#26: On Commitment Phobia & How To Work Hard
Hello from New York!
Where 8:30 sunsets and iced-lattes in the sweltering heat Have made my weekends as blissful as ever Summer dusks at Central Park are tough to beat If only the season could last forever
On Commitment Phobia
I remember being twenty one and thinking, the world is my Oyster. I was about to graduate in a couple months and envisioned my life to be full of adventure. I wanted to live in a different city every year, and change jobs every year. I couldn’t be pinned down to a relationship because I wanted to meet so many people from across the world. “Settling down” in a place was not for me. I was more excited about meeting new people than I was about staying close to the old ones. I was more excited about trying new kinds of work every year than I was about achieving deep expertise in one thing.
I realized later that this approach to life was not sustainable (not in the least because moving cities is much more of a hassle than I’d anticipated). For me, it also does not lead to long- term fulfillment, meaning or happiness.
I still want adventure, no doubt. But what that means to me has changed in a big way. I am excited about decades long friendships. I am excited about having a family someday. I am excited about the rewards of being in a community for a long time. I am excited about sticking with certain domains and functions in my career wherein I can become truly great over time by putting my best everyday for several years. These things require commitment. And, contrary to what my 21 year old self would like, it does mean, to an extent, putting your roots down. It means prioritizing deep friendships, often over meeting new people. It means taking the long view about my career and aiming for deep knowledge & expertise. It means being open to committing to a relationship without dwelling on who else could be out there.
This brilliant Piece By David Perell lays out why so many of us today are suffering from a ‘commitment crisis’, and why the sweetest rewards of life come from commitment and obligations.
https://perell.com/essay/hugging-the-x-axis/
“People think they’ll be happy if they don’t have any obligations. In actuality, total optionality is a recipe for emptiness — and hugging the X-axis — because opportunity and optionality are often inversely correlated. The challenge is that the greatest rewards generally go to people who are tied down in certain ways. A real lifelong marriage is the deepest relationship you’ll ever have because you’ve committed to a lifetime of faithfulness. Likewise, you only get to raise money for a startup when investors are confident you’re committed for the long haul. The challenge is that people who treat their lives like a game of hot potato, always moving from thing to thing, can’t take advantage of exponential curves — and climb the Y-axis.”
How to Work Hard- Paul Graham
http://paulgraham.com/hwh.html
It would seem working hard is simply a matter of choice or motivation, and not a matter of ‘how’. I guess Paul Graham disagrees:
Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result.
An excerpt that really resonated with me is where he gets into the differences between what working hard looks like in school/college v/s adult life. In school and college, your goals and targets are clearly defined by others - teachers, parents, professors- in great detail right from deadlines & due-dates to syllabi, exams etc. But in the real world, there are no exams and no one telling you what to do everyday.
What I've learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You'll probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things.
Find an Easy Way to Do Something Hard:
“The more ambitious types of work will usually be harder, but although you should not be in denial about this, neither should you treat difficulty as an infallible guide in deciding what to do. If you discover some ambitious type of work that's a bargain in the sense of being easier for you than other people, either because of the abilities you happen to have, or because of some new way you've found to approach it, or simply because you're more excited about it, by all means work on that. Some of the best work is done by people who find an easy way to do something hard.”
The Difficult Of Figuring Out What To Work On”
As a kid, you get the impression that everyone has a calling, and all they have to do is figure out what it is. That's how it works in movies, and in the streamlined biographies fed to kids. Sometimes it works that way in real life. Some people figure out what to do as children and just do it, like Mozart. But others, like Newton, turn restlessly from one kind of work to another. Maybe in retrospect we can identify one as their calling — we can wish Newton spent more time on math and physics and less on alchemy and theology — but this is an illusion induced by hindsight bias. There was no voice calling to him that he could have heard.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"Life is a series of tradeoffs, and greater results usually require greater tradeoffs.
The question is not, "Do you want to be great at this?"
The question is, "What are you willing to give up in order to be great at this?"
Until next time,
Manan
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