Learning to dawdle so that we can become Darwin
Part two of a diatribe that will surely exceed four parts
Hi friends,
Sunday’s newsletter was about the idea that career-searching should be more strategic than menial, more expressive than restrictive.
Here’s what my friend, the immortal Gabe Lerner, had to say in response:
“I feel particular resonance with this line: ‘looking for a job should be more about finding the way you want to contribute to the world than writing a cover letter.’
During college, I became increasingly convinced of two dueling propositions: the more I heard successful people tell their stories on podcasts or in memoirs, the more I noticed how they had zeroed in on the single issue that they wanted to spend their life addressing. At the same time, I realized that I had no clue what big-picture problem I wanted to solve. I could spin up compelling-enough cover letter narratives—wrapping seemingly unconnected internship or research experiences into a story about why some DC intern coordinator should bring me on for the summer. But each of them felt disingenuous, and they left my brain as quickly as I typed them down.”
Gabe is saying that successful people are HYPER-FOCUSED on ONE THING and they GO AFTER IT. The problem is—how are we supposed to identify the thing we want to go after? The double problem is that we’re supposed to make up that thing and weave it into a consistent narrative of our personhood in every cover letter that we submit. Tough.
My response to Gabe is that we are sold this idea that if we want to be great, we need to focus, to be disciplined, to be “zeroed in.” I think that what we actually need to do first is to play. To dawdle. To take a walk around the lake. My bet is that there are a few things out there that seem like work to others but feel like play to you:
I think of a student I worked with when I was an SAT/ACT tutor during college. Her name is Lauren. I made her subscribe to 4 Cool Jobs way back when, so shoutout to Lauren if you’re reading this!! One day, I asked Lauren to draft an essay so that we could talk about grammar and sentence structure.
Lauren was like: “Okay, but what do you want me to write about?”
Me: “Literally anything that interests you.”
Lauren: “I don’t know what interests me.”
Me, not realizing that I was making the assignment 16x more difficult: “YOU CAN WRITE ABOUT ANYTHING.”
I had no idea what to expect—an essay about dogs? Summer vacation? Four days later, Lauren came to class with a multi-page manifesto on pen design, pen type, pen structure, and how one can match their handwriting tendencies to those traits to produce calligraphic, beautiful penmanship.
I was floored. The essay was amazing. It was everything I had never understood about why my handwriting looked so ugly at random times. Aren’t we are all wondering deep down why this happens when we use one pen over another? Isn’t this a source of entropy in our lives that we’d like to get under wraps? Don’t we think that Lauren should use her theoretical grasp of the pen market to build an AI that analyzes handwriting and recommends a set of pens? And then make money on that via affiliate marketing? Yes, I think so too.
Point is that Lauren, probably at some point when she was procrastinating a supposedly serious activity, went online mused about pen<>handwriting synergy.
This story is similar to an essay that Paul Graham wrote this week that likens bus ticket collectors to inventive geniuses:
“When you look at the lives of people who've done great work, you see a consistent pattern. They often begin with a bus ticket collector's obsessive interest in something that would have seemed pointless to most of their contemporaries. One of the most striking features of Darwin's book about his voyage on the Beagle is the sheer depth of his interest in natural history. His curiosity seems infinite.”
So all you’ve got to do is that, Gabe! Collect some bus tickets. Develop a theory of natural selection.
I know that Paul Graham, Darwin, and Lauren make it seem like it is the most natural thing in the world to develop an overarching obsession for a rare, powerful, minute thing. In truth, I feel stupid all the time when I try to dawdle. Trying to dawdle is a logical double bind—it’s giving yourself an instruction that you must be spontaneous.
A true, unstructured dawdle is rare and kind of a feat of nature. It takes great cognitive labor to sit down and memorize the structural features of bus tickets. It takes great, amorphous psychological inertia to make that labor feel not only worthwhile but effortless.
So the last thing I’d like to do is present the idea that stumbling into play is difficult and serendipitous but not random. It is almost always about answering a need.
The author Deliah Dawson recently posted a fantastic thread about learning to crochet granny squares.
At first, she was apparently very bad:
Gradually, she got better.
So, there ya go. At first, when you try to play at a new thing, it sucks. You have to work contrary to inertia for what always seems like too long. Then it becomes magic. Please draw your attention to this graphical representation:
That’s all for now. Thank you to Gabe for the lovely response to my last post.
xoxoxo
Lea