States of flow

00:00

I think it's definitely possible to feel dissatisfaction without holding any emotional burden. You can feel like you haven't done your best work, without feeling bad about that state. You just know that there's more, and that's a sort of net positive experience. I'm here, I don't feel unhappy with where I am, but I know that there's more to go, and so that's a motive to keep pushing.

00:23

In terms of life balance, I think flow is an exceptional state to experience but perhaps not one to experience exclusively. Descriptions of flow is that you don't experience the time passing by, which seems like an awful injustice. Yes, you've made something amazing, and you probably felt pretty good because of it, but you're missing a sliver of your life.

00:45

Just before I forget about it, you talked about reading folks about work and work purpose. I'm terrible for reading and I wish I did it more, but one that I did read halfway through college was The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton. I don't know if you've ever heard of him.

01:00

Oh, yeah.

01:00

He's responsible for The School of Life on YouTube. I find that a really excellent read. The rough sort of outline of what he's doing is, he examines the work life of a number of different highly varied roles. He goes to a fishing boat where they're fishing some tuna. He goes to a biscuit factory and talks to the people who are responsible for the business side of that. He talks to an engineer who is launching a rocket that will send a Japanese satellite into space.

01:36

And I thought it was really interesting for him to sort of pry apart the ways that people do or don't find purpose in that work. The one that I resonated with the most before reading the book was probably the engineer sending satellites to orbit, but when you read these things you sort of realize that maybe your assumptions are not... They don't play out in practice when you come to be the person who occupies that position.

02:06

And the same is true of the things that you don't like, but I also thought it was interesting that he highlighted that quite a number of people don't really think about this stuff at all, or at least to a very limited capacity. I think one of the things he said was that when he was talking to some, I think, business analyst or something in the biscuit factory, and he posed the question of meaning and work and got a sort of a blank stare back as if she didn't really know where to address the question or even if the question warranted addressing at all.

02:37

It's a kind of a ridiculous claim that work would deliver purpose. So yeah, I would highly recommend that one as a sort of a philosophical discussion of purpose in work and whether or not that's even a responsible thing to pursue. One thing he said at the beginning is that, in the same way that romantic love has been the core of marriage for only a very short time, purpose in work has also been at the core for a very short time.

03:08

You do what you can do to survive, that you get the work done to feed you and your family, and only now that we have the luxury of, for most of us, our basic needs are addressed by most forms of work. Only then do you start to discover the questions of "Do I actually enjoy this? Do I want to spend my limited time with this?" because you have the indulgence of being allowed to ask the question.

03:34

Is there anyone other than Maslow who talks about our hierarchy of needs in that way?

03:44

Yeah, there is, but I can't remember his name. I was talking about this with a friend recently. He's a lot less popular than Maslow and I actually found that it's quite difficult. It's easy to find information summarized from the really popular authors and philosophers, but as soon as it becomes more contemporary, I found it much more difficult to find other people smarter than me summarizing what they're trying to say. And trying to dive into the literature yourself can be quite taxing. With reference texts, it's tough. But yeah, I can't remember his name.

04:15

Yeah, I feel like we always just default to, "Well yeah, Maslow says once you've got some good stuff, then you keep going up the pyramid." It's just actually more context than that, and maybe I need to understand Maslow more deeply, too, because I feel like I certainly have a gap there, where my only intellectual thought is well, do you hit a certain point, your needs are met, and now you start to look after your own fulfillment rather than your own safety?

04:44

Firstly, what are you yourself motivated by, intrinsic motivation or external motivation? And then secondly, whichever one you are, how would you define it?

04:56

My history of where I've directed efforts in the past, the most important thing to me for a long time and probably still sits there in the background, is the pursuit of understanding. That naturally leads into a path towards scientific thinking, so I pursued science as a teenager and then physics as I got older. And that sort of offers you a framework to reference a lot of otherwise unexplainable behaviors in the world.

