Check out the full notes for “Wanting” by Luke Burgis
From “Wanting” by Luke Burgis
The storytelling process that I use involves sharing stories about times in your life when you took an action that ended up being deeply fulfilling. Today it’s one of the first questions that I ask in any job interview because it helps cut through the thin stuff and goes straight to the essence of the person. “Tell me about a time in your life when you did something well and it brought you a sense of fulfillment,” I ask.
I just spent the last couple hours going through old posts on this site and adding books to the Book Notes section.
I can’t say it was deeply fulfilling or done well but I feel some satisfaction. Through the past, maybe, 15 years I’ve rolled up my sleeves and written some PHP and CSS to hack on the WordPress installation of whatever site I was writing on at the time was.
Often times the things that have been deeply fulfilling have been side projects. Other times it has been work projects. I have noticed in the past few years that often times prototyping and demo’ing to teammates can be more fulfilling than digging into the details required for a public release.
These things are challenging in different ways.
It’s not an original comparison, but the past couple hours really felt like digital gardening.
And relating this to the mimetic desire topic of “Wanting”—I’ve always wanted to have a book notes page like Derek Sivers has. He continues living a lifestyle that matches up with values I want to have.
Not all mimicking is bad, so maybe this small step of making a book notes page and cleaning things up is a step in the right direction.