Jared Diamond’s three filters for a life, and the people you should not send to hell.
When elders speak I listen. Some advice arrives dressed for a conference. Some arrives in a cardigan. The best advice I heard this month came from an 89-year-old man in the second kind of outfit, answering the oldest question there is in three short lines and one blunt one.
The man was Dr Jared Diamond: physiologist, ornithologist, geographer, historian, Pulitzer winner, MacArthur Fellow, and the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, the book that taught a generation of us to ask why some societies ended up with the ships and the rifles and others ended up on the receiving end of them. He was sitting with Professor Andrew Huberman on the Huberman Lab podcast, nominally to talk about his new book, Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings, published in September by Allen Lane. The book takes on the old fight between structure and agency: do leaders make history, or does history make leaders? He works through politics, business, sport and religion, and one of his anchor cases is ours: Seretse Khama of Botswana.
But the part of the conversation I have been rumbling and wrestling with, came near the end. Huberman, who has a habit of asking his elders for the instruction manual, for life protocols, asked Diamond what advice he would give, having lived nearly nine decades, about how to live.
Diamond’s answer, paraphrased from my notes:
Diamond, on how to live
- Do what you are good at.
- Do what you enjoy.
- Do what makes a difference in the world, or at least does it no harm.
And if people insist on telling you what you must and must not do, tell them to go to hell. Spending your life on things you are not good at, do not enjoy, and that make no difference to anyone is, in his words, a recipe for misery.
Then he gave examples from his own house, and this is where I fell in love with the answer. He does not like gardening; his wife does, so she gardens. He loves doing the family’s taxes and accounts, so he does them. He hates grocery shopping. He stopped ironing his own shirts because he was bad at it, did not enjoy it, and it made no difference to the world whether Jared Diamond personally pressed a collar. And he once dreamt of conducting an orchestra. He tried it, once or twice, and discovered that he could not shut out the noise of a passing airplane or hear the next sound before it arrived, which is the whole job. So he made peace with the dream and let it go. A Pulitzer winner who outsources his ironing and retired his baton after two rehearsals. That is not a man who has given up. That is a man who has done radical acceptance.
The geographer who believes in choice.
Here is what struck me first. Diamond made his name arguing that structure shapes destiny. In Guns, Germs, and Steel the gap between societies is not about brains or blood. It is about which continents had domesticable plants and animals, and which way their axes ran. Eurasia runs east to west, so crops and animals could travel along the same latitudes. Africa and the Americas run north to south, through deserts, tropics and different day-lengths, and so diffusion stalled. The book has had its critics, and fairly so; anthropologists have charged it with geographic determinism. But the core claim was a gift to anyone who grew up being told that the people at the bottom of the pile were there because of something in them.
And yet, asked how one person should live, the high priest of structure and keeping lists, gave a pure agency answer. Choose. Drop. Refuse. Tell them where to go. Geography decides a great deal about nations. It decides much less about what you do with a Tuesday afternoon.
I do not think this is a contradiction. I think it is the whole point of his new book, scaled down to a single life. Structure sets the board: where you were born, what your parents could afford, which school would admit you, whether there was a library or a shebeen at the end of the road. Agency moves the pieces that are left. Pretending the board does not exist is arrogance. Pretending you have no pieces is a different kind of surrender. Diamond’s three lines are what agency looks like once you have taken honest stock of the board.
Filter one: Do what you are good at
Diamond’s taxes-not-ironing arrangement is older economics than it looks. David Ricardo described it in 1817 as comparative advantage: even if one country is better at making everything, both countries are richer if each specialises in what it is relatively best at and trades for the rest. A household is a tiny economy. When the person who loves numbers does the accounts and the person who loves soil does the garden, the family’s total output and total contentment both rise.
The science on aptitude also deserves more respect than the motivational industry gives it. I have cited Macnamara and Hambrick’s meta-analyses before: deliberate practice explains a real but modest slice of performance, roughly a fifth of the variance in sport and far less among elites. Practice matters. It is not the only thing that matters. Some people can hear the next note before it is played. Diamond, by his own admission, could not, and no amount of rehearsal was going to install that high pitch ear.
