Hello…
Hi, I’m Nick Torba. I suffer from a chronic condition: not knowing what I want. Life as a not-knower is frustrating. I have trouble answering the simplest, yet most important, questions in life:
what energizes me?
what is my ideal day?
what skills do I want?
what career do I want?
what relationships do I want?
what interests are most important to me?
what’s my favorite color?
The last one may seem like a joke, but I could break down my indecision process if you really wanted me to.
Not knowing makes life confusing. I struggle to commit to anything. I have a constant feeling that I’m wasting time. I know there is something better out there for me, but I can’t put my finger on what **it** is.
The Source of my Frustrations
Looking back on my past year, I’m frustrated by my lack of commitment to any specific project. In other words, I’m frustrated I spent the year hugging the x-axis.
My suffering as a not-knower is tangled up with my continuous case of shiny object syndrome. “Oh, that looks cool, I want to read about that for the next 2 hours.” Do that for a couple days and momentum on other long-term projects slowly dies.
Part of the reason I don’t stay committed is because I lack confidence in my choices. When things get hard, working on something just because you thought it was cool a week ago isn’t enough to push through.
Why Am I Telling You?
Why am I telling you about my condition? Well, my plan is to cure myself by writing. I will rid myself of the endless doubt and frustration of not-knowing through the deeper introspection the writing process requires.
I also suspect that many of you suffer the same. If all goes well, I’ll make some important discoveries about myself that help you as well. If not, hopefully I’ll at least make some discoveries about myself.
Reconfigure Ambition
Honestly, I wish I didn’t feel the need to do this. I’d rather live in a world full of well defined and important projects ready for anybody to take up. But we don’t. Nobody took up my twitter offer to re-organize all the ambition outlets we have.
Luckily, we do live in a world with plenty of problems. The hard part is getting them defined and workable.
So part of this newsletter will be my process for identifying significant issues in the hope to reconfigure my ambition towards something worthwhile - a why I can come back to when it gets hard.
My Current State
I’ve spent the last few months in a deep state of not-knowing. My work is lackluster, my hobbies feel like dead ends, I don’t have upcoming trips or travel to distract me. I’m staring down the barrel of many more months of monotonous frustration if I don’t figure out what I want.
While in a more positive mode recently, I shared that I’ve been in a “tentacle stretching phase.”
Here are my current tentacles:
web design/frontend engineering
product management
writing
evolutionary robotics
ML Platforms
ML
network simulations
talking to people
fitness (MTB, sk8, the gym)
art (drawing/painting)
Each of these draws me in for different reasons. It’s easy to see that some easily lend themselves to financial viability, while others are better suited as hobbies (or a serious change in lifestyle). I love this exploration phase - too much. It feels productive, but it’s shallow. There is so much potential, but the potential is only achieved if you go deeper. The problem is, I, a chronic not-knower, don’t know which tentacle to double down on. With so many interesting directions, which way do I go?
Exploration and Decision Process
The first posts of this newsletter will go through each tentacle
What draws me to them
How much work I’ve already done in them
Hobby vs career
What it is I want and could get from them
The people in that space I know or look up to
After writing a post on each tentacle, I will determine the relationship I want to have with each. In an ideal world, I would pick 1 as a career/hobby (something I like enough for it to be both) and 1 as a hobby on the side. But, we’ll see where I end up.
Either way, by the end, I will have 2 projects that I will stick to until the end of the year no matter what (this newsletter probably being one of them).
This is the type of learning I want to do:
That’s only possible when you stop hugging the X-axis.
Long Term Goal - Seek what is Significant
Some of you are probably wondering what “Cultivating Taste” means. If I’m not careful, it might come off a bit snooty. “Your taste in what? Wine?”
That’s not what I’m going for.
metaflav has another way to put it: “Cultivate the capacity to seek what is significant.”
Here’s a quote from Bret Victor in the tweet metaflav linked to:
The person who wins the Nobel Prize in biology is not the person who read the most journal articles and took the most notes on them. It’s the person who knew what to look for.
Cultivating that capacity to seek what’s significant, always willing to question whether you’re on the right track, that’s what education is going to be about, whether it’s using computers and the internet, or pencil and paper and books.
I’m am setting out to follow the same process in my personal decisions. Instead of floating around the tides of the internet looking for what could be next, I’m going to investigate what I find significant. What fields energize me? What activities energize me? What do I feel connected to? What draws me in and what kind of narrative can I build around it? How can I define a space to operate in and use the internet tides as a means instead of an ends?
Identifying significance, even on a personal level, is difficult and ambiguous. It’s what makes this tweet ring so true:
This is the skill I plan to cultivate in this newsletter - find the right problems by cultivating taste for what is significant.
What Now?
Now it’s time to start cultivating. I’ll start by writing about each of the “tentacles” I shared earlier and what relationship I want to have with them going forward.
I’m going to make a new post bi-weekly, at the least. A big part of me wants to get through these as fast as possible, but I don’t want to rush this process. I also don’t want to get discouraged if I can’t stick to a weekly cadence (although I will post more frequently if I’m able to work faster).
If you are a fellow not-knower, message me! Help me think of ideas on how we can investigate ourselves - become more aware of ourselves - so we can make more confident decisions in the future!
Some Practical Background
For some quick background, I work as a software engineer at a big company. Most of our work is deploying ML projects on top of Kubernetes, so the ML platforms and ML tentacles are spaces I have already went pretty deep on. I’ve enjoyed those tentacles, but when I take a closer look, I’m not entirely certain that working directly in my area is where I want to put the main focus of my life. I’ll dig into this more in the coming weeks.
This makes the backend software/ML-platforms/ML areas the “easiest” (most viable) options for full time careers. As part of this process, I am considering a full on career switch, but want to keep in mind the practical benefits of my current field (remote work, good pay, flexible schedule, interesting), as well as consider if I already have made the best choice for myself. So, an important part of my decision will either be a huge change, or it will be how I can pick one big project to tuck into the crevices of my full time job life.