This can be very obvious to people who become bilingual later in life and seemingly find themselves with two different personalities. Usually the second language speaker finds it much easier to say "I love you", ask for a raise, etc.
This is actually true, I witness this happening more often after I got married.
My wife speaks English, and my family didn’t.
I noticed that when I have hard feelings and wanted to talk about it, unconsciously I would express them in English, while I would find it difficult to do the same with my native language, perhaps this happens due to less childhood memories?
Part of that is that you naturally act out a bit of the culture of whoever you learn the language from. Both my parents learned German in the their 20s. However, my Mom learned it from Prussians and my Dad from Bavarians and Austrians. It has exactly the effect you would expect.
that's an interesting observation! never thought of it before. I'm writing in English, i feel like i can say things that i haven't even been able to formulate in my head in my native German, nor in any of the other languages i speak (to varying degrees). Because English is the only language that i learned first hand, no classes or courses or grammar books, just by reading, listening to music and talking to people. it is my intimate language of feeling too, the one i can be creative in and think in a sensuous feeling way. Thank you so much for this insight! food for thoughts for sure! is there maybe a source or some research you know of, where this phenomenon is described?
I use my second language (english) mainly for work and hobby - everything else is in German. I can absolutely relate on expressing certain parts of my personality rather on English than in German. Especially situations at wornk, where we speak both German and English, I rather stick to English. But this bleeds into also my family life where I sometimes find it easier to explain myself and share my thoughts in English.
I wonder if this is why I sometimes have “talks” with myself about difficult things I’m going through using different accents. Usually things I’m frustrated about in relationships. Lol. Somehow calling someone out on their bs feels much less intimidating in an Austrailian accent. Not that I ever do this to their face but I think it helps me process
But wouldn’t it just make sense that new thoughts would be put into words of your current new language? New thoughts put into the language that’s currently in your head. Why would you revert to the past, if the thought is now, in the present.
Same! Spanish is my feeling language, English is my thinking language. I speak to my dog in both; English to follow instructions on the street, and Spanish for cuddles at home 😀
I relate to this, so much! In my second language I was able to talk about trauma that in my first language I was completely frozen in — stuck at age 12, unable to describe the unspeakable
This is so incredibly fascinating. My late partner (who was an Artist Goldsmith like me) spoke English, German, Afrikaans and Japanese and he would always revert to the Japanese when he wanted worlds for art and concept - never an English word. And his stepson recently told me that there is an Afrikaans word for the responsibility of community work that we don’t even have in English so if languages can have concepts and ideas that others don’t it stands to reason that our personalities would change in each language too. I am fascinated! I want to read a book about this now.
Completely true. I studied English lit in Mexico. English is my second language but I don’t remember learning it. My friends and I noticed we were able to be more specific about how we felt if we talked in English, it didn’t hurt as much. There are many things/concepts that I only know how to name in English. Having your feelings a little bit removed by the second language helps in really painful situations. Speaking or writing about my feelings in Spanish is hard. The only disadvantage I have found is that therapy in English doesn’t work the same as in Spanish. I believe it is just because of the same reason.
What an interesting thought! From my personal experience I completely agree but I think for me I struggle to communicate the same way in my native language because I simply don't have the vocabulatly to describe what I'm feeling in my native language. I fully immersed myself in English when I was 14ish and ever since then I stopped developing my vocabulary in my first language so I pretty much learned to be an adult in a different language
so interesting! there's a story: my great grandmother was Romnja, she prob. spoke a Romani language as a child, was illiterate, was socialized in South Bohemia, so she spoke Czech. She travelled north, alone, to Thuringia in Germany, where she "stranded", looking for work. There she got "rescued" by my great grandfather, married, had a child, my grandmother and so on. but she never really integrated, because they were ostracized as Gypsies and had to hide her from the Nazis or from being reported by the neighbors, so she became reclusive and spoke seldom. I personally knew her. she died when i was 7. But i don't remember her ever speaking to me or anyone. my grandmother and mother, who lived with her, are both dead now. I will always wonder what language they spoke to one another. And how uniquely her thoughts must have been, never being able to make home in any language from the age of 14.
