Summary of 2014: What Is True Passion?

What is true passion? Is it a special kind of energy? This energy makes you go on and on doing something for long hours with singing on your lips and never being present.

Or causes the tendency to kill yourself once you cannot do what you love the most.

A drug that keeps you from eating and sleeping, pissing on your loved ones? I don’t really know what it is, but I miss it.

According to Vallerand et al. (2003), passion splits into two distinct forms. These are a harmonious kind that stays under a person’s control, and an obsessive kind that takes over and crowds out the rest of life. 

The truth is, the passionate and the non-passionate will never understand each other. And, most Dutch are not passionate. I realize this every time I cross the border with Poland.

When I meet my friends. When I talk to random people on the train. They have that fire in their eyes.

Summary of 2014: How Do You Navigate Yourself In Life? On Dropouts In My Environment.

Yet another thing is that it is not easy for enthusiasts in life. Last weekend I talked to my friend from university.

He will probably be my friend forever. This is because, after more than ten years since we bumped into each other in college, we talk even better than at the beginning.

Anyways, we summarized the balance of our mutual friends. This summary relates to their current state of mind and current careers.

It found that 90% of the people who came to college ten years ago as Olympians and local stars — the “golden children,” and people with a great future. These people are now freelancing, owning businesses, or doing something completely different, such as toys for children.

According to Güllich, Barth, Hambrick, and Macnamara (2025), early exceptional performers and later world-class adult performers are largely different people. Therefore, childhood promise is a poor predictor of who ends up excelling as an adult. 

Some are still in science and are doing great. However, these are rather isolated cases because most of them just fell out of business. The most distressing cases are those when someone has fallen out.

This happens even if he or she (1) has great talent and is hardworking; (2) is passionate about their discipline; and (3) is not a nerd at all: he or she has a great sense of humor and can communicate with people.

Summary of 2014: Why Do People Drop Out From Their Careers?

Usually, the act of dropout is a combination of two factors.

Firstly, “my wife wants financial stability.” I do not understand that approach at all. If you want financial stabilization, why don’t you put your ass together and work instead of wasting someone’s dreams?

Secondly, “the system has destroyed me.” This approach I do not understand either.

How can you give up so easily? You must try to leave first and see what the system looks like elsewhere. 

And so I slowly begin to realize that the above two reasons are actually excuses. The real reason, however, is elsewhere, namely deeper.

The truth is that those who dropped out of science simply had 25 years of life energy. As a result, they fell to the level of mere mortals.

And that’s it. They did not care about themselves and their spiritual hygiene, and their development in the broader sense.

They did not play sports, nor did they eat greens. Furthermore, they did not care about surrounding themselves with a sufficient number of people similar to themselves. According to Salmon (2001), regular physical exercise reliably reduces anxiety, depression and sensitivity to stress.

According to Cohen and Wills (1985), a strong network of supportive people around you buffers the negative psychological effects of stress. They did not dream enough. 

Thoughts are just efflorescences of the mind, which is the product of a biological organism. If this nourishing organism is not taken care of, the mind breaks down. Consequently, the conscious part called thoughts goes with it.

Summary of 2014: What Happened at the End of the Year?

Besides, the end of the year is the perfect time for a summary and New Year’s resolutions. When I think about it, it turns out that the year passed quickly. This was because a lot was happening, not because of just nothing. 

First I lived in South America for two months. Then I traveled to Poland (6 times), Athens, Barcelona, USA, and the UK.

I walked the 4daagse (4 x 50 km) and the Dodentocht (1 x 100 km). On this second occasion, I saw a crowd of fainting people at the finish line. This was the first time in my life I witnessed this.

I had my eights removed (it’s my second set, what an injustice!), after which I couldn’t speak for two weeks, and knocked out half a tooth on the front, after which I had to go to Warsaw to restore my looks.

And I worked on my PhD a loooooot. And of course, I met a lot of new people.

Summary of 2014: The Progress in my PhD.

But most importantly, I finally made some progress in my PhD project. I remember walking around La Campana Park in Chile in February.

There, I was trying hard to conceptualize the problem of causality in fMRI that I was struggling with. I knew so little back then that I had no idea how to bite it at all. 

Now I know that the problem is unsolvable. This is true with the methods that have been tried over the previous ten or fifteen years.

On the one hand, it is a problem, but on the other hand, it is also an opportunity. Therefore, I am trying to solve the problem with a different, new method. 

This whole project is challenging, no shit. But at least, I already know what I’m doing.

This is unlike most people in this field. They apply these causal discovery methods in their experiments and will never have a clue that they are doing something wrong. And that’s how my march for fame began ;)

Summary of 2014: The Plans For The Year To Come.

However, fun should not be forgotten. The greatest fun, in my view, is when art is combined with tricks over the mind.

This was evident, for example, in the show by Derren Brown. As my sister and her husband are leaving Cambridge next year (most likely for San Francisco), I finally made a decision.

Therefore, I decided to go to the show in June 2015 with them. It will be a good year.