05:27

It allows you to answer difficult questions with relative ease in specific domains, granted, but still a lot of stuff that physics can't comprehend or can't address very naturally. But it does offer you a lot of foundation to build off of, so that was really important from a philosophical perspective, was understanding the place where you exist. And that only became a more sort of introspective question, about the self and your relationship with others and your world, as I got older.

05:57

As a younger person, it was much more important to understand in absolute terms what is the world composed of, so that was a significant motivator. Beside that, certainly running parallel, is competition. There's a lot of satisfaction to performing something well and pushing your ability as far as you can get it to go, so those two naturally went well together.

06:24

And I found that similar is true when pursuing the work that I'm pursuing now, talking about a skill set which is highly analytical, so it's really easy to know when you've done it right and wrong. It's really quick to reference your aptitude quantitatively, so that means that competitive side of it is very directed. I mean, in terms of understanding that also gels well with code because everything is rock solid, and so once you comprehend the system as it's built, then you're able to navigate solutions a lot more quickly.

07:04

You know the boundaries of that system, you know where its limitations lie, and then you can exploit that to build whatever it is on top. So the first sort of core things that have directed learning in the past have been understanding and then sort of pursuing competition, striving to do well in whatever it is that you do, pushing your limits. I think that still is reflected in the stage of the career that I'm at, but as you sort of refine the skills, once you're confident in your ability to do something well, then it's a question of what do you do with it?

07:39

Can you leverage that skill set that's satisfying to act on, to create something that benefits your environment or the people that you have a relationship with? And that can be direct relationships or it can just be wider world, climate change kind of relationships. That's probably where I will start to move as these sort of core requirements become better.

08:05

It sounds like the pattern of your motivation follows the arc of your life. First thing you reference there is a greater understanding of the world that you have come into. Then that naturally will be one of the first things that you try and grapple with as you come of age. Then, as you grow through adolescence, you probably want to kind of figure out your place and compete against others, and you're motivated to be a person inside a pack or a certain status or place.

08:38

And then once you get over those two motivations, you recognize that you're part of an even wider pack, which is this big group of people on this rock, and it becomes how do you contribute to it? And as you spoke, it kind of surprised me that in some ways the arc of that motivation kind of matches to the arc of our coming of age in some way.

09:06

Yeah, and I think there's also a little link missing in the middle there, where you're sort of, as a young age, trying to understand that the place that you find yourself in, because it's a very confusing and messy affair for a long time, there's some really almost scary behaviors that exist in the world. I remember being terrified of thunder and lightning and as soon as I understood, it wasn't even an active decision. As soon as I understood it, I found I wasn't afraid of it anymore.

09:31

There was just no fear, it was just fascination, because I understood the limits of its influence. It was like I heard as a child this tale that if you stood by a window, you would be struck by lightning, which is almost impossible. It's a ridiculous claim, and so I was terrified of watching it. And as soon as that was reasoned with, it was safe again. I could enjoy just the experience of thunder and lightning.

09:54

And so you understand the environment you find yourself in. Then you realize you have a relationship to others and you compare yourself to them. And they apply comparisons to you, so you're often bumping up against, in a competitive sense, how are they doing? How do they perceive me? Like you say, in the arc of life there's a lot of what, as adolescents become... That sort of part of the brain becomes a hell of a lot more active as a teenager, almost over-active.

10:19

It becomes less active as you become older, so you're really questioning where am I in regards to the path? And then as you get older, that missing step that I talked about from my perspective was sort of comparing yourself to yourself, really just looking at, "Where have I come from? What am I interested in? What do I get satisfaction out of?" And once you can address those questions, then you can sort of, I believe, be sort of the best representation of yourself and use that to help the things that you care about.

10:52

If you are trying to leverage skills that don't gel well with the things that you're good at, you won't be doing the best service that you can to the cause that you're interested in, so that sort of self-discovery step at the beginning, from my perspective, has been super important for realizing the most effective work that I could be doing for the things that I care about.