This resonates with me. I’ve been bilingual since very young age, and only later in life noticed I have two different perosonalities in the two languages.
Capacities like being direct, assertive, mean, are easier in one than the other. Even my opinion of myself is different, somehow, in either.
Also communication norms are different in different languages. I find it more easy to be direct in German and Dutch because these are language cultures where clear statements and directness are very much valued. I've found that liberating.
> One of the interesting things about all of this is that there was nothing particularly inventive about the strategies my husband deployed
While I was reading the stalker story, I thought the moral of it would be that the stalker was Actually Trying.
> Have I done my best to come up with a set of potential solutions, using all the resources I have? Am I doing as well by myself as I would by any friend who came to me with the same problem? How do I know I’m Actually Trying?
There's various stuff in my life where I know I have this problem - knowing it isn't the hard part, the hard part is various emotional blockers in the way. This makes me think that it'd be useful to trade life-solving with other people - spend some time looking at stuff in each other's lives that they're stuck on, and use each other's outside view to make progress.
I realized this too recently, when I noticed the effort and exhaustion I felt was actually from avoiding the thing I needed to do. Our brains can trick us and if we have a lot of emotional blockers, it’s harder to see through the mist. But clarity comes with time, and a lot of frustration too.
Thank you for writing this. Definitely food for thought! ❤️
I like the lesson you drew from it, but with the situation itself, it seems like you might also have just reacted to a violent threat with a freeze response (as opposed to flight or fight).
That's not necessarily you doing anything "wrong" - the freeze response gets a bad rap, but it is so common because it has kept many many people alive in the face of violence, throughout the entire genetic history of humanity. I wouldn't see it as immature to have that response, so much as being a living animal that wants to survive.
Thanks for articulating the discomfort I had with this example, and also with the idea that you need to be Actually Trying in all areas of your life simultaneously. I think wisdom comes from disciplined attention and thoughtful experimentation, which is not necessarily easy to do in multiple domains at the same time. At any rate, while I’m in the final stages of writing my textbook, I have given myself permission to do just the basics from a physical health point of view (in my case: two exercise classes each week which have grown into a group of friends over the space of several years together, and a briefing on eating better next week by our coach for one of the classes)
The freeze response has been beneficial for me. I used to make snap decisions, too often leading me astray. Now, I reflect on a situation for a day, maybe two, and my success rate has improved dramatically.
There’s also some zero sum aspect to this. People overachieving at work invest a lot of time, attention, and energy in it, and that can leave less for other areas.
Simple but real explanation, I think! When you focus on some areas you are bound to lose focus on the others for a while unless you actively track and prioritize them all (in which case would you really become stellar than others at that one thing?)
This year I have started my life from scratch, I am diving head in to all the things that have made me anxious my whole life. And this is exactly what I was thinking when I began. When I look back, I could have done so many things I didn't do because of my fears, I am still scared but I am curious to see how my personality will evolve.
I have just started participating more in everything, I have a new rule to only do one thing at a time, so no phone on the bus ride or when someone around me is talking, so that I can be present.
I am also socially anxious so I am reprogramming myself to not be, I have asked people on dates in person and it has gone well! I went to an event where they asked for people to come on the stage to dance and I did it! I am doing all the normal things that are nerve wracking but it's such a thrill, no high is better than this.
Last year I started reading a lot of PubMed and realized that it was possible to nerd snipe myself about my own health. Once I added metrics via wearables and started ordering labs myself (more frequently than a doctor would bother doing), it started to feel less like “diet and exercise” and more like I was optimizing some piece of software at work. Turns out I’m good at that!
> To the contrary, the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly-engineered life.
I feel this a lot at work. Counter-intuitively, I've noticed my most unproductive days are the ones where I "worked the hardest", and productive days often feel smooth and easy. Sometimes I feel like I'm too busy LARPing as a busy person trying to solve the problem that it distracts from me actually solving the problem in an intelligent manner
This is exactly why the phrase “work hard” never sat well with me. “Hard” suggests you’re struggling against something. I think that true good work is more like tapping into a flow state. And my experience is the same as yours: when I was tapping into the flow, I was so much more productive and made better-quality work to boot.
