Though I know Anna is going to frown on me for advocating this path...
Argh, no I’m not going to advocate ignoring one’s quirky interests to follow one’s alleged duty. My impression is more like fiddlemath’s, below. You don’t want to follow shiny interests at random (though even that path is much better than drifting randomly or choosing a career to appease one’s parents, and cousin_it is right that even this tends to make people more awesome over time). Instead, ideally, you want to figure out what it would be useful to be interested in, cultivate real, immediate, curiosity and urges to be interested in those things, work to update your anticipations and urges so that they know more of what your abstract/verbal reasoning knows, and can see why certain subjects are pivotal…
Not “far-mode reasoning over actual felt interests” but “far-mode reasoning in dialog with actual felt interests, and both goals and urges relating strongly to what you end up actually trying to do, and so that you develop new quirky interests in the questions you need to answer, the way one develops quirky interests in almost any question if one is willing to dwell on it patiently for a long time, with staring with intrinsic interest while the details of the question come out to inhabit your mind...
Argh, no I’m not going to advocate ignoring one’s quirky interests to follow one’s alleged duty. My impression is more like fiddlemath’s, below. You don’t want to follow shiny interests at random (though even that path is much better than drifting randomly or choosing a career to appease one’s parents, and cousin_it is right that even this tends to make people more awesome over time). Instead, ideally, you want to figure out what it would be useful to be interested in, cultivate real, immediate, curiosity and urges to be interested in those things, work to update your anticipations and urges so that they know more of what your abstract/verbal reasoning knows, and can see why certain subjects are pivotal…
Not “far-mode reasoning over actual felt interests” but “far-mode reasoning in dialog with actual felt interests, and both goals and urges relating strongly to what you end up actually trying to do, and so that you develop new quirky interests in the questions you need to answer, the way one develops quirky interests in almost any question if one is willing to dwell on it patiently for a long time, with staring with intrinsic interest while the details of the question come out to inhabit your mind...
I find this comment vague and abstract, do you have examples in mind?