Get Out of the Water

On worry, intuition, and trying new things.

Paul Graham once described prestige as a magnet that warps your ability to tell the difference between what you like and what you’d like to like. I think that’s right, and I think you could extend the analogy to any number of confounding forces (desire, greed, peer pressure, parental pressure, societal pressure, how good you are at lying to yourself, conventional wisdom, overconfidence, underconfidence, misguided devotion to a bygone aspiration, et al) that distort your thinking, cloud your motives, and altogether make understanding yourself and why you do the things you do much harder than understanding yourself and why you do the things you do has any right to be.

An example: For a long time I wanted to be a screenwriter. That was my first real aspiration, and I pursued it at a steady-ish pace for about nine years. But in all that time, I finished just one screenplay and a handful of short stories. Eventually, I began to wonder if I liked writing at all. It was a question easier asked than answered, because I was attempting to answer it while under the influence of several magnets. There was the Dubious Magnet of Underconfidence, child of the Brittle Magnet of Low Self-Esteem; the Statistically-Backed Magnet of Sunk Costs; the Misguided Magnet of Devotion to a Bygone Aspiration; and the Supreme Magnet of Not Trusting Myself. Any thinking about whether I liked writing was followed by pondering about whether I was thinking clearly about whether I liked writing, and the pondering in turn was followed by brooding over whether I was pondering clearly about thinking clearly about whether I liked writing. I’d get so turned around that I’d go back to writing simply because it was simpler, and because, frankly, I didn’t have a better idea.

Magnets are like pythons: the more you struggle, the tighter they squeeze you. The only way to escape is to relax, stop thinking, and let intuition take the wheel. (Disclaimer: This strategy has not been tested on actual pythons.) That’s not to say it’s as simple as closing your eyes and “listening to your gut.” Intuition is a powerful machine, but it’s useless without data. That data comes from experience. I don’t have to wonder if I prefer West Texas summers to Iowa winters. I know I prefer West Texas summers to Iowa winters because I’ve lived through both. If you’re a fish and you suspect, given all you’ve heard, that you might like living on dry land, no amount of cool-headed theorizing or desperate agonizing will help you, because it’s impossible to tell if you like living on dry land based on what you think living on dry land might be like. If you want to know if you like living on dry land, you have to get out of the water.

It wasn’t until I started coding that I finally realized how much I didn’t like writing (fiction writing, mind you). I’d been forcing words onto the page for so long that I’d forgotten what it felt like to enjoy something that was also hard. Far from forcing myself to code, I couldn’t stop myself from coding. I didn’t have to wonder anymore if I liked writing. I knew I didn’t like writing because I’d found something much more engaging.

One caveat here is that you won’t have a strong preference for most things. If you, the fish, get out of the water and find that the beach isn’t doing it for you, don’t worry about it, and don’t settle. Instead, go to the forest and see how that feels. If that doesn’t work, try the Arctic. You may find that you don’t have a strong preference for any climate. That’s okay, too. All it means is that your environment isn’t as important to you as you thought it was. That’s good data. Collect it, and carry on. Keep feeding the machine.

And don’t worry about wasting time. Worrying about wasting time is a waste of time. Trying things isn’t. When you get out of the water, life becomes more interesting and more fun. You’ll do things you wouldn’t have done otherwise. You’ll go places you wouldn’t have gone, see things you wouldn’t have seen, and meet people you wouldn’t have met, and the next time you find yourself talking to someone you feel the inexplicable need to impress, you’ll have a story to tell.

Another caveat is that while strong preferences are obvious, they aren’t always obvious immediately. To know if you like something, you have to spend some time with it. When I first started coding, I was too intimidated to like it. I don’t have a mathy brain, and it seemed like the kind of thing that only people with mathy brains were good at. It took two years of dabbling to convince me that coding was something I could do. Only then did I start to like it. That’s the catch-22 here: You don’t want to spend any more time than necessary doing things you don’t like, but you don’t necessarily know if you like or dislike something until you’ve spent a little time with it.

The best thing you can do is leave yourself alone. Try to relax. Untether yourself, and see where you drift. If you keep drifting back to something, don’t question it. A Serious Man is one of my favorite movies. The first time I saw it, my reaction was a question mark. The second time I saw it, my reaction was a question mark and a smile. The third time I saw it, I fell in love. I don’t know what soundless voice it was that coaxed me into revisiting the movie, and I don’t care. But it’s still there, and I’m still listening.

Further Reading