Arthur Brooks tells Simon Sinek that real reinvention means following your strongest interests, not just reusing old skills. He describes a gut signal: the right move feels about 80% excitement, 20% fear, and 0% deadness.
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Approximately 80% excitement, 20% fear, and 0% deadness.
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Your case is more exaggerated than most. Right. To go from horn player to political scientist.
Pretty big difference.
Pretty big difference. And most people's deltas won't be that big, which is why your case is really important. Because if you can do it, pretty much anybody else can do it. I think where people get stuck is they look at what their skill set is. So in your case, be like, I know how to play a horn. So they look to reapply a skill set, thinking that's reinvention. So reapplying a skill set of. Instead of being a horn player in an orchestra, or maybe I can do video game music. It's the reapplication of skill, which they mistake for reinventing themselves.
That's correct. There's a huge behavioral science literature on this that I didn't know until much later. People have a tendency to say, okay, what have I already, as you suggest, gained skill at? And I could be also good at, so I can hit the ground running. Wrong question. The right question is, what am I most interested in? What is my greatest area of interest? That almost never fails. We have intuition, which is also known as gut, AKA data. We have a lot of data because we've all had a lot of experiences in our lives. When anybody's facing a new opportunity, a new threshold, whether it's a marriage proposal or moving to a new city or having a new career or whatever it happens to be, there's three sensations that you're going to feel based on the data inside the right hemisphere of your brain. That's your gut. When you feel like you have a gut feeling, that's why your stomach feels that, because your stomach is actually weighted to the left side of your body, which is controlled by the right hemisphere. That's why we have that emotional feeling. So those three feelings when you're facing an opportunity are excitement, fear, and deadness, which is that sense of emptiness when you're looking at an opportunity. It makes you feel dead inside, like, I really should get married to that woman, but it makes me feel dead inside to imagine myself 80 years old with her. Right? That kind of thing. The right mix, when you know it's the right step to take is 80% excitement, 20% fear, and 0% deadness. That's the right combination, by the way. It's not zero percent fear because you might fail. But that's the point. If it's zero percent fear, totally. And if there's no risk associated with it, it's going to be boring.
You're going to be bored you're explaining almost everything worth doing. I mean, every entrepreneurial venture has to be more excitement than fear, because the chances of you failing or things going badly are very, very high. And so you have to have the irrational excitement to get over that fear to say, we're going to do this.
Yeah. Yeah. If you're going to change jobs or go back to school or marry that girl or move to Topeka, it should be 80% excitement, 20% fear, and 0% deadness.
