度自信、智力上自满、固步自封。正是当我们以为自己已经解决了生活的所有问题时，我们最终却迷失了方向。

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Over the course of your life, your good and bad decisions will collaborate to forge your unique life path. Often on this blog, I’ve written about how irrational our fears can be and how badly they can hold us back. But we should probably embrace the fear of end-of-life regret.在你的一生中，你的好决定和坏决定将共同塑造你独特的人生道路。我经常在这个博客上写到我们的恐惧是多么不合理，以及它们会多么严重地阻碍我们。但我们或许应该接受对临终遗憾的恐惧。

I’ve thankfully never been on anything that felt like a deathbed, but it seems like there’s something about the end of life that lets people see things with clear eyes. It seems like facing death makes all of those voices in your head who aren’t actually you melt away, leaving your little authentic self standing there all alone, in reflection. I think end-of-life regrets may simply be your authentic self thinking about the parts of your life you never got to live—the parts of you that someone else kicked down into your subconscious.值得庆幸的是，我从来没有经历过任何感觉像是临终的事情，但似乎在生命的尽头有一些东西可以让人们用清晰的眼睛看到事物。面对死亡，似乎让你脑海中所有不属于你的声音都消失了，只剩下你小小的真实的自我独自站在那里，进行反思。我认为临终的遗憾可能只是你真实的自我思考你生命中你从未经历过的部分——那些被别人踢进你潜意识的部分。

My own psyche seems to back this up—looking back on my path so far, the mistakes that bother me most are the ones that happened because someone else took the wheel of my head and overruled the quiet, insecure voice of my authentic self—the mistakes that I knew at the time, deep down, were wrong. My goal for the future isn’t to avoid mistakes, it’s for the mistakes I do make to be my own.我自己的心灵似乎也支持这一点——回顾我迄今为止所走过的道路，最让我困扰的错误是因为别人控制了我的头脑，否定了我真实的自我安静、不安全的声音而发生的错误——我当时内心深处知道的错误是错误的。我未来的目标不是避免错误，而是让我所犯的错误成为我自己的错误。

That’s why I went through such an excruciatingly rigorous analysis in this post. I think this is one of those few topics in life that’s worth it. Other voices will never stop fiercely trying to live your life for you—you owe it to that little insecure character in the very center of your consciousness to get this right.这就是为什么我在这篇文章中进行了如此极其严格的分析。我认为这是生活中为数不多的值得讨论的话题之一。其他声音永远不会停止激烈地尝试为你而活——你要归功于你意识中心那个缺乏安全感的小人物，才能做到这一点。