This reminds me of "wake up and live" by Dorothea Brande. To spoil it, the core thrust is "act as if it's impossible to fail". As she describes at length, it's surprisingly effective. I read the book up until she drops that and then stopped reading 😅 in part cause I was reading as procrastination and then stopped reading and started working
For me, it makes my mind immediately go "erm actually it's very possible to fail for reasons x, y, z". But then I think "well if it was impossible to fail I would have to solve or dodge x/y/z" and it gets me brainstorming on how to do that if it's complicated. Or if x is something like "i could fail if I just don't start typing right now", it somehow breaks me out of the funk of knowing what to do but not knowing how to start. I think it might reframe it from "typing right now seems lame and boring and I'd rather do a, b, or c" to "not typing is making me fail, so I'd rather get started"
A big reason I don't pursue all of the possible options is that I am afraid of the moment when I'll bump into a true rejection, failure, or shortcoming. As a writer with a very small audience, I have a hard time doing some of the things that would potentially expand my audience because - on some level - I know that my work also has to improve. I can't just write a bunch of notes or share my posts to Facebook. I also have to actually become a better writer.
I looked at your posts, particularly "I Got a Four Star Review." My takeaway is that you absolutely can and should expand your audience. The idea that you have to write better first is perfectionistic bullshit.
Perhaps part of you hopes if you get good enough, no one will criticize you. Consider that the best popular book you've ever read has scathing one-star reviews on goodreads.
Final thought: It's a lot easier to learn from direct criticism than from endless self reflection. Most criticism is next to worthless, so you need to attract a lot of it for the privilege of criticism that will show you how to improve.
Wow, thank you for taking the time to really look at my writing and respond. I’ll take your words to heart. Maybe it’s time to put myself out there a bit more!
Love this. Funny enough, Melvin seems to be disproportionately rewarded in the corporate world, at least in my sector. The boxes being ticked and the protocol being followed is the most important thing, effective or not (and oftentimes, they're not). Not to blame the corporate world; I get why it's like this, but whether it should is a different story.
"Take it on faith that the world is more pliable than feels true." Reading that one sentence made me drop my shoulders and sigh with relief. The utter liberation that mindset provides is immeasurable.
"Melvin" is to protect from this experience: https://www.instagram.com/p/BTJ2bkRA1hq/ , the meme where the pink blob tries to leave their box, gets punched, and goes back in their box to vow "Never again".
Have that happen to you enough, then Melvin starts to seem *real* attractive. "Safety without getting punched" seems better to them than just a *chance* that they might wildly succeed. True you won't ever wildly succeed if you take no chances. But the near-guarantee of getting punched hurts them a lot.
After you take the first punch, you assume, naively, "every punch will hurt this much. i must stay in the box, which also feels uncomfortable, because the punches are worse". But the punches aren't always painful. They get less painful and less frequent and less likely on a logarithmic scale the deeper you get into a domain. You roll with the punches, you learn to avoid them, and you build up calluses.
This reminds me of an experience flying this weekend; we'd been briefly rerouted and landed in another airport, taxiied up to a terminal, and were almost instantly cleared to go back out. Some folks scuffled with the staff, until the captain spoke over the comm -- "We are not holding you, but please, stay on the plane, and we can all get where we're going". Then a flight attendant picked it up, "I just want to make sure everyone is voluntarily staying on, and know you're free to go, but you cannot get back on" and repeated a couple of those phrases half a dozen times. It struck me then - these are all corporate risk-management scripts regurgitating themselves. They are emphatically not trying to actually connect to a human, they are a Corporation minimizing its liability -- and now I have an even better, personal word for it. They were Melvining! I'd never speak that way to a friend, and I shouldn't think that way about myself, either
Oh this is brilliant! And so effectively and creatively written, conveying tough and actually abstract concepts so well. I am facing a Few situations where my Melvin is running the show, but this is why good writers rule!! Cheers 🥹
“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.”