Great insight here. It reminds me of Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset—though people often think of it as a generalized idea, we really have different mindsets in different areas of our lives, and it’s helpful to look at each of them.
I agree with the many posters that point out that there is a certain time-based prioritization that needs to happen, but I might ask them… are you Actually Trying to fix your time/scheduling problems? Possibly an uncomfortable question.
I think we’re talking about different things here. You’re talking about how to get more time to do more things, I’m talking about prioritizing the time you have more effectively and sometimes making hard choices about what you are willing to give up. For example, I decided this year that writing is far more important to me than I have been giving time to. So I started waking at 4:30am to give myself time to write. That wasn’t enough for what I’m trying to accomplish, so I am taking a partial leave of absence from my job this coming year in order to devote more time to it. That will come with a pay cut, which will be uncomfortable, but I am willing to downsize my life in order to solve the problem. I think what Cate was getting at is that we aren’t Actually Trying when we stop trying to fix the problem after the first couple solutions don’t work. I think when people use the time excuse, what they’re really saying is “I don’t want to deal with the discomfort of trying a solution that might not work or might cut into my personal time or make me have to reprioritize my decisions.”
Nick, I also like your framing of different midsets in different areas. And you are right in a sense that putting effort in fixing time/scheduling problems might pay off. But the irony is that it takes away time from those very things you already don't have time for, making things worse, at least temporarily. 'People who'd benefit from time management courses the most are those who have the least capacity for taking them'
There are some tricks with which you can buy yourself time. Deliveries is the starting level. Hiring a non-virtual assistant is another one, which is not affordable to ordinary people in countries with good income distribution. But anyway, unlike positive-sum games in relationships or work, buying time doesn't change the 24-hour-sum dramatically.
My cousin tried to solve this by hiring a nanny who lived with their family. In result, his kids became more attached to her than to parents.
So yes, your question is uncomfortable enough for me to write a comment :) Curious to hear your counter-arguments to support the idea that if we have self, kids, spouse, relatives, work plus friends or hobbies, those who failed to put all them into their lives and to fully eliminate chores just didn't actually tried.
I know that a path forward is among the options that actually exist. So that's the open question for me now, am I missing something fundamental, or the problem arising from having only 24 hours a day is not that tackleable without resourcefulness of top 5%.
The outside view often works because the social and emotional stakes for the outside-view-taker are so different from those for the inside-view-struggler.
I have found that I can, as a part-time management coach, reliably help others solve problems that I failed to solve myself when I was a full-time manager. This is only partly because I learned lessons from those failures. It is mostly because my job, my sense of self worth, and the respect of my peers are not on the line. I realize now, and grieve, how often I allowed myself to be blinded into indecision and lack of agency by those stakes.
I often think about trying to find a new team or company to work for, one exciting enough to be worth trading off the other endeavors I love in order to lead and build again. One of the things that holds me back from that is the worry that, even now, I might not be able to help myself take the outside view the way I wish I had been able to do before.
I think our beliefs/areas of selective agency are kind of like a tree-like structure:
- things you believe at a higher level in the tree filter down and affect your decision making at lower levels of the tree
- things you believe in specific lower branches of the tree are localized learnings and may not affect things in other branches that diverged higher up in the tree
This is my best explanation of selective agency; it explains things like why some athletes can be incredible leaders in their domains of play but be completely unable to apply the leadership principles they've learned to other areas of their life. It's a local solution to a specific subdomain of their life (sports), but those learnings haven't filtered up + disconfirmed things that drive their decision-making at higher levels.
I find myself falling into patterns of effort. There's an upper limit of time I can be awake and solve problems every day, and it's so much easier to make myself spend that time on the problems I've demonstrated I'm good at and have a potential for material reward. Fixing my dating life (to take an arbitrary, totally impersonal example from the article) takes time on the same mental tools I use to run my company, but won't make me obscenely rich, famous, or immortal.
