Bait & Switch
"Don't aim at success -- the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run -- in the long-run, I say! -- success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it."
-- Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946)
One of the few episodes of Seinfeld that actually made an impression on me was "The Opposite". It was genius precisely because you can get so much power out of such a simple strategy: when you're persistently failing at something, do the opposite of whatever your instinct is in that situation. It sounds obvious when you say it, but at the time you make a decision it's the opposite of obvious -- that's the whole point of instincts.
Doing the opposite is one limiting case of an oblique strategy -- the other is an orthogonal solution that doesn't so much solve the problem as dissolve it. Unless you're George Costanza, the antithesis of your first instinct isn't very much more likely to be the best strategy than the instinct itself, but if you can compare the consequences of both of them you're freer to start thinking laterally about the problem. "Do the opposite" is a superb bait-and-switch strategy for liberating yourself from a rut.
I bring this up because I realized a couple of nights ago that my life has been dominated by "bait-and-switch". I go into something with one intention and come out with something I didn't expect -- which might be better or worse. Usually I can react adaptively when the results aren't what I imagined, but it occurs to me that I can save myself a lot of wasted time, energy, and opportunities by managing my expectations more intelligently.
For one thing, that means leaving more room for the unexpected in every plan I make; for another, it means structuring my stated intentions such that whatever turns out to be the "switch" will be more important than the "bait"; for another, it means giving myself permission to suck when it makes strategic sense -- which will probably make me suck less. The unifying theme here is that taking the instinctive, obvious, head-on approach rarely works for me -- so I don't have much to lose by doing the opposite.
-- Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946)
One of the few episodes of Seinfeld that actually made an impression on me was "The Opposite". It was genius precisely because you can get so much power out of such a simple strategy: when you're persistently failing at something, do the opposite of whatever your instinct is in that situation. It sounds obvious when you say it, but at the time you make a decision it's the opposite of obvious -- that's the whole point of instincts.
Doing the opposite is one limiting case of an oblique strategy -- the other is an orthogonal solution that doesn't so much solve the problem as dissolve it. Unless you're George Costanza, the antithesis of your first instinct isn't very much more likely to be the best strategy than the instinct itself, but if you can compare the consequences of both of them you're freer to start thinking laterally about the problem. "Do the opposite" is a superb bait-and-switch strategy for liberating yourself from a rut.
I bring this up because I realized a couple of nights ago that my life has been dominated by "bait-and-switch". I go into something with one intention and come out with something I didn't expect -- which might be better or worse. Usually I can react adaptively when the results aren't what I imagined, but it occurs to me that I can save myself a lot of wasted time, energy, and opportunities by managing my expectations more intelligently.
For one thing, that means leaving more room for the unexpected in every plan I make; for another, it means structuring my stated intentions such that whatever turns out to be the "switch" will be more important than the "bait"; for another, it means giving myself permission to suck when it makes strategic sense -- which will probably make me suck less. The unifying theme here is that taking the instinctive, obvious, head-on approach rarely works for me -- so I don't have much to lose by doing the opposite.