Transcript:
These days we are discussing strategies for dealing with uncertainty, and last week we pointed out the challenge of defining success. We did not come to a conclusion, but today hopefully we will. The Stoics noticed that we really do NOT have control over our good or bad fortune, but we do have control over how we respond to it, so let’s dive a little deeper and try to use this fact to our advantage so that our happiness is NOT tied to luck and the dice rolls of fate.
Results Must be Detached From Success
As we have already discussed at length, how things turn out, whether our engagements are tremendously fortunate or end in humiliating disaster, is not entirely up to us. We should only hold ourselves responsible for the parts we have control over, but miracles and tragedies nearly always involve environmental factors that we can neither take credit for or be blamed for. Our superiors may be blind enough to admonish or rebuke us for our role in the results after the fact, but it is very difficult to know how much of it is entirely up to chance. For this reason we must detach results from the way we define success.
Let’s take the worst case scenario first. Let’s say you were the leader when some terrible disaster happened to your organization. If the disaster was caused by your negligence then of course you should boldly take responsibility. Make no excuses, tell no lies, and don’t blame others. Be humbly grateful for any opportunity to correct your mistake or make amends. It will be forever a lesson to help you shape a better future. But if you made what you thought were wise choices based on the knowledge you had at the time, not the information that everyone has looking back, then you should hold your head up high and hope that others will not confuse your misfortune for incompetence.
In the event that you have tremendous success remember not to take credit for what just might be total luck, or the unfair advantages given to you by the environment, by the competence of your colleagues, or the hard work and effort of people unseen. It is easy to attribute your success to some strategy, insight, or perceived advantage, but you cannot know for sure why your results were good, and you certainly cannot predict whether you will be able to produce the same results again even if given the same circumstances.
Deal with Your Fears
The Stoics had a great thought experiment that helped them to face their fears honestly and take action fearlessly. They would imagine the worst possible scenario and then take the time to sit and think through what they were going to do now that their worst fears were really taking place even if in reality no such adversity had yet manifested. In their minds they would accept this imagined worst case scenario as their new reality.
Your mind is very good at this type of simulation. When I was in my senior year of high school I knocked out my two front teeth while skateboarding. It was a traumatic experience for me to say the least. For at least two days my parents would not even look at me because seeing me with shattered teeth was just too upsetting for them. I remember that over the course of a year following this incident I would occasionally have a dream where all of my teeth had fallen out. But somehow by the time I had woken up I had already accepted the fact that I would have to get new teeth and live without them in the meantime. By the time I woke up I was already at peace, so much so that I refer to them as dreams instead of nightmares.
For many of us, we choose to live a safe predictable life while secretly desiring to take the risk of pursuing our dreams. We live in fear of humiliation, or in fear of failing, or we make excuses to shirk responsibility for our unfulfilled potential. We prefer not to define specific goals because defining success in a way is defining failure.
Self Sabotage
Some people will sacrifice huge amounts of critical resources to make one huge commitment. They might even unconsciously sabotage their project out of fear of success or ultimately to reinforce their negative self-image. We have to be honest with ourselves and deal with that self critic–the voice in our head that tells us we aren’t good enough and we’ll never achieve anything. Sometimes we are secretly our own worst enemy.
So be honest with yourself and face your fears. Meditate, conduct thought experiments, and run through simulations of each possible outcome, both to foresee potential problems, and to confront the emotional drama you would likely have to face if these projected futures were to become reality. Once you face them, and even realize them, you will likely find that they really are not so scary. And once you no longer fear them, they will not hold nearly so much power over you.
Experience Gained
Another asset we tend to take for granted are the lessons learned that we accumulate through failures. We learn so much more from failure than we do from success. Like I explained last week, we can capitalize on this by conducting low cost experiments. Fail fast and fail often, but make sure to learn from each failure.
Weigh what you learn against what it costs you in time, effort, and money. Every skill or lesson you learn will benefit you for the rest of your life which also means its value will compound.
