Finding Your New Hobbies - Part 2 - The Flower Exe…

Transcript

So we're on part two of a nine-part series of how to use the exercise called the flower exercise from the book What Color is Your Parachute to determine what hobbies you might actually find engaging and challenging. And just for review, the book What Color is Your Parachute is designed to help people find jobs they love. And you know, what is a hobby if not a job that you don't get paid for? So the first petal in the flower exercise is people. And one of the first things that they suggest you do is go out and determine like what is your personality type, so to speak. And they recommend getting your Holland score. And you can just just go out and search on whatever search engine you like, Holland score, like the country Holland. I'm not a big fan of using those personality types assessments overly literally, but I do find that they help as an exercise to allow us to sort of create sort of objective categories for the various aspects of our personality and the personality of others. Like I did, like Myers-Briggs, I actually paid to do the Myers-Briggs and for me the free tests gave me everything I would have got that I got from that. So but the exercises are really helpful. And I think that's really important for people to go through and just to understand like what are the various sort of parameters of your personality. So go out and get your Holland score. Again, don't take it too literally. You're really just using the exercise to sort of discover discrete attributes of your personality. Like my Holland score told me that I would be happy as an anesthesiologist. It's like my number one job. And maybe I would be, but I can keep it to myself. I can guarantee you my patients would not. So don't take it too literally, but the exercise itself is super helpful. Then use those discrete parameters that you discover in these personality tests to sort of start thinking about people you've worked with in the past and think, you know, of the people that you disliked working with the most, what are some of the characteristics that they demonstrated? The reason I always like to start with disliked is people are more motivated by the experience of pain than they are by the chasing of gain. And thinking about things we don't like, we seem to come up with answers more quickly. So first get a list of the people, the people that you haven't enjoyed working with. And then now that you've sort of have this laundry list of parameters of personalities, start thinking like, well, you know, was she more of a, was she more analytical? You know, was she more, was she more emotional? Was she more scientific, discovery-oriented? And then you can start sort of start categorizing people a little bit. That'll help you to know what people you enjoy working with. It will probably tell you a little bit about yourself. What's interesting for me is that the people that I enjoyed working with were not people like me. They were people that brought out the best in me. I wouldn't even say that some of the people I enjoyed working with, I would ever want to hang out with. with. As a matter of fact, most of the people that I really enjoyed working with, I really don't think I would love hanging out with them, but I did love working with them because again, they brought out the best in me. So that's a big thing to think about when you're thinking about a hobby. And the reason it's important to focus in on people when you're thinking about a hobby is some of your hobbies are going to involve you interacting with other people. So you want to say to yourself, well, what kind of people do I want to interact with if I'm going to have a hobby where I interact with others? Like for me, it's a weird one, but like I love to play pool, but I hate bars. So it's tough for me because typically the typical person that's in a bar a lot is not going to be, generally speaking, somebody that I would want to spend time with and not necessarily somebody that would bring out the best in me. So it's just an example of identifying a hobby where I'd be interacting with people and trying to determine whether or not I would enjoy spending time with those people. And I'm sure like if I really sat down and thought about it, I'm sure there are ways that I could enjoy playing pool that doesn't involve being in a bar. I just haven't thought about it that long. But some of the people that I really didn't like spending time with at work, the people that didn't bring out the best in me, I would say that's going to be somebody that I would want to spend time with. So the people that really didn't bring out the best in me were people that sort of had a tendency to turn every project or task into an emergency. You know, they were very, what we call performative, meaning they're always trying to telegraph to the back of the room what a hard worker and what a dedicated person they are. I never liked working with performative workers. I never liked working with people who couldn't enjoy the job and have fun. But a lot of times every time I would go to work and I would hear the people that I liked working with say, Hey, how do you want to work here? And I would be like, okay, well, that's very Moron. Who did I like working with? I really liked working with people who worked in a Socratic way. Meaning they handled the solutions to problems very academically. We could have discussions where we disagreed diametrically on a potential solution and they would never get heated or weird because we were both just more enjoying the process of finding the answer than owning our suggestions. So you're right. tested answer. So I loved working with people who think and communicate Socratically. Probably the number one thing I loved in people was people who had a sense of humor. I always preferred to work with people who had a sense of humor. So if I had a person who was competent, but had a really good sense of humor, and then a person who was amazing and had no sense of humor, I'd take the competent person every time. That might not be how I make a hiring decision, but it would definitely be how I would determine whether or not I want to spend time working with that person. So what you want to do is get your Holland score, pay special attention to the questions they're asking when you do the score. And again, don't pay for it. There's plenty of sites you can go do it on. But really sort of focus in on the attributes that they're asking about. And think about those attributes with respect to people you've worked with, and come up with a list of the kind of people that you like to interact with and work with. It's pretty likely those are going to be the kind of people that you'd enjoy engaging in a hobby with.