This I Used To Beleive
This had some legs on twitter, so I’m elaborating in a more spacious environment.
We went to see the live version of This American Life a few weeks back. My wife had no idea what it was, but had gotten tickets because she knew it was something I liked (she rocks, by the way). She was entirely enamored by it, so of late I have been burning episodes to CD so that she can listen to them in the car. This morning’s episode was a recent one, “This I Used to Believe.” Taking the idea from NPR’s popular “This I Believe” series, it examines people who used to strongly hold views or ideas which have since changed, either over time or because of events or for whatever reason. It’s a good episode (they all are) and it lead debela to ask me what I used to believe.
My answer was terse enough that I copied it over to twitter as an afterthought: “I used to believe that structure was limitation, that ideas were abstract, that failure was to be feared, and that people were stupid.” When asked what I believe now, I was very proud to manage to keep it under 140 characters with my reply that “Structure is what you build on or from. You don't argue with ideas, only with people. Fail Forward. Uninterested doesn't mean stupid.”
This is enough answer to make sense to me, but it probably deserves some unpacking, more than twitter will really allow.
To want to pick up those four points here.
1. Structure.
I was a textbook gifted slacker, and I grew up in an emotionally supportive environment that prioritized happiness over success. This was mostly good, but it meant that I had a certain snobbery toward to do lists, budgets and organization in general. Those were things for people who didn’t know what they wanted, and who couldn’t just fake it. I, after all, was brilliant and gifted and happy, so who cared if my room was a pit. _I_ knew where things were. _I_ had a system!
This worked just fine for me through most of my twenties, with only a few disasters which I was entirely willing to mentally gloss over in favor of my generally sunny worldview, but as I got towards my thirties, the cracks started to show. I was in a serious relationship (and eventual marriage) so my decisions affected more than just me. The hardest part of really committing was giving up the idea that, in a pinch, I could throw everything important to me into two duffle bags, leave the rest, and take a train to a new city where I could find work as an office temp, and that had been something of an important lifeline for me.
As time went on, it became harder to ignore that my “system” had great bloody holes in it. I was terrible at keeping a budget, bad enough to put us at risk. Plus, “I know where everything is” becomes less convincing after you’ve lost the third important thing in a week. I could feel the wheels coming off, and I had to do something about it, so I made an effort to get myself together.
It failed. Good intentions, poor follow through. There was a moderate improvement for a while, but it would just slide again because I resented the effort and restrictions that I was putting on myself. My greatest fear was to become my own jailor. But I did at least realize I needed to do something, so every few months, I tried something new.
I finally got lucky when I hit upon David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’. I won’t go into the details because they don’t matter much, but what’s important was that it was a pretty lightweight system that I could work with, but more importantly, Allen made a case for organization that I could buy into as a reason it was its own good, not just a not-bad. Most approaches I’d taken had simply assumed that *of course* I wanted to be organized, because that was good and desirable, right? GTD’s message was much more about “You want to be organized so you can stop wasting energy on the things you don’t love”
And that worked for me. I didn’t follow every method or lesson (nor should anyone), but I discovered that he was right. The whole point of this was to move things off my mental plate so that I could read or write or watch TV or visit friends without a nagging sense of things undone. When I explained this to my wife, she looked at me like an idiot - Obviously that was why she stayed organized, not because she _liked_ it. So apparently she, and many others, had known all along but I had simply never seen through the surface of it. I had seen people being anal and organized and assumed that was the goal, when it was really a means to a goal.
Curiously, this also applied creatively. I am slow to start on the blank page (as are many people), but once there is a seed or limitation (which is to say - structure) to work from, then the juices just get flowing.
Bottom line; when structure became a means rather than an end, I realized that it helped me make choices in my life rather than just accept consequences. I got happier, moderately healthier (still working on that) and got a hell of a lot more accomplished.
2. Ideas
Gaming gets credit for this one. It’s easy to argue on the internet, and it’s even easier to paint your own picture of what the person you’re arguing with is thinking, and you will almost always be wrong. I used to feel arguments over ideas were arguments over ideas - it seems obvious enough, does it not? But the reality, driven home by actually _meeting_ people on the other end of the screen, is that however obvious it may be, it’s bogus. You are never arguing about ideas, you are arguing about people. There is no way to separate the idea from the person espousing it and make it some clean, antiseptic thing. But when you don’t realize that, and you argue with the idea, you are poisoning the conversation with the _person_, and when that happens you get, well, the internet.
As I’ve realized this, I have grown more comfortable with disagreement and less comfortable with condemnation. Despite what the Internet might suggest, people handle disagreement pretty well, if you can manage to engage with the person speaking and disagree with him. On the other hand, condemnation of ideas often ends up saying pretty bad things about people who I think well of. This is disturbing enough that even when I don’t know the people involved, it reminds me that they are there, and tempers my approach.
