The Virtuous Cycle of Dancing and Wrestling

Sometimes I wonder if people think I’m crazy.

I talk a lot about professional / personal development, and I spend a lot of time learning about pretty much everything. So I wonder if people think I’m super greedy and want lots of money or, worse, if I’m just neurotic altogether.

You actually wouldn’t be too far off with the latter (lol…), but if you think I’m in it for the money, you’re sorely mistaken.

But truthfully, that actually is how it began. I came out of undergrad and landed myself in a great job that could have been taken away from me in a heartbeat. I was so scared of losing that stability that I began doing everything I could to maintain that. I knew it was just a few short years before my wife and I would begin having kids, and I wanted to harden our home and finances so that my children would be well cared for and well nurtured.

In my last post, I talked about going to the deepest levels of Why, and that all began when I developed a chronic existential angst while pondering the stability of my financial life. Questions quickly turned from “How do I earn more money?” to “Why do I even care to earn more money?” to “What does my worldview tell me about how I feel?” and eventually to

“Why is the worldview I grew up with now failing me?”

Along the way, learning became something totally different than what I thought it would be. I came across personalities like Seth Godin, Ramit Sethi, and Naval Ravikant that reshaped my perspective on the business world. Soon after I would discover names in the philosophical community like Rob Bell, Ken Wilber, and Ram Dass.

Before long, learning became more than just a means to harden my family’s finances.

I found beauty.

I found life.

I discovered that there was an intrinsic reward in learning more about the world, totally regardless of the topic. I found wonder in computer science, awe in math, even gratitude in insurance.

You see, there’s a concept in the Jewish known as “turning the gem”, like a diamond. As you know, light is refracted when it passes through a gem, but because the surfaces of the gem aren’t congruent, light looks different depending how it passes through the gem. So you appreciate the light as it comes out at this angle, and you turn the gem to get a different view of that light.

And you keep turning the gem, again and again and again and again and again.

That’s the metaphor for how I view life now. Regardless of the topic, be it data science or philosophy or family, I keep turning the gem over and over to find the beauty in another aspect of life.

Let me clear though… this turning of the gem is not always a happy business.

Sometimes you dance. You ride high on the sails of wisdom as if nothing can bring you down. That knowledge holds no faults and draws a circle around the entire thing. The dance is a reward itself, so you return to it without hesitations.

But sometimes you wrestle. Sometimes knowledge yields despair, and you cannot understand why something was allowed to happen. Like the numerous instances of genocide throughout history. Or why corporations get away with white collar crimes that decimate thousands of lives. Or why good people get cancer and die.

This constant cycle of dancing and wrestling… it can be taxing at times. What I have found, though, is that it always bears fruit in the end, even if it’s not exactly what you were expecting.

I’m on this path of learning the data science world, which overlaps a lot with advanced math and the whole artificial intelligence. I choose to continue down this path because I find wonder and amazement in things like quantum mechanics. And if you think that there’s no way AI as we know it connects to philosophy… we could have a long conversation about that.

And there’s a mutual benefit to those around me. Where I learn things that add intrinsic value to my own life, those around me also benefit by me exercising this learning in different environments. So where I get intrinsic value from learning about this stuff related to data science, I can totally apply it in my regular day-to-day job. And since it’s generally a pretty unique, highly valued skillset, there’s a level of stability there that I would have craved years ago.

Do you see the virtuous cycle here?

I learn something and benefit intrinsically, I can apply it to my job, my employer benefits, and I benefit again extrinsically in the form of a salary.

It’s a win-win-win all around.

So friends, keep all this in mind the next time you learn something. If you look at things the right way, learning any subject is not a begrudging task. It’s an invitation to participate in the ongoing creation of the world.

Sometimes you dance.

Sometimes you wrestle.

But throughout it all, you benefit by turning that gem over and over, seeing the light in a whole new way.