11:16

When you said that once you understood that lightning wasn't as dangerous as it was, just understanding it made you feel more comfortable. Have you reached the stage now where, when you look at your own professional life, you feel more comfortable about it and not scared? If so, how did you understand that?

11:31

Definitely not to the same level. It was quite a clear-cut, certain transition, I found, because it's such a simple little relationship between you and that element of nature. But I think the core requirement here is a comprehensive understanding of the system that you find yourself in. For me, with as little experience as I have, I've been doing this for a year, there's a lot of unknowns and that can make the behavior of searching for work and working itself a lot less predictable.

12:01

Things will happen often that life, something as simple as you apply for a job that you are sure that you are a perfect fit for. You navigate through the applications process, you find that you have good relationships with the people you're talking to, you feel innately that you've done the interview task well. You feel confident with the way that you've approached them, and then they come back and they say, "It's a no go, sorry."

12:26

That's sort of a misunderstanding of where you are and where the company is, so only with time and practice and understanding can you get a much closer representation of what you expect the company to be thinking, or the group of people that you're interviewing with. So it definitely gets closer over time, but it's not perfect yet. It's very much at its infancy, I feel.

12:47

What was it for you personally that enabled you to find that? I mean, because you've moved from engineering disciplines, across them, and there must have been, perhaps it didn't happen overnight, but a moment where you felt at least more kind of existentially comfortable with the journey that you were taking. It may not have felt practically any easier, but has there been that moment where it's kind of quenched inside you, where you're slightly less angst about it, and if so, when did that happen and how?

13:21

I think if I was to draw from something, I would think about how, in engineering, were frequently times where I would be learning about something and it's difficult technically. And I just was questioning the purpose of that pursuit, that particular vein of knowledge. In my case it was about sort of structures and how forces move through structures, and I was just kind of thinking that "This is fine, but it's not tickling any curiosity. I'm not finding myself pursuing knowledge in that domain of my own accord."

14:00

Whereas when I started to do more coding, I realized that not only was I naturally drawn to do those things for enjoyment because it could be argued I was directing that work myself. I was creating something I was really interested in, but that the skill set that was required to make them, I found that I would get lost in it a lot more readily. Time would go by a lot faster because you're not thinking, "Oh, this is the worst. They're just going to get to this next hurdle and this next hurdle."

14:28

I found that it was a lot more natural to just delve into the problem and you take a break when you're tired and you come back when you're energized again. So that was sort of a time when I realized that "Okay, this feels a lot more comfortable. I'm not wishing I was doing something else, and when I'm not doing that, I'm often thinking about some problems that I faced within it." That seemed a very reasonable rationale for pursuing that further.

14:51

Why was it that curiosity was linked to software engineering and not the other? And I'm trying to work it out in your specific case. I guess there must be parts to your character that are just pulled more specifically by technology and technology companies and software.

15:10

If I was to think about it, there's a lot more versatility to software. The skill set required for activated engineering, understanding structures, allows you just to understand how structural members interact with each other. And it's fine, you can use that to create interesting things, but the domain is limited. Whereas with code, you could create something utterly pointless and beautiful if you wanted, or something which could really change the lives of a lot of people or change the life of one person a lot. It seemed to be more related to more problems of interest I find.

15:50

It's almost as if you've taken a discipline, a skill, a practice, and on its own that's fine, but without the market on top of it and the ability to be able to use that skill in a wider setting, be that a commercial setting or be that whatever setting, it's this kind of Goldilocks combination of how can you find the thing that you enjoy doing during a practice, but that attaches to something that's greater, that has more scope.

16:24

That's the really difficult problem to try and solve when discovering it for yourself. That's why it took so much time, basically that it would have to be viable within the market. Software very fortunately is probably, in fact certainly, because its versatility. There are other pursuits that I found that aren't viable financially but are just as interesting. And it's just a shame that when it comes to work, I mean, at the end of the day, the thing that you're trying to do is support yourself and anybody else who's dependent on you, so it's just a further condition.