I love these lines. It reminds me of how often when working in corporate or some big institution, it feels like there are so many procedures and politics that make things slow and impossible. But if you instead believe the whole thing is pliable, the largeness of the organization becomes more surface area to play with.
I try my best to operate from the stance that whatever is coming my way is both good and right for me, and all I have to do is show up and allow it to unfold
By pure chance, I took the cat to a behaviorist in Neuilly-sur-Seine and learned he probably developed allergies because he doesn't have an outdoor space. The resigned vet talk about types of food is infuriating.
The insight into conflicting goals — stay safe or succeed in an unconventional way — is huge. This post reminds of me of How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. They quote William Perry on responding to people when they ask for help: “I listen very hard and ask myself, What does this person really want — and what will they do to keep from getting it?” Also see https://hbr.org/2001/11/the-real-reason-people-wont-change/ar/1
To me it feels like this skill, or type of courage/conviction, or a combination, is situational. When I worked in kitchens years ago, I was basically fearless. While I heard Melvin very clearly in my head multiple times a day, I always chose to ignore the voice, the fear. As soon as I was out of the kitchen, I didn't stand a chance. Something about the tempo, the now-ness of the environment.
The part of your piece that stayed with me is how a person’s “shape” bends inside a collective — I’m writing about that same tension, using the hive as one example of a system that survives by erasing individuality, and narrative as the human mechanism that lets the self remain intact inside the collective.
This is a really nice piece, and the message of "believe in yourself, you can do the thing" is a really good one. That said, I did get somewhat flustered with the wording of the following passage, although I must stress that the piece is wonderful, and I'm just being very nitpicky with this one part:
> , 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.
While I agree that learning/doing something you've never done before will require facing the unknown and possible discomfort, I do think in the long term, ignoring the timid self is just as harmful.
From what you've written here, it seems like you're familiar with burnout, and living completely outside of the cozy little blame-free corner can, to use a metaphor in the "Breaking a Sacred Pact" article you wrote, tire out and eventually burn out the elephant.
So in the long term, part of "trying your best"/"Actually Trying" (TM) *is* ensuring that your elephant is well cared for, which means that in addition to scheduling "difficult task/learning time/leave your comfort zone/be brave and try", it's important to have to downtime to recharge.
For example, to use the consultant metaphor - if you decide you should do some outreach to help increase your client-base, but that tires you out, commit to doing a little everyday, with plenty of space in your life for eating, sleeping, exercise, socialization, etc, rather than say "okay, sit down at the PC and don't get up until you've sent 100 cold emails" and force yourself to do only that until you're so tired you can't work anymore.
Besides that minor nitpick, the point of the article is, in my experience, totally correct.
In particular, the line
> The essence is simple, if not easy. Assume you will achieve your goal, even if it requires multiple attempts.
is 100% brilliant 10/10 excellent advice will recommend this to all my friends.
possibly relevant digression: I currently have a belief system where the entire universe has a consciousness, which I call "God", and I assume that this universal consciousness is constantly trying to help me be happy at all times, although sometimes that requires me learning something, which may involve discomfort (and actual pain if I'm very stupid, to let me know I'm really doing it wrong). A side effect of this world view is the belief that "if you really want it, you can get it, because God will help you get it", with the important caveat of "unless you want to cause pain to someone, at which point God will just inflict that pain on you instead".