I have a personal stake in this filter. I did not choose the numbers that ended up running through my career. A Biology teacher chose them for me, when I was expelled from his class in Standard 6 and readmitted only on condition I never sit in front of him again. Maths, Economics and Accounting were what was left. I turned out to be good at them. That is the honest version of most aptitude stories: we discover it sideways, often by accident, sometimes by punishment.
The trap inside filter one
Being good at something is the most dangerous of the three filters on its own, because the world will pay you, promote you and praise you for it whether or not it is killing you. Corporate South Africa is full of excellent people who are excellent at something they quietly hate. The salary is good, the title is good, the performance review is good, and every year a little more of the person leaves the building before the body does. I call it the golden cage. The door is not locked. You have just stopped noticing it is a door.
Filter two: Do what you enjoy
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave us the language for this: flow, the state where challenge and skill are matched so well that time disappears. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan gave us intrinsic motivation, the drive to do something because the doing itself is the reward. Both bodies of research say the same thing Diamond said in fewer words: work you enjoy is work you will return to, and return is how mastery is built.
But here I want to add a correction, because “do what you enjoy” is the most abused of the three lines. Paul O’Keefe, Carol Dweck and Greg Walton published a set of studies in 2018 on what they called implicit theories of interest. People who believe passion is something you find, fully formed, like a wallet on the pavement, lose interest faster when the subject gets hard. People who believe interest is developed stay with it through the difficulty. Robert Vallerand’s work on passion makes a related split: harmonious passion sits comfortably inside a life, while obsessive passion takes the life over.
Enjoyment is often the reward for competence, not the entry ticket to it.
I do not know anyone who enjoyed the first hundred kilometres of their running life. Joy arrived later, after the legs learnt the work. Kancane kancane. So read Diamond’s second line carefully. He did not tell us to quit everything that is uncomfortable in week one. He tried conducting, more than once, and quit when the evidence said aptitude, not effort, was the missing ingredient. That is a different decision from quitting because it was hard on a Monday.
Filter three: Make a difference, or at least do no harm
This is the filter that turns a craftsman into a citizen. Adam Grant’s research with university fundraising callers is the cleanest demonstration I know. Callers who spent a few minutes with a student whose scholarship their calls had funded went on to spend far more time on the phone and to raise far more money than callers who never met a beneficiary. Nothing about the job changed. What changed was that the callers could now see the face on the other end of their effort.
Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton found the same thing in hospital cleaners. Some saw themselves as cleaning rooms. Others, in the same job and on the same pay, saw themselves as part of patients’ healing; they talked to the lonely, rearranged the art, learnt which visitors needed a quiet word. Wrzesniewski calls it job crafting. Same structure, different agency. And notice Diamond’s quiet second clause: or does no harm. That clause is a governor, and South Africa has paid dearly for operating without one. The architects of state capture were good at what they did. Many of them plainly enjoyed it. They failed only the third filter, and the third filter is the one that mattered.
Two filters make a craftsman. The third decides whether he builds a clinic or a laundromat for stolen money.
One honest warning from the other side. Stuart Bunderson and Jeffery Thompson studied zookeepers, people with a deep sense of calling, and found that the calling was double-edged: it gave meaning, and it also made them easier to underpay and overwork, because who complains about doing what they were born to do? Anyone who has worked in the non-profit sector will recognise this. Making a difference is not a reason to let someone exploit you. African Men Care has run since 2004 on donations and book sales precisely so that purpose and sustainability can sit at the same table.
Where the three circles meet, and where they do not
The diagram people draw for Diamond’s advice is three overlapping circles with a sweet spot in the middle. Fine. But the more useful exercise is to look at the regions outside the sweet spot, because that is where most of us actually live.
One more thing about that diagram. The popular four-circle version that circulates as ikigai adds a fourth circle: what you can be paid for. That version is a Western remix; the original Japanese idea is humbler, closer to “a reason to get up in the morning”. But notice that Diamond left money out entirely. A tenured UCLA professor can afford to. A great many South Africans cannot, and that is where this essay has to get honest.
