I remember listening to a podcast by Glenn Loury (a professor of economics at Brown University) where he said that people don’t benefit from being given money as much as they benefit from “increasing their productive capacity.”
I think this is a profound insight, and something upon which I would like to expand here.
The basic subject of this newsletter is
How do I become a more action-oriented person?
How do I go from
waiting,
hoping,
fantasizing,
and pleading
to doing?
What needs to happen for me to make the fundamental shift of perspective from being in the stands to being on the court?
I started with the quote from Professor Loury because “productive capacity” is where the answer lies.
What do I mean by that?
When you center the matter of your productive capacity, everything falls into place.
When you scrutinize, encourage, promote, facilitate, and reward your ability to take action, your actions improve.
They improve in quantity, quality, and spirit.
The more you control and improve your actions, the more your results will satisfy you. By results, I mean the various states of affairs that constitute your life.
Your life is the breakfast you’ve just cooked for yourself. It is not a series of circumstances handed down by some higher power.
In Vasistha’s Yoga, an ancient book of Hindu Scripture of unknown authorship, Swami Venkatesananda’s translation (try saying that name five times in the mirror on a dark stormy night and see if you suddenly smell lamb korma), the following diamond of language is imparted to us:
“And the wise seeker knows:
That the fruit of my endeavor
Shall be commensurate
With the intensity
Of my own self-effort,
And no fate or God may ordain it otherwise.”
Dear reader, if you were to start every day, for the rest of your life, by saying those words, you would become an unstoppable force in no time.
Those words make up the mantra of the action-oriented person, the high agency person, the doer, the winner, the hero. To say there is no power in the world that can deny me the consequences of my actions is to center your productive capacity.
To be clear: of course there are circumstances beyond your control, that you did not choose and cannot change. It is my experience, however, that the only people who invoke such circumstances are those who do not take control of what can be controlled.
How to expand your productive capacity:
Step one: what to do when you don’t know what to do.
This could be an entire newsletter, or even an entire book: how to expand your range of behaviors to the point where nothing can cow you into passivity.
Being action-oriented does not mean that you always know what to do! Productive people do not have all the answers. But what they do have are go-to actions they deploy the moment uncertainty arises. Here are some of them:
Identify uncertainty.
If you can say, “I am unclear on this point,” you are already on the road to clarity.
Confusion has a flavor, so to speak. The moment you taste it, train yourself to stop. Stop, zoom in, and go back over whatever it was you were doing when that feeling hit you.
Maybe it was a word you missed, or misread, or didn’t understand.
Maybe someone glossed over a cluster of behaviors with an umbrella term, and you don’t know the composite parts it covered. Someone said “be more charismatic,” and you don’t know what that means.
You’ve gotten a few steps into a process and find yourself stalling, because you don’t know what to do next.
You have a problem that isn’t going away.
These are all forms of uncertainty. Whenever you don’t feel totally in control of yourself, or totally certain of what it is you’re doing, stop and interrogate the situation.
Uncertainty has two basic forms:
External: not knowing what something is.
Internal: not knowing what to do.
Confront uncertainty by naming it.
Whether you’re in a group or talking to one other person, as crazy as it sounds, you are allowed to say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.” You can ask people to repeat themselves, you can repeat back the part you didn’t get, you can politely request that someone elaborate. It’s totally okay.
When you’re not sure what to do next, the process is similar. Here you are, someone who doesn’t know something. The easy, sensible thing would be to ask somebody who does know. That could either take the form of reaching out to someone or, more likely these days, by using the Internet.
One of the beauties of the “information economy” is that for everything you might be curious about there are at least half a dozen other people with dedicated YouTube channels on the subject. How-to guides are not hard to come by.
Get in the habit of referencing them often, even out of idle curiosity (what do I have to do to a surface before applying primer? What special cookware do I need to make a souffle? How do I pronounce souffle?).
Another benefit of going online for how-to help is that you can often get individual steps broken down to the granular level. In some cases, this is as good having someone working with you one on one, if you are sufficiently determined.
When a form of mentorship is required, however, you can’t let your own inhibitions stop you. Find someone who does something well, and buy their time in some way. If this feels awkward for you, don’t worry: you can own the awkwardness. When you call or text, just acknowledge that you feel awkward making the request. Explain what you’re trying to do and why, and give some context, briefly, about how and where you’ve hit a wall in your own efforts.
In my experience, people are not just willing but happy to jump in there and solve a problem with someone – what’s draining is being asked to do something for someone who is themself passive.
Show me that you’re trying, show me where you hit a limit, show me the failed attempts to overcome it on your own, and I can really see that my presence here is necessary. I’m being called upon, not taken for granted, not the enabler of another’s laziness or entitlement.
The other big obstacle to taking action is the fear of making a mistake
Since this is a topic done very close to death in self development circles, I want to give a novel spin on it, if possible.
Live your life like you’re putting together a puzzle.
You’ve got all the pieces in front of you on a big table. You’ve got an image of what the completed puzzle looks like on the lid of the box to keep you going, but mostly what you’re doing is an endless series of trials and errors.
You’re always looking for the missing piece to expand on what you currently have, and the only way to find it is to try however many pieces that don’t fit as it takes until, all of a sudden, you find one that does. And then what? Off to look for the next missing piece, somewhere among the pile of unsorted pieces.
