 Hi everyone, it's MJ and on the 4th of March I'm going to be giving a talk for a virtual conference hosted by Protagion and my talk is going to be entitled Philosophy Lessons for Professional Development. Now what I want to do in this video is go through some of the philosophers that we'll be discussing as well as giving a little bit more details about this virtual conference towards the end. But let's maybe start off with the philosophers and the first one is Blaise Pascal. Now Pascal speaks about two different types of intellects, mathematical and inquiry. And I guess this is why actuarial science is notoriously difficult because it requires both. Now Pascal was an early innovator of probability and he invented the calculator. But philosophically he made a breakthrough by saying that we need to consider both the frequency and severity of potential futures when making our decisions and when it comes to your career You really want to make sure you follow the right process before you make a life-altering decision. Next up we have Coral Jung. Now he observed a mythological framework that divided reality into order and chaos and one could make the case that professionals are agents of order who address chaos in this world. Jung can help us understand the chaos in our lives and what is the best way to address it. Charles Sanders Peirce, the forgotten genius who set the stage for modern statistics. He's the founder of pacantism and another less known philosophy called tychism, which believes that all aspects of reality are stochastic, which one could argue is the same philosophy that Actuaries assume to be true when we build our models. Now what will happen when we extend these assumptions to our own career paths? Next up we have Frederick Nietzsche. Many misconceptions and many misinterpretations of this grand intellectual, but we will look at Nietzsche's will to power and becoming who you are. You know, what are the freedoms and fates of the professional and how do you become the greatest person you can possibly be? Next we have Albert Camus, who said we should ask ourselves the following question every morning. Should I have a cup of coffee or kill myself? It's intense, but it's his introduction to how we can seize the day and make the most out of our lives. Sticking with existentialists, we have Soren Kekkegaard, who famously said if I get married, I'll regret it. If I don't get married, I'll regret it. So we will look at his idea of personal truth and how we can use it to guide ourselves in making career choices and how to deal with the anxiety that comes from committing to a decision. And finally, William James. And his big saying was act as if what you do makes a difference because it does. His view was that your beliefs can influence your future. And as professionals, we have the toolkit to make a difference. And it's almost a cliche now to say believe in yourself, but we will explore why this is true and how to build self confidence. So yeah, just some important details about the virtual conference. It will count towards your CPD requirements, which is really cool. It is free to join Protagion and it will be free to attend the virtual conference from the first to the fifth of March. However, you are going to have to subscribe and subscriptions cost various amounts depending what country you're coming from. It's a monthly fee. And what this will allow you to do is to join the philosophy talk, which I'm going to be giving. So it is a subscriber exclusive, but there will be a few other talks on financial yoga and support squads given by other mentors. Now, there are many other benefits as well from subscribing to Protagion and we'll talk about that soon. Well, yeah, we've got them here on the on the screen. You basically invited to a private LinkedIn group and you can ask a whole bunch of mentors all around the world, specific questions. And they're not just actually there's some accountants and other risk professionals as well that you can interact with. So highly recommend investing in your career. But yes, just to summarize what we're going to be talking about in my one is for philosophy professionals, it's going to be interactive. We're going to have discussions. You can ask questions and I guess some of the broad topics are going to be, you know, what does it mean to be a professional? What is the purpose of my career? Why do I do the work that I do? Am I heading in the right direction? And what can I do when things go wrong? And I think this is the lovely thing about investing in philosophy is that it kind of becomes a mental insurance for when things get crazy, which, as we know in life, that tends to happen. So please check out the links in the description to learn more about this virtual conference. And I hope to see you all on the fourth of March. Thanks for watching. Cheers.