Make or Miss Life
The NBA is often called a ‘make or miss’ league. And even the league’s best teams can go down on a night when the other team just makes their shots. Life is also a lot like the NBA. People make predictions on who will achieve what and base decisions on those predictions. The only thing that matters to others is whether you make or miss that shot.
When trying to do hard things, the most important thing that matters is to actually do them. And each hard thing is different from the other. But the more you do, the more you learn and the more the experience changes you.
Experience is a great teacher. It not only teaches someone how to do something the right way, but also changes people in different ways. That is why diversity of experience is prized in today’s corporate environment. But what experience does, perhaps most amazingly, is prepare someone for the inherent element of chaos in life.
Every experience refines our understanding of reality. It tweaks the model to incorporate new information. We need a model to traverse reality in our day to day lives. We need reasons for why things happened or didn’t. But the most important tweak that experience can help us make, is to account for chaos in reality.
This isn’t to say that we toss up our hands and start praying to the gods or go in search of soothsayers. I’m not advocating that we attribute all success and failure to chaos. What we must do, is make peace with the presence of chaos in reality and its contribution to outcomes. The way to do this is to not be trapped by outcomes. Understanding that outcomes have an element of chaos in them and not allowing them to be a reflection of our abilities, talents or character is the path to freedom.
This can be especially tough in life. We are judged based on the outcomes we’ve been able to create for ourselves. What you scored in class X, class XII, college etc. determines a lot of opportunities you get. Your past work experience determines your access to future roles and so on. The key is to understand that time is flowing and to do the best we can with whatever opportunities we have. We can’t let the outcomes we’ve achieved in the past dictate the type of effort we’re going to put in, in the present.
Don’t let this fool you into thinking that outcomes don’t matter. In most situations in life, they are the only things that matter. This is especially brutal when you’re trying to do hard things. The way to produce those outcomes as best you can, is to not let them affect the input. The outcomes cannot affect our effort, disposition or approach to any situation. This is easier said than done but doing it is important.
To conclude, Experience helps in understanding the contribution of the element of chaos to outcomes. Ensuring that our effort is immune to prior outcomes aids us in doing hard things.