#22 - Preparation, Ad Nauseam 🤢
Spotify, An Escaped Convict's Journey Through India, and 11 Babies in Antartica
Happy Wednesday! 👋🏽
Hello and welcome to another edition of Long Way Home🏡, where each week, I share an original essay I've written loosely related to creativity, emotional intelligence, and happiness. I've been enjoying writing about some of the mental barriers that hold me back from achieving my full potential. It's almost as if putting it in writing defangs them.
Today's essay is another one in this vein. Let me know what you think of this style and subject matter. Of course, I'm always trying to see what feels natural as I work to define a niche and tone for the newsletter. Your feedback is always appreciated.
In this week's LWH🏡:
💫 - Preparation, Ad Nauseam by Vandan Jhaveri
🎙️ - Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify — Habits, Systems and Mental Models for Top Performance (#484) by The Tim Ferriss Show
🎥 - Why 11 Babies Have Been Born in Antartica by Half as Interesting
📚 - Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
Let’s get started.
Preparation, Ad Nauseam
Like many of us, I'm terrible at starting. It takes me weeks or months to begin something slightly uncertain despite overwhelming evidence that learning through experimentation is a winning strategy. I get stuck in the dreadful preparation phase.
I live in the preparation phase for three reasons:
To become informed
To become comfortable
To become worthy
Becoming Informed
Regardless of the medium or subject matter, there's a pressure to do my homework before starting anything creative and risky. I require myself to learn about the greats, read all the how-to guides I can get my hands on, and become a connoisseur of the minutiae. All this before ever producing anything of my own. In theory, this sounds like the promising first steps of a bright creative future, but of course, it never pans out that way. I'll tell you why.
For me, this desire to be as informed as possible is an exercise in de-risking an inherently uncertain task and making success inevitable. I feel like if I de-risk as much as I can, I will eliminate my chances of making obvious mistakes and subsequently making a fool of myself.
De-risking experiments sounds like a noble cause, but the issue with working to be adequately informed before beginning something risky is that I never know when I am adequately informed. The more I learn, the further the goal posts move, and inaction settles in.
Further, learning about others' experiences is not nearly as interesting and exciting as the idea of doing it myself. At the impetus of my "preparation", I become somewhat familiar with the landscape and feel as though the subject isn't as interesting as I thought it was. This ends by abandoning it before I get my feet too wet.
Interestingly, I should have expected this. Since it was the thought of doing the activity that was so exciting to me in the first place, I shouldn't be so surprised when studying the activity doesn't bring me the expected level joy. I was inspired to be a practitioner, not an academic. But I hold myself back from doing the activity because I believe that studying at length is a necessary qualifier.
Becoming informed is a charade we engage in because we believe that it will make it easier to be a practitioner. But we know that we can read all the books there are about starting a business, writing a novel, or recording an album, but actually attempting those activities would lead us to roadblocks that all the how-to guides in the world couldn't prepare us for.
Becoming Comfortable
Preparation is a form of procrastination. We tell ourselves that we need to know more before we're ready to start something uncertain, but really, we are desperately looking for an excuse to push our start date as far back as possible.
Starting something new is terrifying. It's only natural that we want to avoid it. We do things that feel productive to buy us time in the hopes that we grow desensitized to the fear of starting. We pray that the extra time will allow us to feel so comfortable that beginning feels casual and unceremonious.
But it never happens.
The task of starting never gets less daunting no matter how much we prepare. Deep down, we know that preparation and action exist in different worlds, and only a tiny fraction of what we learn in our preparation phase will eventually prove useful. It's easier, however, to convince ourselves we're doing crucial, irreplaceable preparation rather than facing our fears and potentially producing something unworthy of adoration.
Becoming Worthy
Before beginning anything uncertain, there's (ideally) the potential for major reward. To feel worthy of that reward, I prepare.
There's a general sentiment that I need to "earn my stripes" before attempting anything. I need to have done painstaking research to appreciate the greats, learn the intricacies of the medium, and know for certain that what I have to contribute is novel, impressive, and valuable. It's a tall order.
