A Bit of Audacity

It was a much needed break in order see things clearly again, even though I thought I wasn’t using it well.

This morning I felt bored and uninspired. It wasn’t because of the lack of things to do. I do have in my mind a few interesting blog post topics which have been simmering, like consciousness in AI, or the characteristics of language and knowledge acquisition. Alternatively, I could be doing some planning for a smoother Q4 at work. At least, I could do some tidying up of all the note papers I have.

Strangely, I didn’t want to indulge in any entertainment either. So I just sat at the desk, trying to think and staring at things. It was two hours of pure boredom. I knew this meant something but I couldn’t decipher it during that period of time.

It was a perceived sense of insignifance of the things I have been doing. It isn’t that I find them meaningless. They are all quite meaningful to my life as I wrote on this blog in the past. Rather it is a reminder about the missing of a slight bit of audacity or boldness. I was not attacking the most important problems I know. As quoted in Paul Graham’s Essay Good and Bad Procrastination:

What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?

Why Aren’t We Working On The Best Thing?

Certainly the biggest reason is the fear of failure. If you work on hard things, it is almost destined to fail at least once. Normally, it is hundreds or thousands of mini-failures. The frustration and the uncertainty about if any potential reward weigh on us. Is it worth it? What have I got myself into? Why don’t I just pick the easier path? The self-doubt and self-questioning really kicks in harder than a punch on the face. You’ve got to be willing to crash and burn.

It is a challenge to our ego. How can you know you’re right when the other billions on this earth, with many of them more shining, say otherwise? If you’re wrong, it can feel like a gigantic embarrassment. Or, you may offend someone. Someone may disagree with you completely. The fear of ostracism is still hard-wired into our psychology. It requires courage to be wrong on a massive scale.

It is just plain dull. Most of them time it won’t be eureka moment. Even if you do have such eureka moment, you still need to work it out in a way that is useful. For example, turning an idea in my mind into a blog post is often a painful experience. The speed of typing it out is way slower than the speed of thoughts. And I often can’t recall the right words or expressions. It is rare not to feel stuck.

Lastly, you’ll have to leave many things undone. It is always not enough. I used to be quite proud of being able to manage all the things quite well when I was still in uni. But now, I know that I can never finish them all. I can’t even make a list where I can enumerate all the things I should do. And you’ll start to drop balls and face your personal limitations.

The Antidote

Paul Graham offered a few tips at the end of his essay. But I think boiling down, it is about learning to take unnatural steps, something that are not instinctive:

In athletics, some things like becoming a sprinter can be learned relatively quickly because they take a natural motion and refine it. Others, like boxing, take much longer to master, because they require lots of unnatural motions. For example, when going backwards in boxing, it’s critically important to pick up your back foot first, because if you get hit while walking backwards the natural way—picking up your front foot first—often leads to getting knocked cold. Learning to make this unnatural motion feel natural takes a great deal of practice. If you do what feels most natural as a CEO, then you may also get knocked cold.

It definitely won’t be a comfortable thing. But the good news is that it is actually a lot easier given a few facts:

• The world is forgiving and as long as you are not doing something that kills yourself (physically or socially), you’ll always get another chance.
• Being wrong doesn’t mean you are a bad person per se, as long as you can recognise your shortfall, learn about the reality and correct it.
• Dull work is certainly better than mindless pleasure (or worse, just doing something mindless without pleasure); reward isn’t guaranteed but usually you’ll get somewhere.
• Leaving things undone may cause problems, but you tend to get way more in return for working with hard issues.

The Best Thing I Can Work On

Going back to the most important problems I know, there are actually two.

The first one is to master the black art of human organisation and try to pass down things I learnt to have other replicate it. Finally I recognised that I can no longer make meaningful individual contribution without jeopardising the operation of the whole system. To ensure a sustainable organisation development, I must be willing to let something slide while not tolerating deep problems. I was wrong to think that better technology can solve many issues. It does help to a small extent, but the more fundamental issue is sociological in nature. Building a reliable large-scale system is in the end a people issue. Furthermore, it is not only an internal issue but it involves a lot of external interaction. Developing a useful software requires you to learn the unintelligible language of end-user and to manage them well. Programming actually comes last.

The second one is to carry on with my endeavour to sort out a comprehensive view of language and (the acquisition of) knowledge. It always seems too audacious while I am too ignorant. The more I learn about different branches of knowledge, the more I don’t know. How can I know that I am heading towards something useful? The motivation behind is to make everything simpler to reason and communicate about under a broader framework, like how category theory establishes a common language for many wildly different mathematical structures.

Final Thoughts

I don’t know if the above stuff would actually get me anywhere fruitful. I’m in a fortunate position to try out and no need to worry about all the life responsibilities for a while more. I may fail again and again, embarrass myself by being wrong and disappoint people who trust me. But it seems each of us needs a bit of audacity in our own way to realise and refine one’s meaning.

P.S. I think Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 matches the image in my head about knowledge: a few simple, recurring, atomic building blocks, arranged into layers and given some transformations at different places. Eventually, it becomes the complexity which we find it hard to see through.

Work it harder, make it better
Do it faster, makes us stronger
More than ever, hour after hour
Work is never over