andrew lynch.net

The two keys to life: running and reading.

When you’re running, and you’re out there and you’re running, there’s a little person that talks to you, and that little person says “Oh, I’m tired, my lung’s about to pop off, I’m so hurt, I’m so tired, there’s no way I can possibly continue.” And you want to quit, right? That person, if you learn how to defeat that person when you’re running, you will learn how to not quit when things get hard in your life.

That’s the title of a speech that Theodore Roosevelt gave in Chicago in 1899. Here is my favourite part:

We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbour; who is prompt to help a friend; but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail; but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.

That’s how long I have left at uni. I was going to write that it feels like just yesterday when I started, but it doesn’t. It feels like three and a half years ago.

But I’ve loved every minute of it. Coming to uni is all I’ve wanted to do since I was about 12 years old, which I know is probably weird – I didn’t want to be an astronaut or a doctor or a formula one driver, I just wanted to be a student. And now I have been. It’s been fantastic, but now I feel like this chapter in my life is just about ready to end, which is good, because it is ending, very soon.

Which leads me, in Jed Bartlet fashion, to ask: what’s next?

I don’t know, but I’m looking forward to it.

I saw a thread the other day on Quora asking how best to respond when a job interviewer asks what you think your weaknesses are. Judging by what people with more experience than me have said, it’s not the best interview question in the world, but in a sledgehammer, brute force kind of way, it does require you to be at least a little introspective and self-critical.

So, what is my biggest weakness, according to me? Undoubtedly, it’s pushing through the dip.

I’ve written before about how a lot of things came easily to me when I was younger. I did well in school, no problem. I did really well in my A-levels, no problem. And I’m doing pretty well at uni. But when something comes up that I truly find challenging, I struggle to push through the dip and persevere with it. find it hard to keep going with a project if it isn’t inherently easy to me.

This is probably a fairly common problem, but that doesn’t make it OK. It’s easily my biggest mental block and what stops me from achieving what I could, if only I could keep working at it. I can look back on tons of things I’ve attempted to do or learn over the past 3-4 years, and had mild succes to begin with, only to give up when it becomes slightly difficult. In fact, here’s a list:

• learning HTML/CSS – I coded my own site, it was OK, and I thought I had it down. Stopped trying to get better.
• comedy writing – I did one show, two years ago, and got a few laughs. Wrote the first half of one episode of a sitcom, and a friend thought it was funny. It’s still on my hard drive.
• learning the guitar – got a few chords down, could play a song or two, and it sounded half-decent.
• blogging – did it for a while, started to get some traction, but didn’t know where to go with it, so I stopped.
• marketing strategy – read some good books, talked to some smart people, worked on a couple of interesting projects, then realised I wasn’t that good. I stopped doing this.
• free work, RPGrad style – worked on some really cool people doing some very interesting work, then stopped briefly to study for exams, and never started again.
• card magic – I used to hustle people in bars playing 3 card monte. It was cool, and I got some free drinks from it, but couldn’t do any of the really hard stuff, so I gave up.
• poker – I started playing online about 18 months ago. Won some decent money, paid for a holiday with it, but couldn’t move up in stakes and really make some good coin, so I gave up.

And that’s just off the top of my head.

My constant failure to push through the dip and acquire some valuable, quality skills and experiences comes from the fact that, if I were to try really hard at something and still suck, it wouldn’t sit well with the self-image that I’ve created, and present me with undeniable evidence that I’m not as smart and confident and brilliant as I think I am. Time and time again, I do the first 20-30% of something, and it’s easy, and I think I’m the man. Then the dip comes, and it’s hard, so I give up, telling myself “I could do [whatever] if I wanted to, but I don’t have time/have better stuff to do/don’t feel like it right now.”

It’s a paralysing fear of failure, of facing the fact that I might have to tear down this carefully crafted self-image and realise how little I know and how much work I need to do to get to where I want to be.

It’s tempting to see my actions as a positive thing – to think that it’s OK to go from one thing to another constantly, telling myself that I’m searching for the thing that I’m passionate about and naturally good, and that once I find that thing, it will come easily and everything will be OK.

But it’s wrong. I’ve just finished Outliers again, and there’s a quote that seems somewhat apt:

Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing that makes you good.

Similarly, working hard isn’t something you do once you’ve found what you want to do. It’s something you should always be doing, and by doing so, you’ll get to where you want.

News broke yesterday that Nokia and Microsoft will join forces in the mobile phone market in an attempt to:

regain ground lost to the iPhone and Android-based devices.

Let’s try and look at this rationally.

So we have Nokia: a company who, 10 years ago, were the dominant player in their sector, only to be swept aside when they failed to adapt quickly enough when Apple and Google decided to disrupt the shit out of the mobile phone market and do stuff that was wildly different and much better than what anyone had done before.

And we have Microsoft, a company who, 10 years ago, were the dominant player in their sector, only to see their grip on the tech industry broken when Apple and Google decided to disrupt the shit out of the tech market, and do stuff that was wildly different and much better than what anyone had done before.

Worse, Nokia’s CEO knows all this, and still decides to go ahead with it. Unbelievable.

To illustrate how doomed I think this move is, here’s a passage from 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

The reality facing the Prussians in 1806 was simple: they had fallen fifty years behind the times. Their generals were old, and instead of responding to present circumstances, they were repeating formulas that had worked in the past. Their army moved slowly, and their soldiers were automatons on parade. The Prussian generals had many signs to warn them of disaster: their army had not performed well in its recent engagements, a number of Prussian officers had preached reform, and, last but not least, they had ten years to study Napoleon – his innovative strategies and the speed and fluidity with which his armies converged on the enemy. Reality was staring them in the face, yet they chose to ignore it

For further reading, here’s another article by Robert Greene comparing Google to Napoleon.