16:57

You can pursue those other things if you want in your own time, and then we just call them hobbies. You can get really good at them. I mean, a number of musicians don't play professionally for money, but they're exceptionally well skilled and they derive a lot of meaning out of that pursuit. So when it comes to work, yeah. There is a minimum requirement for a salary and you just have to reference it against what your own requirements are for money. How much do you need to survive and support what you want to support?

17:24

It's kind of interesting that there's, I feel, a great comparison with music, because again, you have the same pattern that you do in software engineering where you have this skill, which is a controlled game, that you can impact on your own and practice as a solo player, as a single player. But then you can go into multi-player mode by moving up into the different types and the genres of music or the different emotions that human beings have.

17:58

It's just that music isn't a commercial market, it's an emotional market. It's a human market, but for engineering it wouldn't make any sense necessarily for that to tap into an emotional market, so it taps into a commercial one somehow.

18:12

I wonder, why should the emotional market be more limited than an engineering one? I mean, there's a huge number of skilled people, but we know that it's difficult to achieve success financially in music. Is it that there's limited resources? I mean, I feel like so many people consume music, but why should the funding allocated to pursuing it professionally be so limited by comparison?

18:39

Mm-hmm (affirmative), music's an interesting one because you could argue that it's also a market in the same way that maybe you could argue that a commercial market is also emotional because we all want to pursue our best work and do things that are attached to humanity, but there's a part to it where music has been commoditized in certain places.

19:00

Yeah, and the way that you've commoditized it is that you engage emotionally with a listener, right? So the emotional impact of the music has to be sufficient before it can become commercially viable, whereas the commercial work doesn't need to be viable emotionally. That's not the first place you go to. It's finance. That's the first thing that's the most important. Is it going to make people money and the investors are a good place for that, where they don't need to make an emotional decision. They can just rationalize it themselves from their own experience.

19:30

Yeah, it's not subjective at all. It's "Has it made money? Yes or no?" And therefore, the capital allocation is far more accurate than it would be in music, because in music, how do you allocate capital based on someone's subjective emotional reaction to a performance?

19:51

Yeah, and maybe the reason there's more scope for money in this engineering [inaudible 00:19:56] in here, but maybe it's because with music you're limited to emotional impact on the listener, whereas with commercial products, emotion I think, is just a very small subset of all of the types of problems that you could be solving. You can engineer a solution to problems of emotions, health.

20:14

Maybe it's getting to work using something like Google Maps, maybe it's having a conversation over the internet we're having right now. There's all sorts of problem domains that you could tap into using the same set of engineering skills.

20:27

If great work and finding your best work, and this is a pure assumption. If finding your best work somehow relied on you having a single-play game that you could practice, and it could be enjoyable enough for you that you would do it on its own, and that that combines with wider market and the ability to be able to interact with others at the same time, is there a case where you can have the second, but not the first? So can you do your best work without having a skill or a practice that you do every day? Can you have it without that?

21:11

Intuition is telling me that I don't think you can. I mean, from my perspective, a lot of meaning comes from practicing the skill and getting good at the skill itself. But I mean, no matter what task you're performing, you require a certain skill set to perform well, and I guess in a sense you're practicing that skill set every time you tackle a problem. I don't know if there's any work that could be defined as not solving a problem, or rather that couldn't be defined as solving a problem.

21:42

It seems odd because our biology and our evolution tells us that if we rub the sticks together, it creates fire. If we figure out how to create a tool somehow, then we will leverage ourselves and be better off and we will help other people. So we almost have this biological need to solve the micro problems and become good at a certain type of skill or weaving or hunting, and that that provides a certain amount of fulfillment to us as human beings and we [crosstalk 00:22:20] that we don't feel that part of the pack.