Maybe Actually Caring is another facet of Actually Trying. Being willing to set important things aside for other things you're claiming are important.
hello from sydney australia! first of all; what the fuck. glad you're okay. that's a very cooked situation and from one internet stranger to another, happy you're safe.
second of all, love this mindset and capacity for selective agency. it always, always depends - on how much we personally care about, how much the people we care about care about it, etc. it reminds me of a high school friend who my teachers had collectively agreed was a poor student, but all his peers new that he was an extremely bright child who just didn't find the value in regular academics. likewise, there's a bit of a joke that hip techonlogy startups (e.g. Canva) provide free breakfast/lunch/dinners because 1) it's a ploy to keep them in the office and never leave but also 2) some developers have such high agency for work but low agency for taking care of themselves physically that they kinda just need to so that they don't accidentally fall apart.
thank you for sharing cate!! really enjoyed this piece.
That comparison to the school system is spot on! So many people with huge potential just don’t see the point in what’s being forced on them, and end up “failing” only because the system doesn’t fit how they actually learn or think.
This can be very obvious to people who become bilingual later in life and seemingly find themselves with two different personalities. Usually the second language speaker finds it much easier to say "I love you", ask for a raise, etc.
whoa! really? that's fascinating!!
This is actually true, I witness this happening more often after I got married.
My wife speaks English, and my family didn’t.
I noticed that when I have hard feelings and wanted to talk about it, unconsciously I would express them in English, while I would find it difficult to do the same with my native language, perhaps this happens due to less childhood memories?
Oh my god, this has happened to me. I will tell off rude strangers in my second language in a way I would have NEVER done in my first.
Part of that is that you naturally act out a bit of the culture of whoever you learn the language from. Both my parents learned German in the their 20s. However, my Mom learned it from Prussians and my Dad from Bavarians and Austrians. It has exactly the effect you would expect.
I bet your childhood was a hoot.
I think I was often confused.
That's hilarious, my first French teacher was a German Wisconsinite. I'm for all kinds of football.
that's an interesting observation! never thought of it before. I'm writing in English, i feel like i can say things that i haven't even been able to formulate in my head in my native German, nor in any of the other languages i speak (to varying degrees). Because English is the only language that i learned first hand, no classes or courses or grammar books, just by reading, listening to music and talking to people. it is my intimate language of feeling too, the one i can be creative in and think in a sensuous feeling way. Thank you so much for this insight! food for thoughts for sure! is there maybe a source or some research you know of, where this phenomenon is described?
I use my second language (english) mainly for work and hobby - everything else is in German. I can absolutely relate on expressing certain parts of my personality rather on English than in German. Especially situations at wornk, where we speak both German and English, I rather stick to English. But this bleeds into also my family life where I sometimes find it easier to explain myself and share my thoughts in English.
This is one of the most interesting truth I ever read on my phone. It’s really accurate!
I wonder if this is why I sometimes have “talks” with myself about difficult things I’m going through using different accents. Usually things I’m frustrated about in relationships. Lol. Somehow calling someone out on their bs feels much less intimidating in an Austrailian accent. Not that I ever do this to their face but I think it helps me process
This made me think about a study I read about on how using a second language in therapy allows for more emotional distance making certain things easier to talk about. I found this article, which I believe cites the study: https://societyforpsychotherapy.org/bilingualism-as-a-tool-in-psychotherapy/
But wouldn’t it just make sense that new thoughts would be put into words of your current new language? New thoughts put into the language that’s currently in your head. Why would you revert to the past, if the thought is now, in the present.
I can bare my guts in Spanish, expose my deepest
Same! Spanish is my feeling language, English is my thinking language. I speak to my dog in both; English to follow instructions on the street, and Spanish for cuddles at home 😀
I relate to this, so much! In my second language I was able to talk about trauma that in my first language I was completely frozen in — stuck at age 12, unable to describe the unspeakable
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, or I learned English too early 🤔
This is so incredibly fascinating. My late partner (who was an Artist Goldsmith like me) spoke English, German, Afrikaans and Japanese and he would always revert to the Japanese when he wanted worlds for art and concept - never an English word. And his stepson recently told me that there is an Afrikaans word for the responsibility of community work that we don’t even have in English so if languages can have concepts and ideas that others don’t it stands to reason that our personalities would change in each language too. I am fascinated! I want to read a book about this now.
