How can you approach your learning strategically, So you can both benefit from and enjoy what you're doing? How can you handle push back if you want to change in ways that others around you may not expect? All of these questions, and more, will be explored this week in Mind Shift.

We often face real challenges in our life between what we want to do, our passion and what kinds of opportunities there are out there in the working world. We're often encouraged to follow our passions by well meaning people, friends and teachers, especially who don't themselves have to suffer the consequences of long term difficulties in getting a job. There is no one single answer to all this, but there are thoughtful ways to address this challenge as you think about your career and your approach to life long learning.

That's the pi approach, which is promoted by Patrick Tay, an elected member of Singapore's Parliament. In fact, he brought that artistic passion into his study of medicine which ultimately played an important role in helping Cajal win the Nobel Prize. You may have to spend some parts of your life focusing on one thing in order to get deep skilling in that area, but you don't have to give up on your passion.

Scott Adams, who's the creator of the famous Dilbert cartoon, points out that he's got mediocre skills in a lot of areas. For example, Singapore entrepreneur, Adam Koo, found that his skills in magic And in DJing, completely unrelated to his degree in business, have taught him a lot about how to effectively engage with audiences. The result, he now runs one of Southeast Asia's largest private educational institutions training to tens of thousands each year.

One important rule of thumb, is to avoid going into debt while learning new skills at the field you're hoping to move into is poorly paid. With the dabble approach, you simply start gradually learning in the new area, either online, through reading or by taking local classes. If you are a friend, parent, or mentor, of a potential mind shifter, try your best to remain open to other people's ability to change.

If you have long term goals in a difficult to master area, one of the best things you can do is to immerse yourself in what you're learning. So I vowed not to touch a computer during those years, giving me time to focus on the biology that I needed to master. You've got to cultivate selective ignorance because if you know how to do everything, then you become everybody's go to person and that can interfere with getting your own work done, and that turned out to be pretty good advice.

Often, feeling like an imposter makes you afraid that you won't be able to succeed at whatever tasks lay before you. History is filled with the stories of business executives, generals, and politicians who only listen to others when they reinforce their own convictions. It's natural that most of us except, perhaps, the most brash and narcissistic can fall occasional pray to feeling like an imposter.

Wherever you are in your career path, whether young, mid-career, or even in retirement, it can help to keep your eye on the big picture of societal trends in relation to your special skills. On a side note, I wish I had a dollar for every older student I've had in my engineering classes, who like me, followed their passion, and spent a lot of money to get a first degree in a subject that was difficult to get a good job at. Even great scientists like Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winning co-discoverer of DNA made a point of changing his area of focus to keep himself fresh as he grew older.

It may simply be that disagreeable people are more willing to be brats, to throw aside that compliant deferential behavior of their more agreeable peers. That too can serve as an advantage when everyone's telling you you just can't succeed, you're contrarian nature combined with a little bit of common sense can be just the ticket to prove them wrong. But a little bit of naive dreaming helps keep the world moving forward on a positive note.

There are groups of neurons very deep in the brain stem called neuromodulatory systems that control your levels of arousal, motivation, and attention. But not too high a level since that leads to Tourette Syndrome, characterized by uncontrolled ballistic movements, and a blue streak of swear words, which you can imagine on your own. Dopamine neurons receive inputs from a part of the brain called the basal ganglia, which evaluates cortical states and assigns value to them, and is involved with learning sequences of motor actions to achieve a goal.

Given all this, and also given the nature of the real world, it's often valuable to carefully assess whether the learning you're doing with relation to your career might be putting you into a passion trap. That is whether you may be pursuing an interest you like, that teachers, professors, friends tell you is great, but which in reality may put you in debt while providing little opportunity for growth or comfort in the long term. For example, you can be one of the most brilliant coders in the world, but if you don't know how to read people enough to negotiate a good salary, you can't really benefit appropriately from your great skill.

We need some way of converting those difficult, abstract symbols, digits, numbers, into something that we can process and then turn into something that we can imagine or visualize. So, depending on what you're trying to memorize, if it's a sequence of numbers, we'd have to use maybe your body method or you use a memory palace, like I've talked about in other videos. Or if you're using something, like you're trying to remember a year, or a PIN code, or a birthday, very short numbers that have to be attached to someone, or some fact, or some thing.

Probably a lot of you, that's probably the number one request I get is, Nelson how do I remember the names and faces of people I meet. It turns out that after a number of years of practice I managed to become the top memorizer of names in the entire country. But, if you can do it for the other kinds of things that are a bit crazy, then you for sure will have an awesome memory when it comes time to memorize a person's name.