This is by no means a reason not to disagree or criticize, both of those things are important, but it changes how you do it. The criticism I offer drivingblind is thought out to be useful to what he’s trying to accomplish, not to belittle his efforts or demonstrate how awesome I am. In doing so, it is not nicer, it is _better_. I do not need to pull punches, because Fred’s a big boy, but I communicate them in the way that will be most _useful_ not the way that will prove me the most right.
3. Failure
I can prove this one with math in a pinch, but it comes to this. If you are 99% of the way to failing at something, the effort that you will commit desperately scrabbling to hang on will usually be MANY times more than the effort required to let go of the cliff, drop a bit, dust yourself off, and accomplish something else. And even if it’s not, then stop for a minute and consider the role of luck in the universe. Successful people don’t always like hearing this, but a lot of success is luck. An agent is going to get a lot of manuscripts, and the quality of yours is only one factor that plays into whether or not they like it. Your business plan may be brilliant, but it’s still a crapshoot whether or not it will take off.
Put another way, skill, talent and hard work can create opportunities for success, or take advantage of it when it comes, but nothing can guarantee that the train will actually come into the station.
That sounds kind of bleak, but it’s not. You guys are mostly gamers, so I encourage you to min/max a little bit. How? Consider this - if luck determines whether or not an idea succeeds or fails (or even just has a lot to do with it) then are your odds better focusing on one perfect idea or on ten different ones? In D&D terms, would you rather commit the effort to getting a moderate bonus to hit, or 9 extra rolls of the dice?
The answer seems obvious. Success only comes to those who make the effort in the first place, but that requires risk. The brilliant novel that never leaves your computer makes you less of a writer than the hack job that someone else actually has the guts to send in to a publisher. Their book may be crap. It may get rejected. So might their next one. And their next. But each time they roll the dice there’s a chance that this time it works out.
(yes, there are other approaches to publishing. Please don’t’ take the example too literally.)
If you fear failure, you will not take that first step. Your anticipation of the pain will be a thousand times greater than the pain itself. If, on the other hand, you embrace failure, and strive to fail faster and more productively, then you’re taking control and helping increase the odds of your number coming up.
One aside about this is that there’s an assumption of fruitful failure - failure you learn from. Just like simply doing a thing for 10,000 won’t make you an expert without feedback and learning, just failing over and over again is only so productive (though not useless, depending on the venue). The ability to look at your failures, see what you can learn from them, and continue on is not always instinctive. Failure hurts and is rarely fun to examine, especially when its our fault, but the potential payout is huge.
4. Stupidity
Yeah, like every smart kid I spent some time thinking people were generally stupid. Just look at them! Look at all the important things they don’t know!
What important things? Why, the things _I_ know, of course.
But what about the things I don’t know? Obviously, those aren’t important. The very fact that they bothered to learn those things just shows how stupid they are!
The simple truth is, people are pretty smart about things they actually care about. People can learn things incredibly well if they’re _interested_ , as can be evinced by baseball statistics and TV trivia. Someone who is engaged by a topic can soak it up like a vacuum. Being classically smart may give some tools that assist in the vacuuming process, but its ultimately not that big a deal.
The problem is that, statistically speaking, most people really couldn’t care less about the things you find important. Even if they do, the likelihood that they prioritize them the same way you do is slim to none. It is less challenging to write this off as stupidity, because anything else calls into question our own choices and intellectual investments. That’s a really uncomfortable position to be in, but it can be mitigated. If you engage with people, actively looking for the ways in which they are smarter than you, odds are good you will find them. Once you’ve found that thing, maybe that reveals that the person is someone you don’t want to deal with, or maybe it reveals something you could learn. In either case, it’s more useful than your assumption was.
This touches back to ideas and people. People argue from their positions of engagement. They are arguing about how important a position is to them. Getting them to change a position directly is very difficulty, but getting them engaged in a something else, something that informs on the original position, can be incredibly powerful. Think about the times you have changed your mind, really changed your mind. How often was it accompanied by a sense that you now had a greater understanding of the matter? More often than not, I’d wager, and that change is how real persuasion (and teaching) take place.
Now, there are two important qualifiers to this. The first is simple: Just because someone is smart doesn't mean they're not a jerk. You can acknowledge both at the same time.
The second is a bigger deal. This one is not just a bad idea, it's a poisonous, blackshirty idea. Listen to the news for a while and you'll hear people talk about taking choices away from other people because they just can't be expected to understand. It's always couched in sympathetic, just-trying-to-help language, but the reality is that it's about power and who gets to make decisions. If you believe that people are generally stupid, then it's easy for this kind of nonsense to sound perfectly rational, and when it does, congratulations - you just got played.