When you try a piece that doesn’t work, you don’t think to yourself, “oh no, I made a mistake.” You just think “this is not the right piece.” You drop it and resume your search. You trust yourself to recognize what two rightly paired pieces fitting together actually looks and feels like. You’re not in your head – you’re just trying things until something works.
Is there more to it than that? Of course there is. But you’ll never discover the “more to this than that” if you become discouraged and slow or even cease your efforts. Action is the source of results, and therefore action alone is the source of the information that gives rise to learning, adaptation, insight, and finally, wisdom.
The real mistake is quitting, not the mistake that makes you quit.
One last comment on this sub topic:
For the truly ambitious, imagine that you are starting something so big that it could not possibly be finished in one lifetime. Think of another person discovering your unfinished work and vowing to see it through. I think this way about the composers and poets that I cherish – that the questions that drove them are alive within me, disquieting me and driving me ever onward. Mistakes are inevitable, but quitting is inexcusable.
Last topic for today:
What to do when you make a serious mistake?
This is a separate question to answer, independently of the just do it ethos imparted above. After all, some things have a vastly narrower margin for error than others. Imagine a surgeon, a bomb squad technician, or a lifeguard having a flippant attitude toward mistakes, and just moving on to the “next puzzle piece” in the way I described above. No. Absolutely not.
The spirit of unrelenting effort and indefatigable optimism must never approach the sort of mania that makes someone indifferent to their mistakes. Care and precision are of the utmost importance. Not for the sake of your reputation, but for the sake of others. Everything you do is for someone. Not in a servile way, but simply in the sense that a verb has an object. A transitive verb. You do X to/with/for Y, do you not?
So, mistakes effect real people. Mistakes by definition expend resources unsuccessfully. Success must ultimately justify the cost of resources expended along the way (another reason why quitting is a serious decision).
Let me then arrive at a salient point:
If you want to stay in the game long enough to finally get it right and justify whatever it cost along the way, you must learn to own up to your mistakes. You must learn to acknowledge them by naming them, and, if necessary, describing them in detail, along with their causes, directly to the person or people impacted by them.
Let’s not sugarcoat this. This can be truly agonizing.
I know I was supposed to do X, and I did Y anyway.
I tried to do X and I failed, and Y was the consequence.
I didn’t ask for help or delegate it because I believe that I could do it.
I became distracted. I was preoccupied with Z.
I was emotional.
If you see what you should have done, outline that in equally clear detail. It really, really matters. Yes, it can be emotionally exhausting to do this. I’ve found that the stinging, burning discomfort of negative consequences, faced forthrightly, reforms behavior quickly and permanently. How many people have forgotten that you can’t touch a hot stove?
When you escape the pain, you escape the lesson, because the pain is the lesson. Bad things are bad because they cause unnecessary suffering. Good things often require momentary discomfort: experiencing each, fully, is how you discern the difference, and thereby come to make prudent choices on a consistent basis.
This point borrows from a central point of last week’s newsletter: it is madness to ignore your own knowledge. When you pay a high price for it, you tend to value it. Pain is a high price.
Tying it all together: why focus on obstacles, rather than actions?
This article promised a discussion of your productive capacity, and how to increase it. By now, it might appear that I have broken my promise.
Rather than give you the secrets to galvanizing yourself into motion, or the best way to collect data on your use of time, your effectiveness and efficiency, I’ve only discussed the ways to remove obstacles to the presumed instinct toward activity. Why?
Because responsiveness is innate. A tiger spends all day tigering. The tiger and its tigering-ness are one, inseparable, impossible to discuss as two different things. Being and doing are the same thing: a light shines. There is no coherent statement about something that is a light and then decides to go and do some shining.
And yet, somehow, people are lost in this navel gazing malaise.
Who am I?
Why am I here?
What should I do?
I submit to you that such thoughts are forms of illness, and you should manage them as one manages an illness: obliterate the cause, and witness a remission of symptoms. Get back to tigering, as it were.
You know what to do, in the sense that the you who is you, and the you who does what it is that you do are the same you. The interruption of this is madness.
You can walk fine – remove the thorn in your heel or the pebble in your shoe or the ill fitting shoe from your foot. Hence, I speak of the removal of impediments.
Responsiveness is innate.
You do wish to win daily and hourly,
you do wish to grow in skill, knowledge, and in the breadth of your behavioral repertoire.
You do wish to become more effective, subtle, at ease with yourself, and respected by others.
If the obstacles to your nature are removed, you need merely remain active in your own way over a long enough time for the desired results to come.
Begin by scrutinizing why you are insufficiently active. Begin demanding more.
Where are the results?
Where is the feeling of vigor, strength, mastery, and dominance?
Where are the big and small questions for me to answer, the missing pieces to find, the gaps in my knowledge, the thing that will soon need maintenance, repair, or replacement?
Where is the flow of inspiration, the bright ideas, the synthesis of carefully gathered information?
Where is the trash heap of discarded dogma, superstition, and fanciful nonsense?
Interrogate, interrogate, interrogate: your mind will confess soon enough.
Make Beautiful Choices 