I wrote about things like “big problems” and “abstract problems” and things like that, but if I may be honest those are fantasies and pipe dreams. Tilting at windmills, LKY would say. It sounds nice and grand. But I’m learning that you have to earn the privilege to work on those things. You can’t get there if you can’t solve little problems. A part of me likes to think that the two are different, apples and oranges- and there are all these examples of mathematicians and scientists who’re absent-minded because they’re too busy working on d epic, meaningful problems. I’d like to pretend that I’m somehow cut from the same cloth because I’m irresponsible, inconsistent, unreliable. Sounds like it fits some sort of genius archetype! Bullshit.
Maybe it does, but what I’m learning is that this is a “lottery ticket’ approach to success. Consider the van-gogh-insane-muse idea, the idea that great works come from people who are somehow disturbed, pathalogical, what Jobs would call “Insanely Great”. You seem to have to be a little weird to be amazing. But that doesn’t mean amazingness is a consequence of weirdness. They could be entirely unrelated. Or that weirdness could be the weirdness on the other side of complexity. I fucking love that idea, i’m stealing it from “simplicity on the other side of complexity”. There’s always going to be some shlepping that you’re going to have to do. I accept that. I like that.
I can’t work on big amazing problems if I can’t solve little ones like how do I jump out of bed in the morning, excited and eager to get to work on the problems that I DO have the privilege of working on? Yes, I want to help our species get to space, but before I get anywhere close to even smelling that adjacent reality, I’m going to have to become a person who is capable and worthy. That means I need to kick ass at the challenges I DO have. I have to stop seeing them as distractions or frustrations or problems but as training to sculpt me into the person I need to become to achieve what I believe needs to be achieved.
TL;DR of the above- have to be able to do the little work before you can hope to do the big work. I’ve had this discussion with my boss before, and he kindly helped me see through a lot of my own bullshit- I use terms like “ambitious” and “potential”. Those terms are useless when we’re dealing with reality. “Oh, but she’s got a lot of potential” is not a really useful thing to say. You are not your potential, you are what you have done and what you are doing, the outcomes that you can realistically and reasonably influence immediately. So this is a new heuristic I’m experimenting with. I’m incompetent, irresponsible, and I have no potential. All I have is what I’ve done so far, the opportunity to work on immediate challenges, and the work I do, day in and day out. Speculation is a parlour game. I am defined professionally by the results I bring to the table, and I do that not by daydreaming but by sitting my ass down and grinding/shlepping out what needs to be done.
I had a funny recursive thought when researching stuff for work. A part of my job involves marketing the idea of referral marketing to online stores. I have to communicate the value of communicating value. Now, when you want to understand marketing, you have to dig deep and figure out what the value actually is- and sometimes you’ll find that there’s no value at all, and you’ll have to start over. So for me to market referral marketing, I have to really understand it inside out- become a domain expert, understand how it’s worked so far, why it’s worked, who it’s worked for, why some people haven’t adopted it, everything.
Somewhere in trying to communicate the value of communicating value, I entered a recursive loop which turned the whole process on myself. I like to think I’ve always had this one running at the back of my head, but it’s pretty amazing that I get to work on something that forces it out into the open. It’s like using your brain to study brains, or using language to dissect language… learning the art of selling to sell sales, it somehow encapsulates all of that. It’s a kind of performance and artistry… all sorts of stuff fused into one. I geek out about it.
I’m really excited, and it amazes me sometimes to realize that I’m not excited 24/7. I get stressed and worried because it seems like there’s a lot to do (and indeed there will always be a neverending stream of things to do) and I’m not entirely sure how to prioritize them. But that’s a lie, I do know how to prioritize- when I get down to it. But I’m not getting down to it- why? When confronted, it becomes the obvious thing to do. So the problem is what happens when I’m not being confronted, by myself or anybody else. Then I slip into a familiar pattern that I still don’t completely understand. I’m thinking that I get frightened or nervous of doing the most important work in case it’s not good enough, not right enough, not amazing enough, and then I take too long with it and things start to get ugly. So I need to learn to ship faster.
Fear and laziness both seem to be inefficient, lousy, incomplete explanations. I think procrastination and lack of focus is a bit “more” than that. A part of it comes from not being absolutely certain about something, or about anything in particular. You need a sense of certainty- and this is an emotional thing, you need to feel like “This needs to be written/done and it needs to get out there”, and maybe different people have different explanations or reasons as to WHY the work needs to be done. I understand reasons intellectually, but I haven’t sufficiently fused an emotional understanding into it.
I really like this idea of “mental energy” flowing through the path of least resistance. You could call it creative/generative energy, whatever, I don’t care. It’s the stuff that’s coming out of me right now, from my head to my fingers to the keyboard to the pixels on the screen. If I had my Facebook account still, I might not be writing this. If I had some video games installed on my computer, I might not be writing this. I’m not saying that deprivation/dams is/are the best or only way to direct this energy, just that I have spent most of my life squandering this energy. I’m now thinking about something Scott Adams once wrote about how you should prioritize your tasks in order of whatever energizes you the most.
This energy metaphor seems to work as an extended/generative thing. If you do something that greatly increases the amount of energy you have, you’re more likely to get around to doing something powerful. This happens when I get angry, upset, pissed off- it instantly inspires a large chunk of content. This content isn’t necessarily the best thing that’s going to be out there- it’s usually short-sighted and hurtful, but if you give it time and space to settle, you can do something good with it.
The challenge is not to waste energy- to direct it towards useful pursuits that have long-run (or even semi-immediate benefits) like exercise, reading, creating (writing for me). I’m convinced that I could be working at a much greater pace than I am now- both professionally and creatively. All I have to do is channel my existing energy better. And there’s no need to do any reading or learning or anything of that sort to figure that out- you already know everything you need. I’m off
This is a good article. Particularly liked the line related to Path of least resistance. It does happen that when confronted we know what we should have done, and what we did instead. Its just flashes in front of you.
Good article again. Keep them coming.
thank you for your kind words. 🙂