Podcast - Episode 0264 - The Make Your Mark Myth

12 comments

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  • V
  • February 12, 2019 at 4:31 pm

  This podcast made me realize that I need to make peace with myself and realize that despite current societal pressures to hustle, ultimately, success and significance do not matter. As they say, ignorance is bliss. I spend too much time thinking about what my significance is as well as my definition of success, but in what I feel is not a productive way. Perhaps it’s a manifestation of my Fi-Si loop.

  I really like the idea of working on yourself so that you will be ready for the future when you do hold a position of influence or power (and I think this applies to more specific hierarchies as well, like the workplace, not just society generally). Maybe I like the idea because it seems ‘easier’ to do and more definite than the principle of ‘leaving your mark on the world’.

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  • V
  • February 11, 2019 at 5:24 pm

  I’m an INFP and totally get this!

  I remember when I was younger when I heard about kids my age doing things (8-14), I thought, ’what’s the big deal?‘. Now that I’m in my 20s and I hear about kids making amazing pieces of art or becoming politically active/involved, I think to myself, why didn’t I get started earlier with something I was super passionate about, pushing against all odds (including the adults who told me to sit down and be quiet)?

  And now that I’ve graduated from college, I see social media posts of my high school and college classmates getting fairly normal jobs, getting married, having kids, etc., and I’m honestly so surprised at how…mediocre we all really are. (Not that it is bad to get married or have kids, but I definitely also grew up with the idea that I/my generation was going to do important things in the larger world, not just within a small social circle.)

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  • Marina
  • February 6, 2019 at 10:10 pm

  I do feel the pressure to do something important. But I’ve also felt a dual sense of society telling me to “Sit down, be quiet, you don’t know enough yet, and wait your turn.” I find the latter to be persistently frustrating, especially since I look much younger than my age (I could probably still pass as 12-14 when I’m nearly a decade older). Maybe it’s because I’m an ENFP, but I absolutely cannot stand that message as it is so constraining.

  For pretty much all of my life, I’ve had a notion that I would one day do “important things,” but that wouldn’t happen until later because people my age didn’t make any sort of impact. I kept pushing the date farther and farther into my life. Then I started college and realized, “Why push it any farther? I am going to do things I find important and chase ideas and topics I see as important now. I’m still not sure what the “important things” I want to do are. I think I’ve summed it up to “things I can do to make the world better and things that are important to me at that particular moment.” To me, importance is about self-fulfillment and being content with my life.

  I have been learning to carve my own importance out of life. I think that’s a vital skill in our world today. There are so many people and so many ways to make an impact. A lot of them are small, but if we all made lots of small impacts, I think the world holistically would benefit.

  I suppose I do not want to have some big, Society-wide macro level change as my full responsibility. I’m far too indecisive. But I still want to be a part of the events that create the chain to a better world.

  Though, I do see things in the world that disgust me. My gut desire is to rip whatever this is up and try everything new. But that’s when Te and Si whisper in my ear that it’s not practical and it’s not wise to totally wipe the slate clean at times.

  I feel that a lot of young people, in the US at least, are dissatisfied with power structure and the people who are in power. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve been utterly disgusted by prominent officials’ behavior and example they set and how their policies negatively impact real people. I see it as faulty judgement, at best, and blind partisan loyalty, at worst (I’m really not a fan of hard core partisan loyalties and I have many many issues with both major political parties).

  Then again, I often find the fact that 6s are called “skeptics” to be very fitting since I’m a 6. It’s almost engrained in my mentality since my upbringing to just inherently mistrust large institutional leadership that I have no means of personally interacting with. So that’s part of my above sentiment.

  I also seem to easily get the impression that people my age are too extreme to one side of the other. Then again, I think that of adults in general. I have met too many people who seem willing to discount everything someone has to say over one disagreement.

  But back on topic, I’ve done a lot of work to realize that I can’t fix every problem and bend the world to my will. So, instead I’ve decided that I’ll just chart my own course and see where it leads while trying to be a positive force in the world along the way. It’s not hard for me to be a positive force. I naturally tend towards kindness and compassion—an outgrowth of my Fi’s extremely heavy emphasis on respect. I would go as far as to say that the concept of “respect” is the central component of my morality and what i value. I suppose if I could save some sort of magic problem-solving wand, I’d give the world more respect.

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  • Simon
  • February 6, 2019 at 9:25 am

  Being a millennial, I can really say that this podcast hit home with me.
  If I’m gonna be completely honest with myself, it’s like I don’t even know or can’t even remember where this idea of making a huge impact in the world even comes from, for me personally.

  Listening to you guys made me inspired for the day (which is great for a dominant Fi and user) and even though, probably, maybe I feel like that our minds will be clouded again and we will go back to skipping steps and wanting to becomes presidents of the world, just to have been given some light through this podcast, atleast helps me to stay in control for a short period even if it is for the day.

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  • Yoanna
  • February 5, 2019 at 1:12 pm

  This podcast really came at the right time since I’ve been contemplating about this topic daily for years, however, now that I’m at university and even though I really enjoy what I’m studying, I’m more puzzled that ever as to how I will apply my knowledge and skills to my life after I graduate to make this ‘big impact’ that I want to make. I’m actually not from the West but from Eastern Europe and can say that I don’t share this way of thinking with many people there and that’s one reasons why I’ve struggled to understand it. I realise that this mindset brings me a lot of confusion and anxiety about the future and it seems like the pressure is never going to go away. Thank you for talking about this! I felt understood and I definitely agree with what you said that in the end we just want our lives to have mattered.