“possibly relevant digression: I currently have a belief system where the entire universe has a consciousness, which I call "God", and I assume that this universal consciousness is constantly trying to help me be happy at all times, although sometimes that requires me learning something, which may involve discomfort (and actual pain if I'm very stupid, to let me know I'm really doing it wrong). A side effect of this world view is the belief that "if you really want it, you can get it, because God will help you get it"
I love the naming of “Melvin” and accepting that there is a Melvin at work inside every one of us all the time. In Vistage we say “find reality fast and deal with it”…
This reminds me of "wake up and live" by Dorothea Brande. To spoil it, the core thrust is "act as if it's impossible to fail". As she describes at length, it's surprisingly effective. I read the book up until she drops that and then stopped reading 😅 in part cause I was reading as procrastination and then stopped reading and started working
For me, it makes my mind immediately go "erm actually it's very possible to fail for reasons x, y, z". But then I think "well if it was impossible to fail I would have to solve or dodge x/y/z" and it gets me brainstorming on how to do that if it's complicated. Or if x is something like "i could fail if I just don't start typing right now", it somehow breaks me out of the funk of knowing what to do but not knowing how to start. I think it might reframe it from "typing right now seems lame and boring and I'd rather do a, b, or c" to "not typing is making me fail, so I'd rather get started"
Love this!
A big reason I don't pursue all of the possible options is that I am afraid of the moment when I'll bump into a true rejection, failure, or shortcoming. As a writer with a very small audience, I have a hard time doing some of the things that would potentially expand my audience because - on some level - I know that my work also has to improve. I can't just write a bunch of notes or share my posts to Facebook. I also have to actually become a better writer.
I looked at your posts, particularly "I Got a Four Star Review." My takeaway is that you absolutely can and should expand your audience. The idea that you have to write better first is perfectionistic bullshit.
Perhaps part of you hopes if you get good enough, no one will criticize you. Consider that the best popular book you've ever read has scathing one-star reviews on goodreads.
Final thought: It's a lot easier to learn from direct criticism than from endless self reflection. Most criticism is next to worthless, so you need to attract a lot of it for the privilege of criticism that will show you how to improve.
Wow, thank you for taking the time to really look at my writing and respond. I’ll take your words to heart. Maybe it’s time to put myself out there a bit more!
hard relate
Love this. Funny enough, Melvin seems to be disproportionately rewarded in the corporate world, at least in my sector. The boxes being ticked and the protocol being followed is the most important thing, effective or not (and oftentimes, they're not). Not to blame the corporate world; I get why it's like this, but whether it should is a different story.
"Take it on faith that the world is more pliable than feels true." Reading that one sentence made me drop my shoulders and sigh with relief. The utter liberation that mindset provides is immeasurable.
"Melvin" is to protect from this experience: https://www.instagram.com/p/BTJ2bkRA1hq/ , the meme where the pink blob tries to leave their box, gets punched, and goes back in their box to vow "Never again".
Have that happen to you enough, then Melvin starts to seem *real* attractive. "Safety without getting punched" seems better to them than just a *chance* that they might wildly succeed. True you won't ever wildly succeed if you take no chances. But the near-guarantee of getting punched hurts them a lot.
How do they learn to take a punch?
After you take the first punch, you assume, naively, "every punch will hurt this much. i must stay in the box, which also feels uncomfortable, because the punches are worse". But the punches aren't always painful. They get less painful and less frequent and less likely on a logarithmic scale the deeper you get into a domain. You roll with the punches, you learn to avoid them, and you build up calluses.
This reminds me of an experience flying this weekend; we'd been briefly rerouted and landed in another airport, taxiied up to a terminal, and were almost instantly cleared to go back out. Some folks scuffled with the staff, until the captain spoke over the comm -- "We are not holding you, but please, stay on the plane, and we can all get where we're going". Then a flight attendant picked it up, "I just want to make sure everyone is voluntarily staying on, and know you're free to go, but you cannot get back on" and repeated a couple of those phrases half a dozen times. It struck me then - these are all corporate risk-management scripts regurgitating themselves. They are emphatically not trying to actually connect to a human, they are a Corporation minimizing its liability -- and now I have an even better, personal word for it. They were Melvining! I'd never speak that way to a friend, and I shouldn't think that way about myself, either
Oh this is brilliant! And so effectively and creatively written, conveying tough and actually abstract concepts so well. I am facing a Few situations where my Melvin is running the show, but this is why good writers rule!! Cheers 🥹
“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.”