Completely true. I studied English lit in Mexico. English is my second language but I don’t remember learning it. My friends and I noticed we were able to be more specific about how we felt if we talked in English, it didn’t hurt as much. There are many things/concepts that I only know how to name in English. Having your feelings a little bit removed by the second language helps in really painful situations. Speaking or writing about my feelings in Spanish is hard. The only disadvantage I have found is that therapy in English doesn’t work the same as in Spanish. I believe it is just because of the same reason.
What an interesting thought! From my personal experience I completely agree but I think for me I struggle to communicate the same way in my native language because I simply don't have the vocabulatly to describe what I'm feeling in my native language. I fully immersed myself in English when I was 14ish and ever since then I stopped developing my vocabulary in my first language so I pretty much learned to be an adult in a different language
so interesting! there's a story: my great grandmother was Romnja, she prob. spoke a Romani language as a child, was illiterate, was socialized in South Bohemia, so she spoke Czech. She travelled north, alone, to Thuringia in Germany, where she "stranded", looking for work. There she got "rescued" by my great grandfather, married, had a child, my grandmother and so on. but she never really integrated, because they were ostracized as Gypsies and had to hide her from the Nazis or from being reported by the neighbors, so she became reclusive and spoke seldom. I personally knew her. she died when i was 7. But i don't remember her ever speaking to me or anyone. my grandmother and mother, who lived with her, are both dead now. I will always wonder what language they spoke to one another. And how uniquely her thoughts must have been, never being able to make home in any language from the age of 14.
This resonates with me. I’ve been bilingual since very young age, and only later in life noticed I have two different perosonalities in the two languages.
Capacities like being direct, assertive, mean, are easier in one than the other. Even my opinion of myself is different, somehow, in either.
Also communication norms are different in different languages. I find it more easy to be direct in German and Dutch because these are language cultures where clear statements and directness are very much valued. I've found that liberating.
> One of the interesting things about all of this is that there was nothing particularly inventive about the strategies my husband deployed
While I was reading the stalker story, I thought the moral of it would be that the stalker was Actually Trying.
> Have I done my best to come up with a set of potential solutions, using all the resources I have? Am I doing as well by myself as I would by any friend who came to me with the same problem? How do I know I’m Actually Trying?
"Am I as determined as Cate's stalker?"
I disagree, because the stalker is clearly stuck using a strategy that doesn't actually work.
But they’re trying.
“Stalk Your Success: The Agentic Breakthrough You Need!” buy mai substack
😂 wtf
Lol
I mostly agree. perhaps the confirmation of this depends on the end goal of the stalker.
seems like they were pretty close to making it to America. 😐
😭😭
There's various stuff in my life where I know I have this problem - knowing it isn't the hard part, the hard part is various emotional blockers in the way. This makes me think that it'd be useful to trade life-solving with other people - spend some time looking at stuff in each other's lives that they're stuck on, and use each other's outside view to make progress.
The concept of trading life-solving seems to be what communities were built on. Interesting that we struggle to do it today
I realized this too recently, when I noticed the effort and exhaustion I felt was actually from avoiding the thing I needed to do. Our brains can trick us and if we have a lot of emotional blockers, it’s harder to see through the mist. But clarity comes with time, and a lot of frustration too.
Thank you for writing this. Definitely food for thought! ❤️
I like the lesson you drew from it, but with the situation itself, it seems like you might also have just reacted to a violent threat with a freeze response (as opposed to flight or fight).
That's not necessarily you doing anything "wrong" - the freeze response gets a bad rap, but it is so common because it has kept many many people alive in the face of violence, throughout the entire genetic history of humanity. I wouldn't see it as immature to have that response, so much as being a living animal that wants to survive.