Take learning a new language for example. If you learn a language then you can learn from and share with people who speak that language for the rest of your life. You’ll also learn more and more of that language the sooner you begin making progress. The time and effort required is a one time cost, but it leads to ever increasing benefits for the rest of your life. If you read a book you are consuming in hours what an author invested years of research to put together. And that knowledge is accessible to you for every decision you ever make in the future. If it informs even just three major decisions you end up making in your life, then that is three times the value you gained for that one time cost of reading the book. And any knowledge that transfers from one domain to another, meaning it can be applied to other areas of your life, or if that knowledge can be combined with other lessons you’ve learned to create yet new knowledge, then that original knowledge has network effects. The value gained is now compounding, becoming almost immeasurable.
The lessons you learn from failures will also stay with you long after the pain of embarrassment. The value of that knowledge is incomparable to the time, money, and effort you invested which would no longer be available to you anyways.
Negotiate with Yourself
One summer I decided to enter the Line webtoons contest. The reward was $50,000 and a chance at a career as a webtoon comic artist. I had always wondered if I could write my own stories with my own characters in my own art style while meeting a constant deadline. I graduated with a degree in animation in pursuit of this very goal. It was ten years after I graduated that I entered the contest. I knew there was very little chance I could win even if I had been studying scriptwriting for the past year, and had been steadily getting better at producing comic art over the past decade. I knew I would have to commit 80 hours a week for 6 weeks, and if I were to be successful I knew I would have to keep up that pace afterwards. So my goal was not to win. If I won, great. But that was not how I decided to define success.
My goal was simply to answer the questions that had been lingering in my mind for so many years. After all of these years of training could I produce art fast enough to keep up with the absurdly demanding deadlines? Could I draw and write at a level that satisfied my own tastes? Would anyone else take interest if I were to make the sacrifice to bring this work into the world? If I did what would my style look and feel like? Could I happily live a life that requires 40-80 hours of working alone at an art desk each week?
By defining success as learning the answers to these very specific questions, I nearly guaranteed success while nearly eliminating the risk of failure. If I had defined success by the ability to place in the contest I was almost certainly guaranteed to fail due to the terrible odds of competition.
After four weeks of working on the webcomic I successfully answered all of these questions to my own satisfaction. The answer to all of these questions was yes, with two critical exceptions. I found out that I am too much of an extravert to spend my life alone at an art desk for most of my working hours. Secondly, people might care about my work in the future, but hardly anyone cared at the moment.
But I was also pleasantly surprised in two different ways. First, even though it might look like a failure I really did not regret the work. In fact I found it very satisfying to know that I could technically do the work at my own very demanding standards of professionalism. In other words, I was really impressed with my own style, characters, and story line and thought it nearly as good as some of my favorite artists.
The second thing I found surprisingly satisfying was that I was very happy to walk away from the dream of producing my own comic, at least for another ten years. Instead of wondering whether I should pursue my dream or not, I now feel very confident in saying NO, I do NOT want to be a webtoon comic artist. At least not until I decide to give it another real try, perhaps when I’m ready to retire from teaching and designing games. I can die without regret wondering if I should have tried it or not. I tried it and I found it wasn’t for me at this time in my life.
The Greatest Works Were Often Done Before Any Acknowledgement Was Received
That really is my biggest fear. It is to look back on my life and to have never taken the risks I really wanted to take. So instead I hope to live my life unashamedly now regardless of what results I may or may not achieve by then.
It also helps me to know that many of the people we now consider some of the greatest influencers of history spent most of their lives being relatively unacknowledged. Leonardo da Vinci was not recommended by Medici when asked who were the greatest painters available at the time to paint the Sistine Chapel, that so many famous authors and painters like Vincent van Gough died penniless and unacknowledged till long after their death, Einstein wrote the three papers, while working as a patent clerk, that would eventually revolutionize physics but initially had little to no influence on the science community, that Winston Churchill was often boldly and mostly mistaken in most of his political policies until he ended up being right about Hitler, that playwrights during the Renaissance including Shakespeare for much of his career, were hardly respected more than scriptwriters are today, that many great leaders like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and all of the apostles of Christianity spent years alone in prison, and that Christ was killed as a criminal only three years into his ministry. Yet who would not define these great leaders as tremendously successful?
Simply do your best, worry not about the rest.
Next Lesson
Be sure to listen to the next lesson as we will be discussing the importance of listening, watching, and reading the greatest masterpieces instead of just watching whatever some algorithm brings to the top of your feed.
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