Hello Again
In my backstory post, I shared what I’m doing here: curing my chronic condition - not knowing - by writing about what I find significant. I also shared that I am going to dive into each of the “tentacles” I shared in that post. And I will do that, but first I have some things I want to get out of my head.
In this post, I’m going to share a couple of internalized ideas I’ve recognized in myself and how they’ve shaped my past decisions. I’ll keep them in mind as I explore different tentacles.
Internalized Ideas are your Water
Internalized ideas are a personally accepted truth. They shape us because they are the basis for our worldview. They are the water we swim in.
I’ve recently recognized two ideas that have shaped my decision making for most of my life. I call them the Killer Combo.
what is means to “be smart”
what counts as “actual work”
The Killer Combo
I was labeled “smart” at a young age because I got good grades. I embraced this label wholeheartedly. It garnered respect from teachers, parents, and peers. Over the years, “being smart” became core to my identity. Eventually, every class put my reputation - my identity - on the line. If I didn’t get an A, I wasn’t “me” anymore.
Not only did this warp my view of knowledge and learning (something I’m still unlearning), but it also shaped what I thought of as “actual work.” With grade-chasing as my main priority, “actual work” was only that which contributed to my grades. Everything else was extra and unnecessary. This meant actual work was doing practice problems, studying for exams, or writing papers. Other things, like reading random books, learning new skills, or doing random backyard projects were never a priority. If it didn’t contribute to my grades, I didn’t want to do it. My 10th grade self would cockily ask “what would I get from all that extra stuff anyway?”
This meant that actual work looked like this: sitting at a desk with a textbook doing practice problems. Or, hunched over a laptop jamming short term information in my brain as fast as possible. Or, later on, reviewing notes to figure out which questions the teacher would put on the exam (probably the most useful skill of all of them).
This shaped my life because the only careers I considered during high school and college were careers that looked like the studying I did. I never, even for a second, considered a non-technical career. It seemed like a non-starter. For one, I was a “math kid,” proud to brag about how bad I was at English (despite desperately vying for A’s in English just as much as any other class).
But worse, I was preparing myself to succeed at a specific type of work - jamming short term info into my brain. By the end of high school, my friends and I bragged about how little we actually understood while still acing tests. I didn’t realize the harm - how warped my view of what learning was - until much later.
The Machine Shop
In college, before switching majors to data science, I studied mechanical engineering. The classwork was easy. I knew how to study, I knew how to focus, and I knew how to guess what questions would be on exams. The machine shop, on the other hand, was amazingly hard. It wasn’t that I couldn’t figure it out. It was more the feeling that this was a waste of time and I could be using it to study… Looking back, time in the machine shop would have been, by far, the most useful and interesting time for me in engineering school if I could have only given myself the space to focus and accept that it was an important part of my education. Instead, I decided “I’m just not good with my hands” and moved on.
I bitched and moaned about the machine shop. I preferred homework. That was the game I knew. That was the easier way to ensure I would keep getting good grades.
Looking back now, the kids who wanted to spend all their time in the machine shop were in school for the right reasons. I was there to “be a smart kid” by doing engineering, not to be an engineer.
Athletics
I didn’t spend all my time playing school. As long as I knew my homework was done, I spent the rest of my time playing sports. What’s funny though, is I spent too much time in the gym at the expense of more time working on skills or learning about the game.
Like I mentioned in this tweet, I wish I had watched more youtube
If I could go back, I’d replace 75% of my gym time with time spent learning more about the game or working on specific skills.
How is this related?
I started to view the gym as a direct feedback loop to sports, but I didn’t actually get the results.
The gym was an easy way to feel like I was getting better. It was structured, whereas learning and skills practice was more ambiguous.
Another reason I didn’t spend more time learning about baseball online is because I felt compelled to spend all of my laptop time on schoolwork. Learning about other subjects, using mental energy on things that weren’t school, was a foreign concept. The killer combo affected my whole life in ways I didn’t realize.
Discomfort with Ambiguity
Years of grade chasing left me accustomed to an environment with a clear, achievable goal. There was always someone I could go to for the right answer, especially in technical subjects. I was proud to tell people I loved math class because I always knew if I was right or wrong. My stance has changed since then
Unfortunately, the world outside of school doesn’t have a clear answer. You have to learn how too make your own. You have to figure out how to operate in the “real world,” which is full of ambiguity
Dealing with ambiguity is a skill in and of it’s own - one that I wasn’t exposed to and still shy away from. Dealing with ambiguity requires personal taste and an ability to curate what is significant. You could say I’m writing this newsletter as a means to work on my own ability to deal with ambiguity.
This new world of ambiguity makes a lot of traditionally smart grade-chasers extremely frustrated after school
There are new rules to the game, but no one can just tell you what they are (I asked, Erik didn’t answer). There aren’t any professors and there aren’t any answers in the back of the book. That’s a pretty annoying change.
The GPA of Life?
Sometimes, I like to to think about what the GPA of life is. I imagine many people think about this since it defined our value for so many years. The most reasonable substitute is pay/salary, but that falls apart in a million different ways.
This puts grade chasers in a funny place. We spend years getting comfortable assessing our own worth based on a number, then it’s taken away. Nobody cares about it anymore. How are we supposed to assess our worth now? Many people end up using salary anyway, which infuriates them when they see a bunch of people not working as hard as them and aren’t as “smart” as them making more than them. This is unfair! Those are the people that Erik is talking about in the tweet above.
