When I finished grad school, I was into the idea that you're supposed to have a complete (or at least above average) skill set before you set out to do something. Started from the bottom and now we’re here was something only Drake could say. For me, it was more - I have to start from the top and stay there. I tried to learn everything before doing something. I wanted to learn about microeconomics, read shareholder letters, understand the history of money and banking, trading, all before I started investing. One would think I had set out to solve all of the world's monetary issues, I just wanted to invest a couple of hundred dollars.
Similarly, I recently started running. While I always loved walking infinite distances, it wasn’t that strenuous. Naturally, before I picked up running, I wanted to create a proper plan for myself, nutrition exercise, and all. I wanted to understand my body type, my metabolism, my underlying patterns before finding the perfect plan for me. Well, I kind of tried but in the end, it didn't exactly help. Running is the one place where knowing things in advance had little rewards. All our bodies are different and we come across different kinds of problems when running. Maybe I run out of breath, maybe you get shin splints, maybe your friend's legs refuse to move. You can study the whole field of running for 30 yrs, from muscles to terrains, and then start to run, you still will not run smoothly when you start because 1. your muscles need that exercise. 2. you won’t know where it will hurt unless you actually make your muscles do the work. Knowledge doesn't help, execution does. Hence before I started running, I was aware of the general issues I might encounter but when I did face an issue, I had to go look it up again because the second time around was when I actually understood what the video meant.
It is the same for other areas in life, especially the ones where you are looking to grow. You need to do it. Or as Nike says, you need to just do it. It doesn't help to plan down to the finest detail before you've set foot on the terrain. It helps to be aware of what might come and it helps to have some foresight but it doesn't help to wait until you have ultimate superiority in terms of knowledge. I don't mean don't acquire the knowledge and wing it always. But it is important to have childlike resilience when executing something new. The act of balancing, falling, getting up again, balancing slightly differently, and then succeeding is the act one needs to perfect.
Execution is a balancing act between winging it and collecting knowledge. Over time, you learn which one to prioritize.
The act of doing something involves, well, doing it. But when we do start doing it, we often run into a sort of restlessness. One of the things we are restless about it is that we are not getting done with it quickly enough. Let me take a step back. Sometimes when we are trying to start something new, our motivation is split into two aspects - one part of us wants the identity associations that come from the activity (I want to run because I want to be seen as fit) and the other part is the curious part that genuinely wants to explore (I want to run because I want to see what my body can do). When the self that seeks identity overtakes the process of learning, it becomes less about discovery and more about testing your "innate" talent. After all, it is far more attractive to discover your talent than to build it.
Because of this when we enter a field as a nobody and when we have just begun executing, we feel driven by the urge to prove that we deserve to be here, to prove that we know it all and we aren’t just a rookie. We are in a hurry to gain respect and to belong to the class.
But it is misguided. We don’t have to prove anything to anybody. We just have to make sure we are learning the basics right and are getting results. The results the ones that must earn us respect, and not our self-submitted proofs.
Accepting a learning path instead of a goal also means that we will be forced to realize from time to time that we know nothing. And not in a magnanimous "I am a student of the universe, I know nothing" manner, but more in an "Everyone in the room knew but you didn't" manner. Because chasing learning begins with being honest about our defects, of which there are plenty at the start. Over time, being aware of faults, we make fewer mistakes. It is hard going through the motions of failures and slow progress. It is hard to hold back the urge to prove that you know it. After all, if all that matters, in the end, is reaching the end goal then why should we jog when we can sprint.
In the last post, we discussed placing your confidence in the actions and not in the outcome, the act of getting started is similar to that. In order to build a cadence, it is important to place our judgment on exercising the muscle of execution rather than judging how far execution brought us. This is because weakened execution leads to more fundamental mistakes and develops blind spots. And over time these fundamental mistakes compound to bring more issues. The headstart gained by skimming over details, in the beginning, is later lost in dealing with the consequences of the blind spots.
It is indeed very frustrating to have to learn things when everyone else seems to have them figured out. Or to do the grunt work when others seem to have the innate ability, but it is important to remember that you are doing it to strengthen your abilities, to eventually feel that smooth rhythm, to turn an unknown terrain into the home ground and it is okay to take your time doing that. It is okay to make mistakes and it is even more important to get back up and keep doing it over and over again.Â
Until next time,
Ketakee