In my first grade school Track & Field meet, I was so nervous getting marshalled to the sandpits for long jump that I nearly peed my pants. Actually, this happened in many years. I intensely wished for a competition where instead, everybody lined up, and a referee would pass by with a scan gun that revealed everyone’s intrinsic skill. I’d earn a modest bronze, then we could all bus home without any need for long-jumping or pants-peeing. Clearly, this was the yearning of a child…
In my first year job hunting in university, I hated having to mass produce cover letters and reach out for coffee chats which neither me nor my victim looked forward to. I wished recruiters could just scan my intrinsic skill, recognize my high caliber gravitas, and email my offer letter the next business day.
But what would a recruiter with a scan gun have actually seen?
A recruiter wants whoever is resourceful and conscientious enough to find the job posting early, analyzes which steps prepare them for success, then takes initiative to execute their plan – since they want someone to do all this on the job; a problem solver. I wanted the scan gun so I could do none of those things; a problem shirker. A scanner for the qualities a recruiter wants would surge over exactly the type of candidate who solves these hurdles and doesn’t need it in the first place. So the times when I needed the scan gun the most were precisely when it would have helped me the least.
The fantasy of being “seen for who you are” is just wishing to be exempt from becoming worthy of recognition.
Path Dependency
“But wait,” say scan gun experts, “wouldn’t a scan gun show someone's potential, rather than actualization? That’s the point! Being a cover letterist shouldn’t matter before the eye of the gun.”
Perhaps. But a crucial effect of challenges is: people rise to them. In Track & Field, a hurdle doesn’t merely reveal who can jump over it – it makes those people jump. And not just during the event, but in the months spent training, too. So a scan gun that only detects potential would still tend to favor doers, since accomplishing feats trains your intuition to perform automatically, stretching the potential of your conscious efforts.
It is through writing the cover letter you may realize a good explanation for why you’re the perfect fit. It seems that a mere idea should make no difference to your candidacy, yet knowing your fit helps tremendously. It’s like knowing there exists a winning move on a chessboard – you won’t settle for a second-best effort. But until you write the cover letter, your idea doesn't exist yet. You don’t know what knowledge you’ll create until you start creating it.
Another example. While writing a card to your spouse, you may identify an opportunity for a clever, attentive flourish – so you take it. Though you feel no different before and after, the second version actually is a more thoughtful person, in material reality. But it’s less about capitalizing within any particular moment; you only had the opportunity because you were writing a card in the first place. If not for that, there’d be no distinction between actualizing your potential vs. failing to do so – the potential wouldn’t exist at all!
Staticity
It’s easy to ‘believe in’ your identity as if it’s a storehouse of traits waiting to be expressed. You take the Myers-Briggs test, “I am an ENTP.” You choose a restaurant, “I wish I liked seafood, but I just can’t eat it.” You introduce yourself, “I like to write—a recent thing I wrote? Oh, I haven’t written anything recently…” But empirically, your identity is composed only of the reality you instantiate.
The storehouse model tampers growth in two ways. The first failure mode is treating fantasy as fulfillment. If you believe you’re smart but have nothing to show for it, you may eventually entertain wayward notions like joining your local MENSA chapter, or other hollow proxies, instead of sublimating your ego towards the life you actually want. “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?”
The second failure mode is treating fulfillment as fantasy. It may not occur to you to choose anything better than the default behaviors aligned with your “identity” – that there even is a choice, or a distinction between “you” and “your behaviors.” You say, “That’s just who I am!” True, you can't just will yourself into a new and better identity. But you can will yourself to step in the direction you want. Then, you won’t need to will yourself into a new identity, you’ll simply already be the new identity.
My own progression with seafood was, “I hate seafood, but…” “… I could obviously eat a bit of fish if I really had to,” “… I can do this (gulp),” “… I’ve forced myself to have some before,” “… I’ve tried it a couple times,” “… I’ll have some of the lobster mac and cheese anyway,” “… I might try a bit of the octopus…”
“I hate seafood, but… …wait. I don’t actually hate seafood.”
As James Clear, author of Atomic Habits said, “Motivation often comes after starting, not before. Action produces momentum.”
Understanding
However, I have a different theory than James Clear. I think his insight is a special case of a more general one: understanding precedes behavior change, and action is just one way to generate sufficient understanding. Change through understanding is instant and frictionless. And this truth is so ubiquitous and mundane in daily life that it’s surprising people search past it, hoping to find another secret method – it’s hidden in plain sight. For example:
As a kid, I thought you brush your teeth after breakfast, otherwise you’re smearing food on the mouth you just cleaned. But that was a misconception. You brush your teeth to get rid of bacteria that multiply like crazy overnight, so you don’t swallow them into a new and exciting home in your stomach, or let the plaque fortify into a citadel in the deep high ground of your mouth, using the morning’s sugar & starch supply drop. After learning this, I instantly switched to brushing before breakfast. Not labored through a nagging voice, but followed through with eager clarity.
And again. Practicing for my driving test, I could never remember the arbitrary and ridiculously cautious rule of stopping at a red light with enough space to see the road under the next car’s tires. Until I learned it lets you change lanes rather than be helplessly pinned bumper-to-bumper. After that, I never had to remind myself to remember the rule; I wanted to do it; it solved a problem.
Nearly everything we do is due to an implicit or explicit understanding of how it solves a problem.
A corollary: for things you “know” you should do but still don’t, say, going to the gym; you probably don’t actually “know” why you should do it, deeply enough. If you did, it would be your default mode, like for millions of others. Intellectually knowing it’s healthy is not salient enough. Maybe you don’t fully grasp how having good health would deliver the life you want, or maybe you don’t even know what life you want, so what’s health got to do with it.
The path involves filling these types of knowledge gaps, and everyone’s path is unique to their unarticulated intuitions and misconceptions arising from distinct life experiences.
Liberation
It’s easy to then prescribe “just try everything.” But in practice, that succumbs to a bootstrapping problem: How do I motivate myself to act before I am motivated, so I can be motivated enough to act?
Lots has been said here. The most liberating is: Be honest with yourself and pay attention to how you feel. If you feel ineffably averse to forcing an approach, don’t interpret that as “try harder, there’s something wrong with you for failing,” but as “appreciate that you tried, but that approach won’t work for you now.”
But wait. Earlier you said you forced yourself to eat seafood, and then you were fine with it! So what is it? Should you strain to become your ideal self? Or should you accept yourself as you are!
Truthfully, I don’t know how I started eating seafood after years of aversion. When the time was right, I was just ready. My life experiences likely shifted my values around until a slight bump of an opportunity snapped them in place.
The tension between becoming and acceptance dissolves if you commit to being honest and paying attention. It’s hard to cheat the system by treating self-leniency as permission to coast – you’ll know you’re lying to yourself, and it will erode your soul. If you truly feel no hang-ups about not doing something, either the urgency isn’t there yet, or the life around it hasn’t come into shape yet. Becoming and accepting aren’t usually reconciled in battle, but by realizing some way in which they’re actually the same.
The truth is that you need to both strain to become your ideal self, and accept yourself as who you are. Until you see how they’re the same, you know you’ll have to do both anyway; so switch between them until they meld. An Ecclesiastical truth:
To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven:
A time to eat seafood,
A time to not eat seafood;
A time to write the cover letter,
A time to apply for a different job instead;
A time to accept the scan gun’s disappointing appraisal,
A time to manifest the behaviors that cause a scan gun high score;
A time for long-jumping,
And a time for pants-peeing.