Most Things Are Not Like A Trip To Pluto
On January 19, 2006, NASA launched the space probe New Horizons to do a flyby of Pluto. When New Horizons made its approach on July 14, 2015, NASA announced: “New Horizons’ almost 10-year, three-billion-mile journey took about one minute less than predicted when the craft was launched in January 2006.” Astrophysicists predicted the almost 10-year, three-billion-mile journey with 99.99998% accuracy. Before launch, they were 99.99998% certain about what the next 10 years held for New Horizons. Because astrophysics is what the writer Morgan Housel calls a “field of precision,” where outcomes can be precisely forecasted with near-perfect accuracy. It would be nice if more things in life were more like astrophysics. If you could predict how a decision would play out with 99.99998% accuracy. If—before starting a business or writing a book or quitting a job—you were 99.99998% certain it’d work out. But most things in life are not fields of precision. Most things in life, as Housel writes, “are fields of uncertainty, overwhelmingly driven by decisions that can’t easily be explained with clean formulas, like a trip to Pluto can.” So with most things, you’re better off starting imprecisely than being put off, plagued, or paralyzed by the delusion of certainty.
Navigating fields of uncertainty—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
It’s All A Crapshoot
Before he went on to have one of the great comedy careers of all time, Will Ferrell pursued a career in sports broadcasting. After graduating from college with a sports journalism degree, Ferrell took a job at a small cable news station in Los Angeles, where he learned about The Groundlings, a sketch comedy school in West Hollywood. He signed up for comedy classes at The Groundlings, and as he wrote comedy sketches to perform in class, he experienced this growing, “gnawing” desire to quit his job “to pursue this comedy thing.” Torn between the stability of his job and the uncertainty of “giving this comedy thing a shot,” Ferrell said, “I had the best conversation with my dad,” a musician who’d navigated an unpredictable career, jumping from gig to gig without ever finding steady mainstream success. “I said, ‘so Dad, I think I’m going to try to get into comedy. Any words of advice?’ And he said, ‘You know, if it was only about talent, I wouldn’t worry about you because you really have some talent. But just know that there’s so much luck involved and that if you go down this road, and it’s starting to feel like you’re not getting anywhere, it’s okay to quit and just do something else.’” Ferrell called it the best anti-pep pep talk ever, saying he interpreted his dad’s advice as, “don’t worry if you fail, because it’s a crapshoot anyway.” “And for some reason, that completely took the pressure off. So I approached comedy with like, ‘This is probably not going to happen, so might as well have a blast,’ and because I gave myself that break internally, I think it—unbeknownst to me—opened all these doors because people could read that I was so free with what I was doing.”
8 or 9 Times Out of 10, It Doesn’t Work
Jerry Seinfeld started performing stand-up comedy in 1976. Since then and to this day, every day he sits with a yellow legal pad and writes jokes. Given that he’d been honing his craft for 47 years, he was asked, “How do you know a joke is going to work on stage?” Seinfeld said, “You don’t.” “You just trust yourself?” the interviewer asked. “No you don’t,” Seinfeld said. “There’s no trust. It’s excruciating—8 or 9 times out of 10, it doesn’t work.” The interviewer pushed back, noting that he had recently seen Seinfeld perform at The Beacon Theatre in New York City, where Seinfeld got nothing but laughs. “What you saw is what’s worked,” Seinfeld said. “But you only saw 1.5% of what I’ve tried.” Rarer than comedic talent, Seinfeld adds, is the ability to persist in a field of near-complete uncertainty, where even after 47 years, one is wrong 98.5% of the time. “It’s slightly terrorizing,” Seinfeld said. “A lot of people can be funny, a lot of people can write jokes, but not a lot of people can handle that daily slight terror.”
Don’t Be Paralyzed By The Delusion Of Perfection
For almost two years, I thought about writing online but was hung up on the idea that I needed a clear niche, needed to know for certain what to write about. So in a Google Doc I called “BLOGDOC,” I was drafting articles and essays, waiting for patterns to emerge that would help determine what to write about. When I told Ryan Holiday about this complicated way in which I was privately writing stuff to determine what to write about publicly, he said, “Just start. You’re trying to map out the whole 9 innings. Just throw the first pitch. You’re better off starting imperfectly than being paralyzed by the delusion of perfection.” In hindsight, I see I was in the trap of wanting “fields of uncertainty” to be more like “fields of precision.” I was uncomfortable with and uncertain about the quality of my writing—rather than waiting for the certainty about what to write about, I was really waiting for the writing to get better. And the writing can always, endlessly, get better. So I called this newsletter SIX at [sometimes a little after!] 6 on Sunday to counteract my desire for certainty, to remove the option of my brain going, “It’s not ready yet, keep working on it and send it tomorrow,” and then tomorrow, it’s, “it still needs work, send it tomorrow,” and then tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
“That Won’t Work” Is The Worst Thing You Can Ever Say
When he first had the idea for a third-person narrative song about a fictitious guy who builds a submarine, John Mayer thought to himself, “I’ve never been a third-person sort of narrative writer, ever.” He wasn’t certain he could do it. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the idea, so eventually, he gave it a shot, creating what is my favorite John Mayer song, Walt Grace’s Submarine Test, January 1967. Mayer said it taught him this: “Don’t shoot ideas down before you try them. ‘That won’t work’ is the worst thing you can ever say. ‘That didn’t work’ is cool, but ‘That won’t work’ is not a way to go through life.”
The Greatest Disease The Mind Faces
In his book Mastery, Robert Greene writes, “The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.” With most things in life, it’s impossible to be 99.99998% sure this or that is going to work out. Just give it a shot. You’re better off starting imperfectly than being paralyzed by the delusion of perfection. You’re better off saying, “That didn’t work,” than, “That won’t work.”