Find a way

Don't let reality reject you

Some outcomes in life are of outsized importance —­ they’re turning points that determine much of what follows, like landing your first big contract with a high-­ value client or convincing a talented person to join your company.

When you’re approaching these make-­or-­break moments, it’s really important to make sure Melvin isn’t showing up.

Who’s Melvin? It’s a part of the human personality that exists in all of us, the part that’s good at avoiding blame or embarrassment by “acting normal.” Melvin is always taking the reasonable approach: Faced with a dilemma at work, rather than striving to really tackle it, Melvin executes a normal-shaped, solution-type action-thing.

You know the old saying, “nobody gets fired for buying IBM?” Melvin is the part of us that, faced with a big, chewy problem, tries to buy IBM — to do something that might not be maximally effective, but that won’t get you criticized. And then, if that doesn’t work, Melvin assumes the problem is unsolvable, and stops.

(I apologize to any iconoclastic real-life Melvins who are reading this.)

Let us attempt to understand this creature, who holds great sway over the low-agency person. Though Melvin might seem irrational, I think there are some totally sensible reasons for his behavior.

Putting in a mediocre effort at a given task is deeply irrational if our goal is success at that task. But often, when we put in a mediocre effort, it’s because we have other covert goals we’re not really acknowledging. Let’s say your stated goal is that you want to make more money as a consultant. You could take many approaches to this, such as trying to sell your clients more of your existing services or seeing if they will pay a higher rate. If those fail, you could raise your professional profile by producing more online content. If that also fails, you could talk to consultants who make more money, and ask for mentorship. And so on. You have many options to pursue before you can assure yourself that you’ve Actually Tried.

But you find yourself sheepishly attempting only one strategy, and when that doesn’t work, you stop. Why? You may have less explicit, conflicting goals, such as:

• Don’t make any of your clients uncomfortable by being pushy.

• Don’t do anything that the ghost of your favorite English professor would categorize as greedy and capitalistic.

• Don’t discover an embarrassing gap in your qualifications that you would then have to work on.

Accomplishing all of these goals along with the primary one would be extremely complicated, maybe impossible. But what if you want to achieve some of them, by striving in a seemingly adequate but actually ineffectual way? Looks like a job for our friend Melvin.

Often, when we play the Melvin game, we’re attempting to satisfy both our aspirational self, which desires a meaningful, complex existence, and our timid self, which wants us to be left alone in our cozy little blame-free corner. The issue here is that you can’t satisfy both selves at once. You typically have to pick either the scary goal of really wanting to do things, or the comforting goal of hanging onto safety.

As I get further on in life, I realize more and more that everyone is doing this all the time. When you hire most people, whether it’s a therapist, a designer, a personal trainer, or a financial planner, they are going to sell you the most common solution-shaped action, rather than asking, “what is the real problem here, and what’s the most effective way to solve it?”

For example: We have two cats, and they’ve faced a couple of medical and behavioral issues. Which is a fancy way of saying sometimes they get allergic reactions, or piss and shit in random places. This I expected, since they are animals. What I didn’t expect is that multiple times, we’d take them to a veterinarian who would apply a completely ineffective solution. Like recommending a “non-allergenic food” that still contained many common cat allergens, without mentioning that we might need to try another food. Or giving us feline anti-anxiety medication without saying, “there are six other drugs you might try, if the first ones don’t work.” Instead of telling us that the problem might involve trying something more than the first intervention, the veterinarian wanted to present the facade of someone who always knew the correct solution: the common, low-risk one. This also ruled out the possibility of saying, “I might not know all the options, contact a cat behaviorist.”

And, again in this case, we can see the logic of Melvin-ness. It’s arguably important for most medical professionals, most of the time, to avoid innovating, to present the first-line intervention with a reassuring persona. This avoids a lot of disasters. But it also caps competence at an average level.

But it’s whiny and, frankly, low-agency to complain that the world is full of Melvins. Look for the Melvin in you before you criticize others. And ask: What is the anti-Melvin way of being?

Assume you’ll find a way

The essence is simple, if not easy. Assume you will achieve your goal, even if it requires multiple attempts. Take it on faith that the world is more pliable than feels true. Refuse to accept your brain’s first-order response that you probably can’t achieve goal X because of restrictions Y and Z. Instead, approach restrictions Y and Z with a puzzle-solving mindset, relishing the challenge of discovering how to work around them.

This way of thinking will give you extra stamina. Maybe you can’t figure out, right this second, the series of keystrokes required to help you clear the video game boss and move on to the next level, but you treat it as a law of the game world that there must be one.

We humans are unfortunately hardwired to readily reject options that will require effort when we think the chances are good that we won’t succeed. Flipping the script from “that won’t work” to “how do I make this work?” can help you discover degrees of agency you didn’t realize you had.

One small example of this comes from my husband’s life. About six years ago, Sasha got locked out of his Twitter account at a point when it was vital for his business. All attempts to contact customer support failed. He asked other people who had gone through the same problem, and they’d given up and started new accounts. Instead, he paid for a service that provided phone numbers of executives at Twitter, and started calling them, beginning each call with the words: “You don’t know me but I need your help.” The first two hung up, but the third stayed on the line and helped Sasha get his account back, in exchange for promising to delete his number.

Some might consider this rude or insane, even though the only real cost was just making a couple of strangers feel awkward on the phone for a few seconds. This is another reason Melvin convinces us to stop trying: The solutions you get when you Find a Way tend to be non-normal solutions. The fear of criticism if we attempt them, or ridicule if we fail in trying, leads us to tell ourselves we’re being reasonable when we reject them.

Perhaps intellectually, you understand that discouragement is just an emotional state, not a map of the boundaries of the possible. From inside of it, though, discouragement might still seem like a good reason to stop trying.

Don’t let Melvin deceive you. Rebel against what you see as the limits of reality and you’ll find that reality tends to be quite malleable. The real boundaries are typically beyond the constraints of our imagination when we’re tired or afraid; they’re certainly beyond Melvin’s.

Chapter 14 of You Can Just Do Things, my book out July 21, contains many inspiring examples of people Finding a Way. (*Threateningly*) You do want to be inspired, don’t you?