Imagine that you are one of the contestants on the reality show Alone. You make several attempts with your skills to acquire food, but time after time, you fail. Now, let’s modify the premise slightly: you have knowledge of how the other contestants are doing. You see that some contestants are struggling like you, but some are doing better. They hunted down a rabbit or deer and caught fish. You start to copy their strategies. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Every time it doesn’t, you try to explain why it didn’t work. Almost all the time, you blame yourself. You tell yourself that you could have made a different choice, stuck to your strengths, or done something else. You need to decide what to do next. Now you’re in a predicament, and any decision you make could lead you back to the same frustration-blame cycle. This can drive you crazy.
This must be the most shared experience among all human beings. We try something, it doesn’t work, we get frustrated, and we blame ourselves. Unfortunately, this is the only way it could be because no one can tell if something new we try will work or not since no one can predict the future.
There is one solution: to treat the whole exercise as debugging. If we change the framing of the situation as a quest for finding something that works, by explaining to ourselves why something will work and altering the explanation based on our attempt, then we may eventually find what we are looking for. This is not to say that all the frustration and blame goes away. It gives us a form of protection from our insults. Some people say that it’s even possible to enjoy the quest. I think it’s another way of saying enjoy the journey and not worry about the destination.
I’m thinking of all this as I process my own feelings. I want to do something in AI, maybe start my own company, start a blog, build a cool demo. That represents the problem. I have several ways to do something and of which I’m doing none. As I sit and write a deck about my team, my mind drifts towards all the things I could be doing. A quick scan of LinkedIn or Twitter shows a huge parade of demos and accomplishments. That creates envy and a sense of urgency - I want that now! It frustrates me that I’m not doing anything. I blame myself for wasting time when I was younger and not working hard enough. That is demotivating. I can see the cycle of frustration and blame repeat. I have seen this hundreds of times by now.
Taking the analogy above, I should be able to figure out how to change my mindset. The ground rules are:
- Future is unpredictable. Any idea or experiment could work or not.
- Only way to find something that works is to try it and refine.
Right now, I’m stuck not trying anything because I want immediate success. I should fix that by trying one thing and sticking with it.