22:23

Yeah, it sort of makes sense from a sort of evolutionary perspective. We're told that humans are exceptional problem solvers, but when you think about it, we exist in a market of survival [inaudible 00:22:33] as well, so that's where our biology has come from. So it makes sense that those who can solve problems better than others are inclined to survive, and so that propagates and the survivors become exceptional problem solvers.

22:46

You marry exceptional problem solving with the ability to share understanding and knowledge with the group, and all of a sudden you've expanded the number of people working on a problem to whatever limit you want to define. We now have modern systems where it can be tens or hundreds of thousands of people and that makes for a pretty winning combo as we can see. Humans are doing pretty well from an evolutionary perspective.

23:11

At the core of problem solving is unhappiness because you are driven to see the flaw in something. You're driven to worry, you're driven to be skeptical, you're driven to doubt and by doing so, you can recognize the flaws in something and then hopefully make it better down the line. How do we balance both being effective problem solvers at work but also being happy?

23:51

Yeah, because pursuit of the problem is a sort of a symptom of dissatisfaction. If you were perfectly satisfied you wouldn't change and you wouldn't pursue it.

24:03

I'm going to say his name completely wrong and I've got his book here. I can't even say it out loud. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Oh my goodness, that's absolutely awful. Have you ever read Flow by Mihaly whatever the [inaudible 00:24:19] name is?

24:19

No.

24:20

It's a book about how there is in this odd satisfaction in our working life, where if we can find a problem that's in a Goldilocks environment where it's not so difficult that you look at it and you're petrified of it, but it's more challenging than your current state, that in some way perhaps you can get over that kind of innate unhappiness of solving problems if there's this natural element of growth.

24:57

If you can pursue a project that is challenging but in a way that once it's finished, and perhaps whilst it's happening, you feel like you are growing in some way and that maybe that growth kind of balances it out?

25:18

So I maybe misinterpreted the question a little bit. I think it's definitely possible to feel dissatisfaction without holding any emotional burden. You can feel like you haven't done your best work without feeling bad about that state. You just know that there's more and that's a sort of a net positive experience. "I'm here, I don't feel unhappy with where I am, but I know that there's more to go."

25:47

And so that's a motive to keep pushing, so I don't think dissatisfaction is unhappiness. I think you can, in flow, like you said, that's that exact state where you're moving towards solving something. The experience of just practicing that skill is enough to sort of balance what you were saying about it not being so difficult that you feel disheartened and being difficult enough that you get the joy of participating in it.

26:18

I think that's definitely possible, and I guess that's sort of an ideal in terms of work life, is seeking flow. In terms of life balance, I think flow is an exceptional state to experience, but perhaps not one to experience exclusively, that one of the hallmark descriptions of flow is that you don't experience the time passing by, which seems like an awful injustice. Yes, you've made something amazing, and you probably felt pretty good because of it, but you're missing a sliver of your life, so maybe good if it's important and meaningful for you to create or pursue something, but not an exclusive state to exist in.

27:02

I think I really enjoy the alternative, which is ... What's it called? The kind of meditation where you're focused on your just experiences? Mindfulness, I would feel that mindfulness is the opposite experience and that can be hugely, hugely enjoyable. But you're not creating something, it's just sitting and experience, not very productive perhaps, but really enjoyable.

27:23

is there any other state that you'd want to be in other than those two, in a mindful state or in a flow state? Are there any others that you would want to be in?

27:33

I don't even know what the spectrum looks like. I don't what the landscape looks like. It's easy to compare them once they're sort of right in front of you. You could definitely derive a spectrum for sure, so you could start with one on each extreme and look at states between when you're in conversation with someone. It's maybe not flow, but it feels very comfortable, but you don't know what's going to come next and so just being sort of conscious of that experience. That's definitely possible, it's somewhere between the two.

28:03

Going back to flow state, the flow state is going to be different for different people, because their capacity for risk, their appetite for challenge, will differ. How have you gone about figuring out what yours is? Do you have a working definition or awareness of how much risk and challenge you want in order to get into that place?

