Theme: Agency

(diary – self improvement)

Talked to a female friend yesterday. Trying to find some way to improve myself – given fact that I definitely mollify, misdirect, or mislead people so that I have time to gather more information or solve an issue later on – because I have great comfort with my ability to obtain and make use of information, and solve problems later on, and less concern over their comfort with the lack of it, and more comfort with seizing opportunities at a discount rather than diverting resources at a premium. I have been doing this my whole career. Probably my whole life. I do not do it consciously. I do a lot of “just keep at it, I am still trying to figure out whats best, and there is no better thing to do than keep at it in the meantime.” This process of ‘keeping at it no matter what’ has been extremely successful for me in almost everything. But it has also been problematic and caused me issues. Or better said, it works when it works, but when it doesn’t work it’s often bad because there is no record of my thinking – which is why I try to over-communicate and create a record of my thinking. If I know a problem is solvable I will happily not solve it now, and instead seize an opportunity to solve it when it presents itself. This is one strategy I’ve advocated often: the Napoleonic Strategy: master the territory then seize opportunities, rather than create a plan and hope it works – plans are just ways of understanding the territory. Once you understand the territory you just seize opportunities. But as my partner Max and Jim have told me, this can be hard on others. You just sort of learn to trust each other’s strategies after a while, and each of you do what you’re good at. If you just take the moral high ground and try to do the right thing, then in the end, most everything works out. Not always. But mostly. HOWEVER, I am still stuck with acknowledging the fact that I definitely take discounts on communication and try to put people off because I just think they’re silly or stupid or wasting my time, or worried about trivialities. And I know this is my rather grandiose ego doing its thing: “please don’t be an idiot and bother me.” So I want to see if I can somehow figure out how to intervene in that subconscious process and take the time to explain to people why I am doing what I am doing. I just can’t imagine that I can change that behavior. But I have to try. I have this switch that is ‘be kind to people’, but it’s a ‘low cost’ to just humor them somehow. To actually take the time to explain all this stuff to people…. I just can’t imagine that’s possible unless I drastically reduce my problem set. “it will be fine. We don’t need to know or solve that right now. we can figure it out later. we can fix it later. just stay on mission for now. an opportunity to handle it will arrive and we’ll seize it.” I guess this goes along with the scientific method that I subconsciously process at all times: we never know, we only try. Anyway. I have clearly got to work on this issue. I can’t always treat people as children. It’s not really ‘fair’. And so I gotta learn a way around it.

She says “Everyone does it”. And I think, yes, well everyone does it in what capacity? Mostly they do it to be kind or lazy. I do it out of arrogance in order to save myself effort.