Notes / You can only connect the dots looking back

Smart, ambitious people want to be successful. Nothing wrong with that, but a trap I’ve fallen into is optimizing for legible success, rather than defining my own terms.

Legible success is your job title, salary, apartment, and clothes. These things are visible and comparable. We want to be able to display our success in ways that others can understand and quantify. We like being able to rank successes against each other.

But what if what you want isn’t legible? What if the factors that will make for the most meaningful life are more abstract?

Again, nothing wrong with pursuing legibility, but it should be an intentional decision. You could do a lot worse than try to make more money. But a priori should be why you want to make more money.

Mimetic theory is a growing interest of mine. Many of the things I value and believe are taken from others without thoughtful consideration. I see this in my friends as well, who dedicate their time to pursuing high-prestige careers but can’t really articulate their motivations.

Why are so many of our desires and decisions inherited mimetically? Why are we okay with outsourcing the most important choices in life to no one in particular?

The crux of living mimetically is that you aren’t intentional with how you spend your time. Your desires are taken from others, and you can go years without questioning why you do what you do. It’s possible that your desires are actually the same as those who came before you, but wouldn’t you want to come to that conclusion after careful thought rather than blind belief?

I’m beginning to understand and feel this quote a lot more lately.

I think a big reason why we live mimetically is our love for stories. Stories are comforting and inspiring. We see and hear about the stories of people that came before us—the older friends, siblings, and acquaintances that achieved legible success.

Because their successes are legible, and because we focus on what we can see, we come to believe that their story is the best one. Alternate paths become hobbies, distractions, naive dreams, and eventually fade out of consideration.

We follow invisible life scripts because we want to connect the dots looking forward. There is comfort in knowing the time and effort we spend today will lead us to somewhere we want to go.

This is why it’s so hard to live with intentionality. If you live curiously and intentionally, you’ll likely set yourself on a path that few people have been on. You can try to connect the dots, but it won’t work. There isn’t enough data. No milestones to measure against or success stories to emulate. You are living the life that only you could have thought of.1

It’s risky, because you don’t know how it ends. But I think we tend to overweight the risk of failure. Life is a multi-turn game and failure is almost always you can recover from. While the upside is more nebulous, it isn’t trivial.

How will you spend your time? What do you want to work on? What do you value? What would you trade to not wield final say over these questions? When we live a life of certainty, we give up our ability to decide on these for ourselves.