One day at a time

We’ve written a lot about goal setting and orientation, and these are important topics—it can be hard to achieve a desired outcome if you don’t have any direction in life.

Doing the work is only one piece of the equation—you need to do the work—but the direction is equally important. It’s like walking towards a location without a map, or any guidance whatsoever—you can get lucky and stumble upon your location, and walking is definitely better than not moving, but a well-thought-out strategy and sense of direction will always be better.  So, if this sounds like something that you’ve heard before—you’re right! We think this is important—but, like any other tool you have at your disposal, it has its limitations.

Goal setting and direction is great for smaller tasks, but in the big picture, which is life, it often falls short. Life is too complex to comprehend and trying to create a plan that can cover all your future opportunities and mitigate all of its pitfalls is a futile endeavor. Let’s cut to the point—we humans are not smart enough to make a detailed plan, and people who try often get stressed and end up trying to warp the reality around them to fit their conception or master plan.

The English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead coined the term the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” This is when, e.g., a mathematician falls in love with his theory or creation and tries to warp the surroundings to fit the theoretical model, instead of the other way around. Another way of conceptualizing this notion is to imagine a runner who gets lost in the forest because he trusts his map more than the real world, which he tries to navigate. The notion of misplaced concreteness is also quite useful when thinking about the impact of social media. People genuinely think that what they see on Instagram or Facebook is a reflection of reality, when in fact it resembles more of a picture-perfect postcard than a view into the life of the “author.”

But back to where we came from… you can plan the simplest things, but to plan out your life trajectory with any form of detail resembles the lost runner. You’ll get lost, and you’ll feverishly give even more value to your “map”—because you’ve hedged your direction and purpose in life on the map, which has led you off course. This sounds a bit stupid in our analogy, but in real life, this leads to stress, and we often see people doubling down on their “plans” or belief systems until they end up as victims, blaming others for everything wrong in this world.

So, what should you do then? Well, do like the little kids! Small kids live in the present. They don’t have a master plan, map, or any direction—but they’re truly curious. Try and watch a kid walking around—they’ll look at the trees and insects—marvel at the beauty of the simplest of things—things which most of us adults don’t even notice anymore.

So, the practical advice from us is to slow down—be curious and mindful of your surroundings instead of focusing and living in the future. Look at the opportunities that the real world presents you, instead of the ones in your future plans or the ones depicted on social media. The world is a complex and marvelous place—nature, the interaction between humans, and artistic accomplishments are all examples of wonderful things that you might overlook if you live in the future, but this also works as a strategy for life.

When you look around and navigate the world you don’t see the world as it is—what you see are the action possibilities of things—the car is a “drive me to work thing” and you may see your kids as “obstacles” which you need to manage, so you can get to work. But this is a caricature… it’s the affordance of the thing, which means how you see the action possibilities of a thing in that specific time. This means that you don’t see the complexities of the car—what a marvelous piece of engineering an engine is, or your kids who are small developing humans with hopes and dreams and agency.

The same goes for every other opportunity that the world presents you—you’ll probably miss out on most of them because you're too busy getting to the next thing or looking at your phone.

So, slow down, be present and see the opportunities that present themselves. Be curious and appreciate the beauty and complexity of the things that surround you, and most importantly—live in the present—one day at a time.

Until next time

Scott and Lennart