We went to see the live version of This American Life a few weeks back. My wife had no idea what it was, but had gotten tickets because she knew it was something I liked (she rocks, by the way). She was entirely enamored by it, so of late I have been burning episodes to CD so that she can listen to them in the car. This morning’s episode was a recent one, “This I Used to Believe.” Taking the idea from NPR’s popular “This I Believe” series, it examines people who used to strongly hold views or ideas which have since changed, either over time or because of events or for whatever reason. It’s a good episode (they all are) and it lead debela to ask me what I used to believe.
My answer was terse enough that I copied it over to twitter as an afterthought: “I used to believe that structure was limitation, that ideas were abstract, that failure was to be feared, and that people were stupid.” When asked what I believe now, I was very proud to manage to keep it under 140 characters with my reply that “Structure is what you build on or from. You don't argue with ideas, only with people. Fail Forward. Uninterested doesn't mean stupid.”
This is enough answer to make sense to me, but it probably deserves some unpacking, more than twitter will really allow.
To want to pick up those four points here.
1. Structure.
I was a textbook gifted slacker, and I grew up in an emotionally supportive environment that prioritized happiness over success. This was mostly good, but it meant that I had a certain snobbery toward to do lists, budgets and organization in general. Those were things for people who didn’t know what they wanted, and who couldn’t just fake it. I, after all, was brilliant and gifted and happy, so who cared if my room was a pit. _I_ knew where things were. _I_ had a system!
This worked just fine for me through most of my twenties, with only a few disasters which I was entirely willing to mentally gloss over in favor of my generally sunny worldview, but as I got towards my thirties, the cracks started to show. I was in a serious relationship (and eventual marriage) so my decisions affected more than just me. The hardest part of really committing was giving up the idea that, in a pinch, I could throw everything important to me into two duffle bags, leave the rest, and take a train to a new city where I could find work as an office temp, and that had been something of an important lifeline for me.
As time went on, it became harder to ignore that my “system” had great bloody holes in it. I was terrible at keeping a budget, bad enough to put us at risk. Plus, “I know where everything is” becomes less convincing after you’ve lost the third important thing in a week. I could feel the wheels coming off, and I had to do something about it, so I made an effort to get myself together.
It failed. Good intentions, poor follow through. There was a moderate improvement for a while, but it would just slide again because I resented the effort and restrictions that I was putting on myself. My greatest fear was to become my own jailor. But I did at least realize I needed to do something, so every few months, I tried something new.
I finally got lucky when I hit upon David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’. I won’t go into the details because they don’t matter much, but what’s important was that it was a pretty lightweight system that I could work with, but more importantly, Allen made a case for organization that I could buy into as a reason it was its own good, not just a not-bad. Most approaches I’d taken had simply assumed that *of course* I wanted to be organized, because that was good and desirable, right? GTD’s message was much more about “You want to be organized so you can stop wasting energy on the things you don’t love”
And that worked for me. I didn’t follow every method or lesson (nor should anyone), but I discovered that he was right. The whole point of this was to move things off my mental plate so that I could read or write or watch TV or visit friends without a nagging sense of things undone. When I explained this to my wife, she looked at me like an idiot - Obviously that was why she stayed organized, not because she _liked_ it. So apparently she, and many others, had known all along but I had simply never seen through the surface of it. I had seen people being anal and organized and assumed that was the goal, when it was really a means to a goal.
Curiously, this also applied creatively. I am slow to start on the blank page (as are many people), but once there is a seed or limitation (which is to say - structure) to work from, then the juices just get flowing.
Bottom line; when structure became a means rather than an end, I realized that it helped me make choices in my life rather than just accept consequences. I got happier, moderately healthier (still working on that) and got a hell of a lot more accomplished.
2. Ideas
Gaming gets credit for this one. It’s easy to argue on the internet, and it’s even easier to paint your own picture of what the person you’re arguing with is thinking, and you will almost always be wrong. I used to feel arguments over ideas were arguments over ideas - it seems obvious enough, does it not? But the reality, driven home by actually _meeting_ people on the other end of the screen, is that however obvious it may be, it’s bogus. You are never arguing about ideas, you are arguing about people. There is no way to separate the idea from the person espousing it and make it some clean, antiseptic thing. But when you don’t realize that, and you argue with the idea, you are poisoning the conversation with the _person_, and when that happens you get, well, the internet.
As I’ve realized this, I have grown more comfortable with disagreement and less comfortable with condemnation. Despite what the Internet might suggest, people handle disagreement pretty well, if you can manage to engage with the person speaking and disagree with him. On the other hand, condemnation of ideas often ends up saying pretty bad things about people who I think well of. This is disturbing enough that even when I don’t know the people involved, it reminds me that they are there, and tempers my approach.