If I were to begin with experimenting in a space and found any degree of success, those rewards would feel stolen. I would feel like I'm cheating. I would feel undeserving of any reward. To ensure that I never feel like an imposter, I force myself to trudge through mountains of homework that I assign myself that I can point to if anybody were to ever question whether I deserve what I get. For some reason, the answer needs to be, without a shadow of a doubt, that I do.
I think back to young adolescents who make beats on their computers and post them to SoundCloud, or bloggers who used to go viral because of Tumblr. I know for certain that I'm wired differently than these people. I would have never been able to share work until I was convinced I had earned the right to, and at that young age, there's nothing I could have possibly done to feel as though I had earned that right.
Thus, I envy the adolescent SoundCloud beat-maker and viral Tumblr blogger. They weren't governed by this egregious notion that they need to prove to themselves that they're worthy of becoming successful through excessive studying before even allowing themselves to try. It unlocked them to cultivate their passion, develop their skills, and receive much needed feedback. Those of us stuck in the rut of needing to feel worthy of success hold ourselves back every single day.
Prepared
Preparation undoubtedly has its place. Of course, some preparation before embarking on any risky adventure is recommended. And there are personalities that could certainly benefit from more preparation. But for me, the guise of thoroughness is the enemy of progress.
The kind of preparation that would really benefit me is mentally preparing myself to fail early on, to not receive positive feedback anytime soon, and to live in the discomfort of uncertainty.
I need to prepare myself to appreciate that building something I care about will never magically be easy once I uncover some secret through my preparation. It may get easier, but it will never get easy, and if I ever want to build valuable and enjoyable, I need to be okay with that.
The quickest way to learning how to do something well is by doing it poorly first. Usually, quite a few times. This phase is irreplaceable. No amount of "studying" will suffice.
How full of wonder our lives would be if we didn't convince ourselves that we needed to be masters before we were allowed to be beginners. Let's commit to acting in some of the areas in which we are merely preparing right now. I think we will both be pleasantly surprised.
Prepared,
Vandan🏡
@vandan_jhaveri
🎙 – Orchestrated
Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, is a breath of fresh air when stood beside other stereotypical tech CEOs. His gentler temperament, his timid demeanour, and his thoughtful approach give the impression that he's not trying to trample over anybody as Spotify steadily rises to global audio dominance.
This interview is a goldmine of actionable advice for leaders at any level within their organization. Daniel discusses how he thinks about meetings, providing leaders with opportunity, and aligning his leadership style with his personality type for the most sustainable advantage. Listen here to learn how Daniel has gotten out of his employees way when he realizes that he's the problem.
🎥 – Frozen 11
Half as Interesting is another channel by the creator and narrator behind Wendover Productions. As you may have noticed in last week's LWH🏡, I've been binging videos in this corner of YouTube, learning all sorts of geographic, economic, and geopolitical oddities.
In this video, we learn why the UK, Argentina, and Chile, were in a bit of a race to have one of its women deliver a baby on the continent as a tool for colonization. I hope that watching this video will lead you down a rabbit hole of HAI videos like it did for me. Watch here to see why anybody in the world would want to have their baby in the most isolated and uninhabitable place on Earth.
📚 – Escaped
Last week, I finally completed Shantaram, the 932-page epic novel written semi-autobiographically by Gregory David Roberts. There's so much to say about this novel, but one of the coolest experiences while reading it was that you never knew which parts were fiction and which parts were true. The novel is about a man named Greg who escapes prison in Australia, runs away to Mumbai, and starts a new life in this new country. He gets whisked away by a life of crime with the Mumbai mafia and lives in the slums as its resident doctor.
It feels as though there is no limit to Roberts' ability to come up with beautiful one-liners that rattle your understanding of the world and everybody in it. The book has taught me so much about love, crime, resilience, pain, and friendship. This ambitious novel somehow manages to do all these topics justice, and despite its length, I think it's worth your time.