I value clarity, but I pursue complexity.
It’s not on purpose. I wear a lot of hats as a physician, medical director, IT advisor, family man, and Yorkie chauffeur—who’s also trying to get decent at Gracie jiu-jitsu in decade 6. I yearn for simplicity and clarity, like desert flowers yearn for the rain.
Making things complex is more of a smelly personality trait.
This is true. But that is true at times, too. And don’t forget about this other thing, which seems to contradict the others. Actually, all of them apply, depending on the circumstance.
You might say it’s the philosopher’s approach to life, or at least a scientist’s. There’s a lack of clarity about a thing, and only by keeping your eyes and mind open and being supremely rigorous can you hope to arrive at an understanding of what’s going on.
In a word, clarity.
But there’s another way to get clarity
You can impose it from within.
You act like you know what you are doing.
And you’re done with dithering about nuance or completeness.
You blow right past the folks who are still on the fence while they carefully weigh consequences.
At In-N-Out, you order off the secret menu from memory, and drive off with your mustard-fried double Flying Dutchman, with grilled whole onion wrap and yellow peppers.
With that kind of clarity, you get shizz done, and quick.
Hell, yes, it’s seductive.
So why don’t we act this way all the time?
Consequences
Or maybe fear.
It’s easy to be decisive and badass when you’ve got zero fear. When you can act like you’ve got nothing to lose, that there’s no wrong answer, or that you’re 10 times smarter than anyone else and that whatever happens, you’ll figure it out.
If you’re a catastrophizer, acting with resolute clarity is almost unheard of.
Obsessing about all the ways your plans could go wrong and pitch your family, friends, and all of humanity into The Abyss is paralyzing.
Did she want whole onions or chopped? If you order the wrong one, will she throw a fit and tank the whole weekend? And what about the peppers, now?
If you’ve got a scar across your brain from being yelled at so hard that it’s permanently dented your neurotransmitters, clarity comes hard, if at all.
Many high-scoring, brainy people excel in school. But as company CEOs, if success depends on taking decisive action and risks, and iterating through 7 failures to find the 8th banger success? Not quite so many.
Too many vivid simulations of everything tanking on the way to Hades.
And yet, we get by
As a former valedictorian, I can attest to being able to order at In-N-Out.
And care for my patients, while talking and chewing gum at the same time.
But absolutely, there are endeavors that take way longer than they should.
Being c-a-r-e-f-u-l pulls the handbrake on the roll down the hill, so to speak. There’s friction in looking back up the hill and out the side at the various shops and store windows, instead of accelerating single-mindedly towards the goal.
The taxes get done, but the process takes years off my life. I should be a 4th-degree black belt in two or three martial arts by now. Had I pulled out all the stops from the beginning of the World Wide Web, I’d be Tony Starking my way to a new Avengers tower somewhere in the Balkans, while releasing an open source cure for cancer and stabilizing the dollar.
Is there something inherently human, humane, even noble about holding complexity in the mind’s eye? Generations of academics would say so, but some days the ghosts of the robber barons find that vastly amusing.
If your job, your actual job, is mitigating castastrophes, then you had better be leaning hard into exploring complexity. Professionally overpreparing for disaster is a Good Thing for airline pilots, nuclear power plant operators, and skyscraper architects.
But if it’s Not Actually. Your job. To mitigate disaster. Then you probably shouldn’t look at the world through the lens of omigodomigodomigod.
Yes, bad things can happen. Some of that can be prepared for; most of it cannot. It’s the job of the accountants, mathematicians, and your momma to identify the sliver of life that falls into the former category.
Believing you can exert effort, usually enormous, to sidestep the part of life that is unavoidable, is—and I’m going out on a limb, based on my own personal experience—a sign of some early life trauma that you haven’t yet worked through.
The grand issues are not served by you falling face-first onto the table, smoke coming out of your ears, from stressing over the complexity of life. Complexity exists, in fields like politics, religion, quantum physics, and immunology, and like fractal geometry in nature, it’s also endless.
What’s not real is the mind’s ability to simulate all that accurately and productively. It only thinks it can, and will try endlessly to do so unless you put a limit on it.
Leave a Reply