Put yourself in situations

You don't need a plan. You need to put yourself in a situation and watch what happens.

I’ve been on holiday with my oldest and dearest friends this week. Their eldest son has recently finished school and is unsure about his next steps. Chatting in the car about it yesterday, I could sense his frustration. He doesn’t want more of the same - boring essays and school work. He wants to work, but doesn’t want a shitty unskilled job he’ll get stuck in. He also doesn’t want to study something random if he doesn’t know the jobs that go with it. More broadly, he doesn’t know what jobs there are. In school, he told me yesterday, they only mentioned the headlines: doctor, lawyer, teacher, accountant, engineer. But people are doing all sorts of stuff… so, how? What jobs are there? And how do you find out about them?

I did more listening than talking, because I’m starting to learn that my voice is nothing more than a high-pitched whine to people aged between 12 and 22. Still, I did suggest he pick something to study based on what he found interesting and trust that putting himself into a new situation (rather than languishing at home) would be the most useful next step.

Like most people, the kid wants a step-by-step plan, but those are hard to come by, and they’re the most boring way to live your life anyway. I’m a big believer in the life strategy of putting yourself in situations.

Situations where you’ll meet new people, discover new options, and expand your possibilities. My 18-year-old mate doesn’t know what jobs there are. How could he? I didn’t know policy was a job until I was in postgrad. I didn’t know consulting existed until my third year in the workforce. I didn’t know public speakers were a thing until I was asked to speak at a conference. You don’t know what you don’t know, and when you’re at a crossroads, the smartest thing is usually to expand the limitations of your possibilities.

Sahil Bloom calls it the Luck Razor. He says: choose the path with the biggest luck potential. I don’t know about luck, but I do know a bit about possibility - and you don’t find much of it by sleeping at home until 2 pm and hanging out with the same people every day. You encounter possibilities when you enter new situations where the environment, people, rules, options and pathways are different from the ones you’ve experienced before.

When you can be a tiny fish, you blow your options wide open. You have a chance conversation, observe someone else’s choices, or learn about something you had no idea about, which opens a door to the next thing, and the next. This is so important when we’re young, and we’ve only seen a tiny sliver of the kind of lives people live, but just as important as we get older, and fear and inertia threaten to narrow our lens again. Just being places with people is how I encountered most of my life’s possibilities. I want that for my kids, too.

Fiction writer Brandon Taylor wrote about situations recently, for story-writers. One thing he wrote stuck with me:

Details without relation is just stuff. Actions without relation are just arbitrary moves.

Situations aren’t about your character, their back-story, or their motivations. Situations are about relationships between things, people, and places. These relationships are dynamic and unpredictable, and the choices a character makes in response to the situations as they change ultimately shape a plot. Or, you know… a life.

Put yourself in situations and watch what happens.

Til next week,
AM

If these thieves had just stayed home, they never would have been able to grab a free laptop, wallet and other items just by cruising through a car park at night. Plus they would have deprived themselves of the opportunity to f**k up six weeks of my life with admin, insurance and car repairs. Kids need to put themselves in situations.

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You don't know how great you can be: expand your possibilities