The South African edit
Floors before ceilings
Diamond’s three filters are ceiling advice. They tell you how high to build once there is a floor under you. When close to half of young South Africans who want work cannot find any, the first job a young man in Khayelitsha or Gugulethu gets may pass none of the three filters. I have written before that being broke is not the same as being behind, and that scarcity taxes the very bandwidth you need to plan. Nobody should read this essay and feel ashamed that their current job is a stepping stone instead of a calling.
But the filters still work as a direction of travel. Job crafting does not require a promotion. The cleaner who decides she is part of healing has changed nothing on her payslip and everything about her Tuesday. Ask of every next move: does this take me closer to what I am good at, what I enjoy, and what makes a difference? If it does, it is a good move even if the destination is far away.
Go to hell – Hamba uye esihogweni, but not to everybody
Then there is the “rude” or blunt line. Self-determination theory would back Diamond: autonomy, the sense that your life is authored by you, is one of three basic psychological needs, alongside competence and relatedness. Look again at Diamond’s list and you will find all three: good at is competence, enjoy is intrinsic motivation, and go to hell is autonomy. Even his shirts have research behind them. Ashley Whillans and colleagues found in 2017 that people who spent money to buy themselves time, by outsourcing chores they disliked, reported greater life satisfaction than those who spent the same money on things.
But I grew up in a culture where abantu bazothini? (what will people say?) is a governing question, and where the people telling you what to do are often the same people who fed you. A young graduate whose family pooled money for her degree cannot simply tell her uncles to go to hell when they ask why she is not yet a doctor. Ubuntu does not permit it, and frankly, neither does gratitude.
So here is the distinction I have tried to draw in earlier pieces on the dompas and on the giver who has no stop button. There are two kinds of people who tell you what to do.
Diamond’s “go to hell” is aimed at the first column. Send the dompas voice away. Keep the elder at the table. Most of us get this backwards: we defer to the gatekeepers because they are loud and dismiss the elders because they are gentle.
The art of burying a dream properly
The most underrated thing Diamond said was not about doing. It was about stopping. He wanted to conduct an orchestra, he tried, he could not, and he made peace with it. He quit.
Carsten Wrosch, Michael Scheier, Charles Carver and colleagues have studied exactly this. People who can disengage from goals that have become unattainable, and then reengage with new ones, report better wellbeing and even show fewer stress-related physical symptoms than people who keep grinding at a door that will not open. The key is the second half: disengagement plus reengagement. Quitting into nothing breeds bitterness. Quitting into something breeds freedom.
I wrote about the opposite failure in Isiva Asilibali, about my Comrades DNF and the sunk-cost voice that says you have invested too much to stop. A dream that is never formally buried does not die. It haunts. It sits in the corner of every new project asking why you gave up on it. Diamond did not leave the orchestra in limbo. He tried it, read the evidence, said goodbye, and went back to birds and continents and taxes. That is what a funeral is for.
A dream properly buried does not haunt you. A dream abandoned in the passage trips you every night.
Running the filter on myself
I am 52, and I am still asking the question Huberman asked. After 28 years across Unilever, Vodacom, Nike, Google and Canva, a PhD, one published book and three more in the making, and twenty-two years of African Men Care, I enrolled to study psychology at UNISA, with the aim of qualifying as a psychologist. People have asked me, with varying degrees of politeness, why a man at this stage would go back to first-year textbooks.
Diamond’s filter gives me the answer more cleanly than I have managed to give it myself. I am good at listening to men and at translating research into something a man can use on a Monday. I enjoy it more than almost anything I did in a boardroom. And it makes a difference: boys in this country rarely see a man in a caring profession, as their therapist, their nurse, their teacher. If one more boy sees one more man doing that work, the experiment will have paid for itself.
I am less advanced on the second half of the advice. I have not yet drawn up my own list of shirts I should stop ironing: the meetings I attend out of habit, the favours I do because I cannot say no, the dreams I have left lying in the passage. That list is my homework. I suspect it is yours too.
The Diamond Audit: a one-page exercise
Take one sheet of paper and give yourself thirty minutes. No phone.
- Good at. List five things people ask you to help with. Not what your CV says; what people actually phone you about.