Thanks for articulating the discomfort I had with this example, and also with the idea that you need to be Actually Trying in all areas of your life simultaneously. I think wisdom comes from disciplined attention and thoughtful experimentation, which is not necessarily easy to do in multiple domains at the same time. At any rate, while I’m in the final stages of writing my textbook, I have given myself permission to do just the basics from a physical health point of view (in my case: two exercise classes each week which have grown into a group of friends over the space of several years together, and a briefing on eating better next week by our coach for one of the classes)
The freeze response has been beneficial for me. I used to make snap decisions, too often leading me astray. Now, I reflect on a situation for a day, maybe two, and my success rate has improved dramatically.
There’s also some zero sum aspect to this. People overachieving at work invest a lot of time, attention, and energy in it, and that can leave less for other areas.
Simple but real explanation, I think! When you focus on some areas you are bound to lose focus on the others for a while unless you actively track and prioritize them all (in which case would you really become stellar than others at that one thing?)
Agree. I say — you have only so much willpower. Spend wisely.
This year I have started my life from scratch, I am diving head in to all the things that have made me anxious my whole life. And this is exactly what I was thinking when I began. When I look back, I could have done so many things I didn't do because of my fears, I am still scared but I am curious to see how my personality will evolve.
Cool to hear! What are you trying?:)
I have just started participating more in everything, I have a new rule to only do one thing at a time, so no phone on the bus ride or when someone around me is talking, so that I can be present.
I am also socially anxious so I am reprogramming myself to not be, I have asked people on dates in person and it has gone well! I went to an event where they asked for people to come on the stage to dance and I did it! I am doing all the normal things that are nerve wracking but it's such a thrill, no high is better than this.
I love this idea of being present. One thing at a time.
It is never too late!
Yet another banger post! Appreciate it.
Last year I started reading a lot of PubMed and realized that it was possible to nerd snipe myself about my own health. Once I added metrics via wearables and started ordering labs myself (more frequently than a doctor would bother doing), it started to feel less like “diet and exercise” and more like I was optimizing some piece of software at work. Turns out I’m good at that!
I love that!
> To the contrary, the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly-engineered life.
I feel this a lot at work. Counter-intuitively, I've noticed my most unproductive days are the ones where I "worked the hardest", and productive days often feel smooth and easy. Sometimes I feel like I'm too busy LARPing as a busy person trying to solve the problem that it distracts from me actually solving the problem in an intelligent manner
This is exactly why the phrase “work hard” never sat well with me. “Hard” suggests you’re struggling against something. I think that true good work is more like tapping into a flow state. And my experience is the same as yours: when I was tapping into the flow, I was so much more productive and made better-quality work to boot.
“ work with intensity”, maybe?
Willpower can be a subset of discipline. I use willpower constantly, with good results. Willpower can also be blind, leading to a lot of box canyons.
Sometimes being a victim of such things is paralyzing; bravo to your husband who did the right thing.
It can take a lot to shake yourself into action when you need to; responding correctly to stop aggression in a timely manner can be a very tall order.
It's an odd mental block. I know this from personal experience. It's a lot easier to think about these issues when you have some emotional distance.
Great insight here. It reminds me of Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset—though people often think of it as a generalized idea, we really have different mindsets in different areas of our lives, and it’s helpful to look at each of them.
I agree with the many posters that point out that there is a certain time-based prioritization that needs to happen, but I might ask them… are you Actually Trying to fix your time/scheduling problems? Possibly an uncomfortable question.
I really like this framing!
I think we’re talking about different things here. You’re talking about how to get more time to do more things, I’m talking about prioritizing the time you have more effectively and sometimes making hard choices about what you are willing to give up. For example, I decided this year that writing is far more important to me than I have been giving time to. So I started waking at 4:30am to give myself time to write. That wasn’t enough for what I’m trying to accomplish, so I am taking a partial leave of absence from my job this coming year in order to devote more time to it. That will come with a pay cut, which will be uncomfortable, but I am willing to downsize my life in order to solve the problem. I think what Cate was getting at is that we aren’t Actually Trying when we stop trying to fix the problem after the first couple solutions don’t work. I think when people use the time excuse, what they’re really saying is “I don’t want to deal with the discomfort of trying a solution that might not work or might cut into my personal time or make me have to reprioritize my decisions.”