Ignorance of Feelings
I chased grades for the approval of others at the expense of my own interests. If I went back now, I would have a much harder time doing it. It would feel so pointless. I could never work up the motivation.
How did I do it back then?
Visa has a great passage in the rough draft of FAN that describes how he ignored his feelings
Oh man, I have a lot of feelings. I have feelings about my feelings. When I was growing up as a kid, nobody really talked about feelings. My family didn't particularly talk about feelings, although I noticed when people were angry or upset. But we didn't talk about that. I don't recall school talking about feelings. It's really interesting to reflect back on. Most of what I knew or thought about feelings, I got from books, from games, from music, from art. Maybe a part of it is a ~traditional masculinity~ thing – boys don't talk about their feelings. Maybe part of it is an Asian thing, Singaporeans don't really talk about their feelings either. I don't know. I feel like the guy from Memento, trying to piece things together.
I find myself thinking, when I was a teenager, I don't think I cared about feelings? Or I thought that I didn't care about feelings. It's complicated. There was a denial aspect to it. I thought that I had to be some sort of happy-go-lucky, unaffected, blissful joker. And I believed sincerely that that was who I was. And so... when I got anxious at school, I didn't entirely notice it. Does that make sense? I'm realizing on retrospect that I actually know what denial is like, because I was in denial about my feelings a lot of the time. And, obviously, if anybody had said to me "you're in denial about your feelings", I'd probably have laughed them off.
I’d surmise to say I was an expert in this as well.
I recently talked to my girlfriend about my lack of anxiety in high school, but I couldn’t remember or explain what was happening. This passage explains it well. I just ignored feelings (in denial, maybe?). They were not important to me. Not real, even. So I’m sure I had anxiety, but I just ran it off somehow. It’s still hard to describe, but I did it.
This is why I’d be worse at grade chasing now. I feel my feelings. I wouldn’t be able to ignore that anxiety anymore. In fact, that anxiety is the main reason I’m writing this. I’m desperate to figure this out, to figure out a question I never honestly asked myself when I was young: “what do I really like?”
Why’d You Choose Your Field?
Why did you choose your career? Did you actually like it? Did you trick yourself into liking it? Was a safe choice? All of the above?
I chose a lucrative field. When boomers hear I majored in data science, they say “oh man, I wish I’d have been that smart back in the day.” It was a safe choice. There’s plenty of jobs and nobody questions you.
Comments like this make me feel good because they are reassuring. But when I pay attention - really pay attention - to how I feel, I need to be careful I actually chose this field for myself and not for the people I get to tell about it.
And to be fair, data science, ML, and programming are interesting. There’s no denying that. This also makes it easier for me to convince myself I chose it for the right reasons without over-analyzing. I’m not saying that I regret my decision - I’ve gained a lot from the skills I’ve learned and I’m happy to have them. But, my point is that I never gave non-technical subjects a legitimate shot, even as hobbies.
Expanding Actual Work
Since leaving college, I’ve been forced to expand my view of “actual work.”
This started with small changes, like realizing how important code documentation is and how much time it takes.
Then, it expanded to understanding the business context of technical work to ensure our projects would have the right impact and building relationships to make sure I understand customer needs.
(Side note: those things are obvious, I know. And if you had asked me 2 years ago, I would have told you those things are obvious, so I may need to work on articulating the specifics of what I mean. I thought that good technical work would solve problems the same way people think a good product sells itself. Maybe I’ll expand more on this in a future post.)
Then, I read How Not to Let Work Explode Your Life. I realized how complex and multi-faceted our modern day lives are and how much work must go into every facet.
For the average person, work is work and the rest of life is supposed to go smoothly. But that’s far from the truth. Everything in life takes work. Your relationships, your diet, your hobbies, moving, cleaning, and everything else!
Some of that work is more annoying than others, but it’s all work. Realizing this has helped me expand my view of “actual work,” which in turn has allowed me to spend more time focusing on non-technical things. This shift would have helped me see the value in the Machine Shop in engineering school and it now has me more interested in non-technical career paths.
Shying away from Product Management
When I think about Product Management, or business roles in general, the voice in the back of my head says “that’d be okay, but they’re is too much talking and not enough working.” It has never fit into my view of “actual work” which is supposed to be an “intellectual challenge”
What’s funny though, is that I love talking to people. It’s one of my favorite things
So why am I so inclined to dismiss the social aspect of a job as a negative? Because it doesn’t fit into the killer combo.
This is the main idea I’m getting at. I want to expand my views of actual work so I can make more honest assessments of the type of work I want to do.
Plus, I’m going to consider when my interest in non-technical skills, like talking to people, would actually help me excel in certain areas instead of only considering how they “get in the way of real work.”
In a way, this post is a deeper intro to some of my inner thinking related to Product Management. I want to keep the killer combo in mind as I consider how enticing a career in Product Management is to make sure I don’t write it off because it doesn’t fit my old views.
Conclusion
2022 is the year I’ll unlearn the killer combo. Instead, I’ll build a more holistic view of intelligence that allows me to explore areas I’ve previously ignored.
Some other titles for this newsletter could have been “Expanding Actual Work” or “Embracing Ambiguity.” That’s what I’m going for here.
If you made it this far, thank you! If you relate to anything here, please let know on twitter!
See you next time.