28:29

It's hard to come up with a definition, I think, because oftentimes you just happen to cross flow. You don't design it. It's not something that you say, "I'm going to sit down and have flow state right now," so usually it comes from the environment that you find yourself in. And it's basically, certainly in the problem-solving context that I find myself in professionally, it's usually a time when I'm able to address every unexpected problem that comes my way with reasonably little effort.

29:01

It's like I know where to navigate this unforeseen speed bump. I know what to do to solve it, and that keeps the train moving. That maintains momentum and so long as you always have another idea of where to take it, that can certainly feel like flow. You could lose hours to that experience.

29:18

Chris Evans, the radio DJ, who said something like, when he was resigning from BBC Radio 2, I remember being outside a car park listening to him say it, and I was crying my eyes out. He said something like, "There are two different types of people, someone who looks at a blank sheet of paper and gets excited and someone who looks at a blank sheet of paper and who's petrified."

29:41

I think that says a lot about your flow state perhaps, or at least how you want to challenge yourself. When you look at a blank sheet of paper, do you get scared or does that either excite you or does it incite fear?

29:56

From the problems that I'm most practiced with, a blank sheet of paper is a very difficult task to address, but the kinds of tasks that I've often gotten the most enjoyment from have started with a blank piece of paper. So kind of difficult to marry the two, often, because the skill set required to navigate it is not very strong, so you're less likely to reach flow. You're going to bump into a lot more unaddressable problems, but it can be a hell of a lot of fun.

30:29

Something that pops up a lot in these conversations is the community that surrounds development and the support, especially online you can get in order to help you through those moments. Has the development community helped you in a particular way?

30:45

So there's probably two. First is direct and the second is indirect. Direct has been actually just a community that I'm part of. I [inaudible 00:30:53] with coding, which is the people that I know who are also coders themselves and knowing somebody that you can frequently ask questions of is an absolutely massive advantage. If you don't have that, it can be a lot more difficult, and that's probably why people praise the online community so well.

31:12

People are working very hard to break down that difference, build places, forums, communities, where you can discourse, where you can talk about problems and try to find answers. But I've found that the most beneficial experiences I've had, have been the ones where I can talk to friends of mine and very quickly move through a problem. It's like when you're in the workplace, it's much faster although it's more costly for the company, to get several people talking about a problem and how to work through it.

31:42

You've got three or four devs now who are all working on a single problem rather than four in parallel, so it can be costly, but if the problem is big enough, then it's warranted and you can move through something difficult very quickly. Alternatively, you're just on your own and you're looking for resources online, docs or whatever. So that's the direct, but the indirect is probably the incredible infrastructure that developers have created for learning coding.

32:08

It can be something as core as docs. Documenting how you use a resource is so important and oftentimes done really, really well, sometimes not so well. But oftentimes the things that I've used have been really well polished, and that's awesome. But then there's also the learning platforms. I learned primarily from Codecademy. That's an unbelievable resource where, with no environment set, I go to the internet and I can start coding in a node environment or using React or JavaScript.

32:41

You literally just click the link and go. It's unbelievable that people have created these, and there's courses and everything. They're all curated by different people. It's amazing, and other things exist elsewhere. I mean, just cord you could argue the same. It probably helps that software developers are the ones that are making resources for software development.

33:00

Just a bit.

33:01

They have an unbelievable insight into the struggles that come with the territory, so it's pinpoint accurate in terms of what you need to move fast. And it's not to say that there's one mold for what it takes, but there's so many developers now working on these projects, they probably have most of the mold ready.

33:19

Be interesting to see how history pans out and whether we look back on this time, and if technology and if every company doesn't become a technology company over the next 20 years and kind of the more old-school industries do go away. It will be interesting to look back and think how much of that was because the pace of learning for everyone to get up to speed in this new economy was so fast and so freely available, because for the first time we were able to match the production of that learning environment with the actual skill itself.

