Don't Chase It
On ambition and avoiding the crowds
Weird thought. Maybe being in a mindset where I’m not consciously chasing things, actually gets me better results in the long term. I tried to figure out what this means, and felt like I needed to write about ambition first.
What would happen if you took everyone in the world and asked them, one by one, to picture their ideal city? No doubt, some people would end up imagining cities bigger than others’. There would be someone who thinks up the biggest city of them all, and another one person who thinks of the smallest. In theory, I could rank everyone based on the size of their cities, and then see where I landed in this list.
This is my model for ambitiousness in people. Where you land on this spectrum is probably random. I’ve seen too many regular families with an ambitious child, but with easy-going siblings, for me to think that this trait is a matter of just the environment.
After speaking meaningfully with about a thousand people over time, I think I am probably in the middle of this ambitiousness line. I don’t have a need for things in my life to be perfect. But I’m not completely apathetic about it. I usually want things to go at least well.
I also think ambitiousness tends to stay fixed. I used to work longer hours to copy the ambitious ones, hoping that somehow their auras would attach to mine, but gave up on that because it didn’t work.
Rather, I realised that I should focus on figuring out what it means to live well, given that my current ambitiousness won’t change.
Wellness, to me, means avoiding avoidable hardship. Avoidable hardship is like running around trying to find treasure without bothering to think simple things like drawing a map. I experience physical stress, like knots in my tummy, when I meet this kind of hardship, like being late to a meeting for no reason. I sometimes replay in my mind how hard I tried at university despite getting mediocre results.
This is linked to my own problem solving strategy. It’s not a precise, but I think of this as how I would dig for wells in the desert. Given a certain amount of energy, I’m probably the type to dig lots of shallow holes, due to a prior belief that it’s likely to be futile anyway. If on the off-chance the water was there, then it’s probably a lot shallower than I initially thought. And so digging many shallow holes over a wide area makes sense. Others might focus on digging one deep hole, working hard to get something no matter what, but that is not me.
My strategy means finding quicker ways to put sheets on the duvet. Or optimising arrangements of my stuff, like setting my bicycle gear out in the evening so I’m not ruffled the next morning trying to find things. Or trying to find the right angle to foam my milk for its best consistency in my cappuccino.
This efficiency gives me currency to spend on doing nothing. I usually spend a couple hours a day doing nothing, or trying to get some sleep in. This nothingness also feels like a magnet for ideas. Ideas often pop into my mind when I am staring into space. And so the rewards of being efficient slowly accumulate like a pile of sand.
Showing people that you care about them is an exception to the ‘maximal efficiency’ rule though. In this case, the impact of showing you care increases with the effort you put in. Work hard for your partners!
Bottom line is, I think many people are able to make things go well, and become efficient in areas that they choose to focus on. Even more so with automation tools becoming so widespread. But for me, making things go well in many areas is still hard. I think this is true for others too. It’s hard on the brain, because switching between different things requires mental effort. Context switching consumes energy. If you’ve ever tried to cook a large meal with different side dishes, and have felt that unique tiredness afterwards, you probably get what I mean.
So, I’ve spent some time in my twenties thinking about general principles that make things go well, customised to my easy-going personality. I’ve looked for a set of around three to ten, ideas. Ideas that I can use when I’m in this type of situation:
‘Hey, given this is who I am, and I’m stuck on this problem, what styles of thinking can get me out of this rut?’
But so far, I’ve realised that either a) I am too stupid to find these principles, or b) general rules for doing well at something don’t exist.
But whilst I haven’t found concrete, general ideas, I think there might be looser sayings that kind of feel like general principles, but are not really fully fledged. Sayings and thoughts that are worthy of a short essay, instead of a fully fledged novel.
I call these ‘idioms’, inspired after the word for ‘sayings’ but in different languages.
And there’s in an idiom that I have been thinking about more and more.
‘Don’t chase it’.
Here’s how I got thinking about it. You know that feeling when two unrelated people you respect tell you the same thing?
A mentor in my day job said something surprising to me whilst we were having coffee, at a time when business was shaky. My industry (which isn’t science) often involves aggressively making calls about opportunities to do. But out of the blue, he said
‘Yeah, you don’t want to be chasing things right now’.
This struck me as odd. I’d usually think that chasing what you want, especially when you’re in a tough spot, means you’re more likely to get it. I was going to brush this off but then…
My chemistry supervisor tried to tell me the same thing, about a different problem.
As part of my research, I was thinking about using machine learning to make energy calculation algorithms faster. This work still has a lot of hype. I then wrote an email to him asking what he thought about me trying to work on that. He replied,
‘It’s an active field, but it’s crowded, don’t chase it’
By now this phrase was ringing some alarm bells. Both of these individuals seem to be quite successful in their respective areas. And now they’re telling me the same thing, in the same year. Shouldn’t I be paying attention?
It was unclear to me what this meant in the beginning. What does ‘not chase’ even mean? And why does ‘not chasing’ make you more successful? I’ve heard of the phrase ‘if you choose two rabbits, you will lose them both’, but this was like saying not to trying chasing anything at all.
After thinking about it for a week, I think that ‘chasing’ is feeling pressure to finish something. Like running a race that you want to win. Or in my case, digging into a research area that you feel is hot because everyone else is doing it. In each case, you have an awareness in your brain that the completion of the task itself is important. And probably, there is also some awareness that you have to beat other people to it.
Chasing is great for a lot of things, like a sprinting race, anything that is adversarial, or routine tasks. Stuff like coding up a system that you’ve already built before.
But when does ‘chasing’ not work? I think it doesn’t work when you’re trying to do new things.
I think this is because, if you feel you’re chasing, then what you’re doing is probably crowded. There’s probably other people doing it. It’s like walking down a street and seeing a queue of people outside a new tasty desert store, and then thinking ‘wow, I need to get myself some of that’.
So it’s like the crowdedness induces the feeling of the chase. You think that you need to get in line, otherwise you’ll miss out.
In the case of research, this feeling of chase now means you’re less likely to discover something new, because other people are already there. I’ve started to use this emotional feeling of ‘chasing’ as an indicator of how relatively undiscovered something is. If I listen to my body and I think ‘wow, I’m quite anxious to get this done’, then that’s a warning sign to me.
I think a good way to use this is by thinking of how you got an idea. Did it just spark out of the blue, or is it because you heard it from someone else? If it’s the latter, then how likely is it that you have an edge in solving it?
More recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of not entering crowded fields when doing work. It used to be a minor consideration when making decisions. But now, I think it’s probably more important than even trying to work hard.
Right now, I think the best way to decide if a field is crowded is to seek mentors that can tell you.
But the next best way seems to be to notice your feelings of the ‘chase’. If you are, it’s worth corroborating with others.
I also think that the physical pressure from chasing puts a ‘lock’ on creativity, because now you have a second variable to think about. Which is quickness. And for me, this second variable is simply too much to handle. I think having slack is really important to doing good work. I wrote about this in a different post here.
Don’t chase!
I’m not chasing too. Taking a mental sabbatical from out put and just taking in absorbing. And poof! New ideas and reformed old ideas just pop up. I take notes and prepare my tools for the restart of my process. The idea of Not Chasing helps me sleep at night too!