00:00Travel is one of the best ways to break out of routine and come back with new insights,
00:05new plans and sometimes a completely different understanding of what to do with your life.
00:11My main realization from this trip is something I suspect may be useful to many people.
00:17We judge ourselves, our talents, our successes, our failures according to the category we have
00:24assigned ourselves to. I am a doctor, so success should look like ABC. We compare ourselves with
00:32other people in the same category and build our expectations from there. And this is where
00:39a rather nasty mental trap appears. Our self-esteem and much of what we think about ourselves and our
00:47achievements is essentially a story we have invented. Nature doesn't care. The universe
00:54doesn't care. Every person we meet evaluates us according to their own needs, circumstances and
01:01life experience. Their judgment is also a story, not some objective truth handed down from above.
01:08And yet we cannot stop comparing ourselves with other people because our mental maps were
01:15originally designed for survival in a primitive society. Instinct tells us to occupy a respectable
01:22place in the tribal hierarchy. So we keep asking, who am I? What am I capable of? How do other
01:31people
01:31see me? Where do I rank? The tribe is long gone. Increasing our social status no longer determines
01:39whether we survive or reproduce. In fact, if you look at the modern world, the people reproducing most
01:47successfully are hardly those with the highest status in global society. It would be wonderful if we could
01:54simply switch off these obsolete functions. Unfortunately, we cannot. So we have to learn how to live with the
02:03software we have. A person's actual achievements have surprisingly little to do with how successful that
02:11person feels. What matters is the category they have placed themselves in and whom they've chosen as their
02:19comparison group. Suppose someone earns $110,000 a year. Even in the United States, that is a very good income.
02:28But if this person thinks of himself primarily as a Harvard graduate, the same salary suddenly becomes
02:36evidence of failure and personal disgrace. What is wrong with you, my friend? Why are you earning so
02:43little? Are you a loser? The problem is often that we have chosen a category that is either far too
02:51broad
02:51or simply wrong. A wonderful singer, for example, may torture herself because she cannot fill stadiums like
02:59Taylor Swift. Does it mean she cannot sing? No. Does it diminish her talent or what she has accomplished?
03:08Not at all. She merely imagines that she and Taylor Swift belong in the same category because
03:15she starts with their profession. I am a singer and therefore my social pyramid consists of every singer
03:22in the world. And if I am not standing at the very top of that pyramid, something must be wrong
03:29with me.
03:29It becomes even more absurd when we compare ourselves with people from an entirely different category.
03:37An orphan raised in rural Mongolia compares himself with crypto-sheikhs in Dubai.
03:43A 50-year-old woman compares herself with 20-year-old beauties on Instagram.
03:49But we are defined not only by what we do. We are also defined by how we do it and
03:57under what circumstances.
04:00That allows us to place ourselves in a more precise category of our own.
04:06If an Harvard-trained doctor believes his mission is to treat patients in an underserved rural community,
04:13then a salary of $110,000 suddenly stops looking like a humiliation.
04:19Within the life he has actually chosen, it may be evidence of success.
04:24There is another important consequence.
04:28Once you understand that you belong to your own particular category,
04:31it becomes obvious that the path everyone else is following may have nothing to do with yours.
04:39There is no single road shared by Taylor Swift and every other singer.
04:44There is no single road shared by Taylor Swift and every other singer.
04:48There is no universal story in which you were given exactly the same opportunities as somebody else
04:54and simply wasted them or failed the assignment.
04:58The words,
05:00I have a different path, can be extraordinarily liberating.
05:05Let me use myself as an example.
05:08I cannot become a successful writer in Russia in the conventional sense.
05:14No major Moscow publishing house is going to work with me because the Russian Ministry of Justice
05:20designated me a foreign agent over my novel, The Snow Queen's Spring.
05:26So if I insist on placing myself in the category of Russian writers, I am almost guaranteed to look like
05:34a failure.
05:35At the same time, I cannot quite become an American writer in the conventional sense either.
05:41I write in Russian and then translate my work into English.
05:45My subjects, my style, my plots, all of them are foreign.
05:50The American literary establishment sees little value in that.
05:55But if I place myself in a category of my own, someone who decodes complicated systems and turns them into
06:03human stories,
06:04the entire picture changes.
06:06A sense maker does not particularly care about publishing houses, reviews or literary prizes.
06:14The goal is to reach as many people as possible.
06:17The former does not matter.
06:19Neither does the route.
06:21You use whatever works.
06:24A novel, a YouTube video, a lecture, an interview.
06:28Anything that helps you explain what you have understood and why it matters.
06:34Because the purpose is no longer to prove to the world how talented I am.
06:38The purpose is to help people see how authoritarian systems work,
06:43why they are so dangerous, and why humanity has to learn how to resist them.
06:49And once you find a larger meaning in what you do, questions of self-esteem begin to lose their importance.
06:58A sense maker does not do the work in order to collect proof of personal worth.
07:04You do it because there is something you believe needs to be understood and because with whatever tools you have,
07:13you can help make it visible.
07:14You can help make it visible.
07:14You can help make it visible.