33:58

Of course, the other thing is not just creating a learning environment. I don't have to learn to code from scratch. I know nothing about how machine code is interpreted by a CPU. It's abstracted away for me, so by building layers of abstraction that I, as a developer, no longer need to worry about, you can sort of skip straight to the top, which is what most people are doing when they come into code for the first time. So we're building infrastructure that allows us to jump past a significant amount of hurdles and I reckon that will continue.

34:25

What layers of abstraction would accelerate someone's finding work?

34:30

I think we're already seeing some of it with something like LinkedIn or cord. You eliminate the need for you to be near a company as you might have been in the past, to literally deliver a CV or in the case of remote work now, to partake in an interview process or even to participate in work. Yeah, definitely in that capacity.

34:53

And then there's also what we're seeing in a lot of domains, which I'm sure some companies are part of attempting to leverage, which is machine learning and AI, so predictive and sort of algorithms, which we might say, using some sort of statistical process, come up with recommendations based on your information. And of course that doesn't tend to get worse with time, so I think that will certainly improve. They're the two strongest ones that we're seeing right now.

35:19

And what layers of abstraction or perhaps even layers of infrastructure can we build in order to help individuals, not just kind of find work per se as the process of finding work and being able to talk to someone, but for themselves, too. What are we missing? What are we not giving people that enable them to be able to truly find their best work?

35:46

I'm not sure what the best technological creation is to solve that problem. I think probably this is an indication of my current position in that pursuit myself, that it still feels very early stages. I've been doing it for a short amount of time and so discovering what that landscape looks like is difficult from my own perspective. But it's in terms of self-discovery, never mind creating a product that is well-adjusted to the population at large.

36:12

And the key bit there being self-discovery and how we can, and call it a good example. It's been difficult but we can, with relative ease, build an infrastructure that enables the practical pursuit of work by building something on the internet, enable two people to talk to each other with the right type of predictions and the right type of messaging.

36:36

But as you move from that more kind of quantitative world to the qualitative, which is how do you enable someone to self-discover meaning in work? That is a more tricky technological problem to solve because there are so many independent variables that go into all that means for each individual person.

36:59

Exactly, yeah. I mean, it sounds like a problem reasonably well suited to machine learning, if you could figure out how to collate the data. But from an outsider, not with any significant understanding of those systems, I would be wondering about what are good predictive indicators of best work. You could think about history, the kind of works that you've done in the past, but that might be a gross misrepresentation of the satisfaction you got out of that.

37:24

If you're still pursuing it, you don't even know what kind of work you get the most out of, so now you've got to take a step back and help that person on the journey of self-reflection. What does it mean to question whether or not you got satisfaction out of a certain work. Why didn't you? They could be really difficult questions to parse out.

37:44

Yeah, and are we asking the question, we're enabling an individual to self-actualize and find what's meaning to them, or are we asking the question, what type of work could we all be doing to make our whole society better as a result? Should the success be based on whether you feel self-actualized as an individual?

38:06

Perhaps in this kind of progressive life of abundance, yes, but as soon as that goes the opposite direction, and life is more perilous and difficult, then our self-actualization falls right down the priority list and instead we all, as a society... Maybe we will look back and think actually, "Why the hell were we so selfish? We should have been focused on how to make the world better, not ourselves. What's the [crosstalk 00:38:35] relationship?

38:35

Yeah, and of course that sort of things going down the drain might be a direct result, we don't know, of say mass self-actualization. Perhaps the interests of the individual are quite at odds with the interests of the population. Oftentimes they are. It's just en masse, are they? On total, are they? Can you address those systematically? It sounds like a very difficult problem to be navigating around.

38:59

Yeah. I feel like we've done it again. I've loved this conversation. It's been ridiculously brilliant and-

39:06

Same, very much enjoyed it.

39:07

Yeah, thanks [crosstalk 00:39:08].