I love these lines. It reminds me of how often when working in corporate or some big institution, it feels like there are so many procedures and politics that make things slow and impossible. But if you instead believe the whole thing is pliable, the largeness of the organization becomes more surface area to play with.
I try my best to operate from the stance that whatever is coming my way is both good and right for me, and all I have to do is show up and allow it to unfold
By pure chance, I took the cat to a behaviorist in Neuilly-sur-Seine and learned he probably developed allergies because he doesn't have an outdoor space. The resigned vet talk about types of food is infuriating.
The insight into conflicting goals — stay safe or succeed in an unconventional way — is huge. This post reminds of me of How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. They quote William Perry on responding to people when they ask for help: “I listen very hard and ask myself, What does this person really want — and what will they do to keep from getting it?” Also see https://hbr.org/2001/11/the-real-reason-people-wont-change/ar/1
To me it feels like this skill, or type of courage/conviction, or a combination, is situational. When I worked in kitchens years ago, I was basically fearless. While I heard Melvin very clearly in my head multiple times a day, I always chose to ignore the voice, the fear. As soon as I was out of the kitchen, I didn't stand a chance. Something about the tempo, the now-ness of the environment.
The part of your piece that stayed with me is how a person’s “shape” bends inside a collective — I’m writing about that same tension, using the hive as one example of a system that survives by erasing individuality, and narrative as the human mechanism that lets the self remain intact inside the collective.
this is such a good readd🫶
This is a really nice piece, and the message of "believe in yourself, you can do the thing" is a really good one. That said, I did get somewhat flustered with the wording of the following passage, although I must stress that the piece is wonderful, and I'm just being very nitpicky with this one part:
> , 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.
While I agree that learning/doing something you've never done before will require facing the unknown and possible discomfort, I do think in the long term, ignoring the timid self is just as harmful.
From what you've written here, it seems like you're familiar with burnout, and living completely outside of the cozy little blame-free corner can, to use a metaphor in the "Breaking a Sacred Pact" article you wrote, tire out and eventually burn out the elephant.
So in the long term, part of "trying your best"/"Actually Trying" (TM) *is* ensuring that your elephant is well cared for, which means that in addition to scheduling "difficult task/learning time/leave your comfort zone/be brave and try", it's important to have to downtime to recharge.
For example, to use the consultant metaphor - if you decide you should do some outreach to help increase your client-base, but that tires you out, commit to doing a little everyday, with plenty of space in your life for eating, sleeping, exercise, socialization, etc, rather than say "okay, sit down at the PC and don't get up until you've sent 100 cold emails" and force yourself to do only that until you're so tired you can't work anymore.
Besides that minor nitpick, the point of the article is, in my experience, totally correct.
In particular, the line
> The essence is simple, if not easy. Assume you will achieve your goal, even if it requires multiple attempts.
is 100% brilliant 10/10 excellent advice will recommend this to all my friends.
possibly relevant digression: I currently have a belief system where the entire universe has a consciousness, which I call "God", and I assume that this universal consciousness is constantly trying to help me be happy at all times, although sometimes that requires me learning something, which may involve discomfort (and actual pain if I'm very stupid, to let me know I'm really doing it wrong). A side effect of this world view is the belief that "if you really want it, you can get it, because God will help you get it", with the important caveat of "unless you want to cause pain to someone, at which point God will just inflict that pain on you instead".
“possibly relevant digression: I currently have a belief system where the entire universe has a consciousness, which I call "God", and I assume that this universal consciousness is constantly trying to help me be happy at all times, although sometimes that requires me learning something, which may involve discomfort (and actual pain if I'm very stupid, to let me know I'm really doing it wrong). A side effect of this world view is the belief that "if you really want it, you can get it, because God will help you get it"
very similar for me!
I love the naming of “Melvin” and accepting that there is a Melvin at work inside every one of us all the time. In Vistage we say “find reality fast and deal with it”…
Well Cate I think your book is gonna do pretty well.