Nick, I also like your framing of different midsets in different areas. And you are right in a sense that putting effort in fixing time/scheduling problems might pay off. But the irony is that it takes away time from those very things you already don't have time for, making things worse, at least temporarily. 'People who'd benefit from time management courses the most are those who have the least capacity for taking them'
There are some tricks with which you can buy yourself time. Deliveries is the starting level. Hiring a non-virtual assistant is another one, which is not affordable to ordinary people in countries with good income distribution. But anyway, unlike positive-sum games in relationships or work, buying time doesn't change the 24-hour-sum dramatically.
My cousin tried to solve this by hiring a nanny who lived with their family. In result, his kids became more attached to her than to parents.
So yes, your question is uncomfortable enough for me to write a comment :) Curious to hear your counter-arguments to support the idea that if we have self, kids, spouse, relatives, work plus friends or hobbies, those who failed to put all them into their lives and to fully eliminate chores just didn't actually tried.
I know that a path forward is among the options that actually exist. So that's the open question for me now, am I missing something fundamental, or the problem arising from having only 24 hours a day is not that tackleable without resourcefulness of top 5%.
Love this idea too. We can only allocate so many “spoons” to so many areas of our lives.
The outside view often works because the social and emotional stakes for the outside-view-taker are so different from those for the inside-view-struggler.
I have found that I can, as a part-time management coach, reliably help others solve problems that I failed to solve myself when I was a full-time manager. This is only partly because I learned lessons from those failures. It is mostly because my job, my sense of self worth, and the respect of my peers are not on the line. I realize now, and grieve, how often I allowed myself to be blinded into indecision and lack of agency by those stakes.
I often think about trying to find a new team or company to work for, one exciting enough to be worth trading off the other endeavors I love in order to lead and build again. One of the things that holds me back from that is the worry that, even now, I might not be able to help myself take the outside view the way I wish I had been able to do before.
I think our beliefs/areas of selective agency are kind of like a tree-like structure:
- things you believe at a higher level in the tree filter down and affect your decision making at lower levels of the tree
- things you believe in specific lower branches of the tree are localized learnings and may not affect things in other branches that diverged higher up in the tree
This is my best explanation of selective agency; it explains things like why some athletes can be incredible leaders in their domains of play but be completely unable to apply the leadership principles they've learned to other areas of their life. It's a local solution to a specific subdomain of their life (sports), but those learnings haven't filtered up + disconfirmed things that drive their decision-making at higher levels.
great point!
https://naturalism.org/philosophy/free-will/luck-swallows-everything
I find myself falling into patterns of effort. There's an upper limit of time I can be awake and solve problems every day, and it's so much easier to make myself spend that time on the problems I've demonstrated I'm good at and have a potential for material reward. Fixing my dating life (to take an arbitrary, totally impersonal example from the article) takes time on the same mental tools I use to run my company, but won't make me obscenely rich, famous, or immortal.
Maybe Actually Caring is another facet of Actually Trying. Being willing to set important things aside for other things you're claiming are important.
hello from sydney australia! first of all; what the fuck. glad you're okay. that's a very cooked situation and from one internet stranger to another, happy you're safe.
second of all, love this mindset and capacity for selective agency. it always, always depends - on how much we personally care about, how much the people we care about care about it, etc. it reminds me of a high school friend who my teachers had collectively agreed was a poor student, but all his peers new that he was an extremely bright child who just didn't find the value in regular academics. likewise, there's a bit of a joke that hip techonlogy startups (e.g. Canva) provide free breakfast/lunch/dinners because 1) it's a ploy to keep them in the office and never leave but also 2) some developers have such high agency for work but low agency for taking care of themselves physically that they kinda just need to so that they don't accidentally fall apart.
thank you for sharing cate!! really enjoyed this piece.
That comparison to the school system is spot on! So many people with huge potential just don’t see the point in what’s being forced on them, and end up “failing” only because the system doesn’t fit how they actually learn or think.