- Enjoy. List five activities in which you lost track of time in the last year. Note which ones you got good at first and enjoyed second.
- Difference. List the three problems in your community that make you angriest. Then name one person, by face, whom your work could reach.
- The shirts. List everything you did last week that failed all three filters. Mark each one: delegate, drop, or outsource.
- The orchestra. Name one dream you have been carrying that the evidence says is not yours. Write it a short, kind farewell. Then name what replaces it.
- The voices. List the people telling you what to do. Sort them into dompas and elder. Send the first list away. Phone someone on the second.
Where lists 1, 2 and 3 overlap is your direction of travel. It does not have to be your job this year. It has to be where your next move points.
The study I would run
Take 200 young men in their first jobs through our Men’s Resource Groups. Half complete the Diamond Audit with a mentor and craft one change into their current role within 90 days; half go on a waitlist. Measure meaning at work, intention to quit, and the size of the gap between the job they have and the one they want, at baseline, 90 days and one year. My hypothesis: crafting toward the three filters, without changing jobs at all, closes a meaningful part of that gap. If it does not, I want to know that too.
Closing: the polymath and the village
Look at Diamond’s life and you see the three filters in practice. He trained in physiology, fell in love with the birds of New Guinea, followed them into ecology, followed ecology into geography, and followed geography into the biggest questions about why the world is unequal. He did not move because a career ladder told him to. He moved because he was good at it, he enjoyed it, and he thought it mattered. At 89 he is still publishing, and still, by the look of it, refusing to iron.
I would add one thing, as an African reading an American. None of the three filters is a solo achievement. What you are good at was coached, corrected and paid for by somebody. What you enjoy is sweeter when it is shared; a run alone is exercise, a run with my nephew is a memory. And a difference is only a difference if it reaches abantu, real people with faces. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu: a person is a person through other people. Even the right to tell the dompas to go to hell was won for us by people who were jailed for saying it first.
My name, Mzamo, means try. Diamond only learnt he was not a conductor because he tried. He only learnt he was a historian because he tried. That is the part of his answer that sits underneath the other three, and it is the one I would give my own children: you will not find out what you are good at, what you enjoy, or what difference you can make by thinking about it. You find out by trying, by reading the evidence honestly, and by having the courage to stop when the evidence says stop.
Do what you are good at. Do what you enjoy. Do what makes a difference, or at least does no harm. Keep the elders. Send the rest to hell. Zama.
Sources and further reading
– Diamond, J. (2026). Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Make a Difference? Allen Lane.
– Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W. W. Norton.
– Huberman Lab podcast, episode with Dr Jared Diamond (2026). Quotations above are paraphrased.
– Bunderson, J. S. & Thompson, J. A. (2009). The call of the wild: Zookeepers, callings, and the double-edged sword of deeply meaningful work. Administrative Science Quarterly, 54(1).
– Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
– Deci, E. L. & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4).
– Grant, A. M., Campbell, E. M., Chen, G., Cottone, K., Lapedis, D. & Lee, K. (2007). Impact and the art of motivation maintenance. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 103(1).
– Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z. & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions. Psychological Science, 25(8).
– O’Keefe, P. A., Dweck, C. S. & Walton, G. M. (2018). Implicit theories of interest: Finding your passion or developing it? Psychological Science, 29(10).
– Ricardo, D. (1817). On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.
– Vallerand, R. J. et al. (2003). Les passions de l’âme: On obsessive and harmonious passion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(4).
– Whillans, A. V., Dunn, E. W., Smeets, P., Bekkers, R. & Norton, M. I. (2017). Buying time promotes happiness. PNAS, 114(32).
– Wrosch, C., Scheier, M. F., Miller, G. E., Schulz, R. & Carver, C. S. (2003). Adaptive self-regulation of unattainable goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(12).
– Wrzesniewski, A. & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2).
– Related on Between Thoughts: The Dompas of the Mind; The Giver Has No Stop Button; Isiva Asilibali; Kancane Kancane; Broke Is Not the Same as Behind; Isiqingatha.
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Dr. Mzamo Masito
Between Thoughts- Intellectual Musings.
Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.
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