Navigating incompleteness
The seventh thing I learnt?
I thought I had one more hard-earned lesson to share for this little series. I was wrong.
Sometimes you write a beautiful masterplan. You announce it to the world. You start executing with pride and diligence. Down in the weeds, you begin to loose track of what drove you in the first place. The venture sinks.
Resisting to name things too early is a blessing. Anticipation needs silence. With silence comes a sense of invitation, which seems to carve an opening into the adjacent possible futures.
The world is an open system. I am increasingly convinced that the person you are becoming can only come unannounced. Personal metamorphosis grows only out an epoch of your life which you don't yet understand. It is by relaxing the tyranny of forward-looking meaning making, goal setting and positive positioning, that we can allow the moments of sudden realisation to happen. Who is the stranger I have become and now looks at me in the mirror?
This is Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (2015). A dynamical system that converges too quickly wasn’t very interesting to begin with. The seduction of taking continuous methodical small steps towards our end is perfectly legitimate for small goals, but for greater goals? It can even be counter-productive!
Stanley and Lehman make the case that worthy achievements can't be broken up into a mechanical series of conscious and convergent actions. Their phase space of possible outcomes is simply too big to be searchable this way. Often we need to escape local minima to pursue the global ones. A bit of randomness, serendipity and playfulness can bring us further in our journey.
If only embracing uncertainty can lead you to the places you never felt you deserved or could access, what is stopping you?
Take care,
David
Seven things I know was a series of recollections on the lessons I learned by experience or reflection in 2024. I engaged with the hardest personal subjects I manage to. These were my field notes from the frontlines of unlearning.
Maybe they'll spark your own uncomfortable conversations too… Reply to this e-mai if anything resonated with you, constructively or destructively!