This is by no means a reason not to disagree or criticize, both of those things are important, but it changes how you do it. The criticism I offer drivingblind is thought out to be useful to what he’s trying to accomplish, not to belittle his efforts or demonstrate how awesome I am. In doing so, it is not nicer, it is _better_. I do not need to pull punches, because Fred’s a big boy, but I communicate them in the way that will be most _useful_ not the way that will prove me the most right.
3. Failure
I can prove this one with math in a pinch, but it comes to this. If you are 99% of the way to failing at something, the effort that you will commit desperately scrabbling to hang on will usually be MANY times more than the effort required to let go of the cliff, drop a bit, dust yourself off, and accomplish something else. And even if it’s not, then stop for a minute and consider the role of luck in the universe. Successful people don’t always like hearing this, but a lot of success is luck. An agent is going to get a lot of manuscripts, and the quality of yours is only one factor that plays into whether or not they like it. Your business plan may be brilliant, but it’s still a crapshoot whether or not it will take off.
Put another way, skill, talent and hard work can create opportunities for success, or take advantage of it when it comes, but nothing can guarantee that the train will actually come into the station.
That sounds kind of bleak, but it’s not. You guys are mostly gamers, so I encourage you to min/max a little bit. How? Consider this - if luck determines whether or not an idea succeeds or fails (or even just has a lot to do with it) then are your odds better focusing on one perfect idea or on ten different ones? In D&D terms, would you rather commit the effort to getting a moderate bonus to hit, or 9 extra rolls of the dice?
The answer seems obvious. Success only comes to those who make the effort in the first place, but that requires risk. The brilliant novel that never leaves your computer makes you less of a writer than the hack job that someone else actually has the guts to send in to a publisher. Their book may be crap. It may get rejected. So might their next one. And their next. But each time they roll the dice there’s a chance that this time it works out.
(yes, there are other approaches to publishing. Please don’t’ take the example too literally.)
If you fear failure, you will not take that first step. Your anticipation of the pain will be a thousand times greater than the pain itself. If, on the other hand, you embrace failure, and strive to fail faster and more productively, then you’re taking control and helping increase the odds of your number coming up.
One aside about this is that there’s an assumption of fruitful failure - failure you learn from. Just like simply doing a thing for 10,000 won’t make you an expert without feedback and learning, just failing over and over again is only so productive (though not useless, depending on the venue). The ability to look at your failures, see what you can learn from them, and continue on is not always instinctive. Failure hurts and is rarely fun to examine, especially when its our fault, but the potential payout is huge.
4. Stupidity
Yeah, like every smart kid I spent some time thinking people were generally stupid. Just look at them! Look at all the important things they don’t know!
What important things? Why, the things _I_ know, of course.
But what about the things I don’t know? Obviously, those aren’t important. The very fact that they bothered to learn those things just shows how stupid they are!
The simple truth is, people are pretty smart about things they actually care about. People can learn things incredibly well if they’re _interested_ , as can be evinced by baseball statistics and TV trivia. Someone who is engaged by a topic can soak it up like a vacuum. Being classically smart may give some tools that assist in the vacuuming process, but its ultimately not that big a deal.
The problem is that, statistically speaking, most people really couldn’t care less about the things you find important. Even if they do, the likelihood that they prioritize them the same way you do is slim to none. It is less challenging to write this off as stupidity, because anything else calls into question our own choices and intellectual investments. That’s a really uncomfortable position to be in, but it can be mitigated. If you engage with people, actively looking for the ways in which they are smarter than you, odds are good you will find them. Once you’ve found that thing, maybe that reveals that the person is someone you don’t want to deal with, or maybe it reveals something you could learn. In either case, it’s more useful than your assumption was.
This touches back to ideas and people. People argue from their positions of engagement. They are arguing about how important a position is to them. Getting them to change a position directly is very difficulty, but getting them engaged in a something else, something that informs on the original position, can be incredibly powerful. Think about the times you have changed your mind, really changed your mind. How often was it accompanied by a sense that you now had a greater understanding of the matter? More often than not, I’d wager, and that change is how real persuasion (and teaching) take place.
Now, there are two important qualifiers to this. The first is simple: Just because someone is smart doesn't mean they're not a jerk. You can acknowledge both at the same time.
The second is a bigger deal. This one is not just a bad idea, it's a poisonous, blackshirty idea. Listen to the news for a while and you'll hear people talk about taking choices away from other people because they just can't be expected to understand. It's always couched in sympathetic, just-trying-to-help language, but the reality is that it's about power and who gets to make decisions. If you believe that people are generally stupid, then it's easy for this kind of nonsense to sound perfectly rational, and when it does, congratulations - you just got played.