if experience is the goal, then you always win

You can measure internal congruence by the lag between desire and action. We all have friends who want to change something about their lives, sometimes harboring secret desires for years, yet stay static in place. Others upend their lives on a whim. Reinvent. Start anew. What separates them? My hunch is that the latter view experience as a goal in itself, where most of us see-saw between rational pro and cons lists, or terminal value calculations. And if experience is the goal: whatever happens in the process, you always win.

Earlier this year I had an inkling that my writing interests were shifting from cataloguing the movements of my own mind, to creating something more akin to a communal practice – writing with, and about other people. I wanted to experiment more, but I felt somewhat suffocated and trapped inside of my own register. This resulted in my latest essay series, New Ontologies, which is quite a different format than my prior work.

This was a hard realization, as the style of auto-fiction and personal writing is what I’ve been doing since I started writing on Substack. More broadly I’ve observed that as you grow older and gain experience in any domain, you’re rewarded for staying in your circle of competence and deepening the gyre. You don’t charm anyone by constant pivots, lest you seem unserious, un-devoted.

And your identity gets quickly socially bound to past experiences. You’re the person who does X, you belong to a certain tribe and earn brand equity on a particular vantage point on the world. Comfort in a continuous unbroken identity can keep us stuck creating within a limited perimeter.

But I don’t want this to be the case in my own writing, or any of the pursuits I take seriously. More recently, I started looking for inspiration in artists who remain startlingly fresh across years of prolific creation. Artistic fearlessness, I noticed, often coincides with anti-nostalgia. A spirit that would rather risk sales and accolades than sacrifice the impulse to reinvent.

For a long time, nothing. Then, suddenly one has the right eyes.

searching for your life’s work is a multi-turn endeavor

In “The Miles Method“, an essay by Simon Drew, Drew describes the ethos of Miles Davis, arguably the most influential jazz musician in the period of post-World War II. Davis contributed to the grand transformative arc of jazz: bebop, cool jazz, modal jazz. “He wasn’t interested in playing what he’d already played,” Drew writes, “and if he was, then he was going to reconstruct it.”

Davis was extremely present-oriented and dramatically leapt onto five or six distinct jazz movements across his career. He never clutched or hoarded an old style, so much so that he sometimes refused to play any old music at concerts. He alienated much of his original fan base that came for modal jazz, a style they wanted from him indefinitely. Many of his records from the 1970s which were reviled and mocked by rock and jazz critics, were later re-reviewed as prophetic.

Davis believed “being an artist was not about finding a sound and staying with it…it was about listening for the next sound.”

If you don’t match those social sounds that are in the air, they don’t want to hear it…If I was a fan of myself, which I am, I wouldn’t want to hear anything that looked like what I did in 1960. You know, you can’t do both of them. I mean, it’s over, the 60s and the 70s. It’s 1984, and soon it will be 1985. They’re doing all sorts of things. Anything is possible.

What he describes is an openness of mind, and a deftness of spirit – give it all, throw it away. Viewing identity as a moving target rather than a finite, fixed, good. Davis is oft quoted the magical line “it has taken me years to learn how to play like myself.”

More recently I began reading The Waste Books by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a physicist in Germany who kept a series of notebooks he called Sudelbücher, “scribble books” an informal notebook of thoughts and aphorisms.

Merchants and traders have a waste book in which they enter daily everything they purchase and sell, messily, without order. From this, it is transferred to their journal, where everything appears more systematic, and finally to a ledger, in double entry after the Italian manner of bookkeeping, where one settles accounts with each man, once as debtor and then as creditor. This deserves to be imitated by scholars. First it should be entered in a book in which I record everything as I see it or as it is given to me in my thoughts; then it may be entered in another book in which the material is more separated and ordered, and the ledger might then contain, in an ordered expression, the connections and explanations of the material that flow from it.

Lichtenberg, Waste Book E

I like that he had these waste books, and that writers have their diaries. There’s a lot of imposter syndrome held inside these ledgers! Steinbeck thought he was just fooling his readers; Kafka bemoaned the “tremendous world” in his head and being able to write nothing of it; Woolf suffered over her best known novels, calling them “feeble.”

The waste book’s central ethos is this. Craft requires large volumes of production, much of it “waste” — unusable in any serious way. To write one perfect sentence requires you to jettison a hundred sentences. Writing and rewriting a detail in high fidelity, returning to old ideas with a renewed scrutiny and re-ordering them, allows you to understand your own response to what you produce. It also allows you to make decisions at a granular level. Do you like an idea enough to transfer it from the waste book? In doing so, you train your own mind.

For my latest essay on a company, I spent at least 40 hours interviewing the team I embedded with. Almost an hour per person I interviewed. I read all their internal documents and Slack messages, their strategy memos and engineering articles. In writing the final piece, I probably used less than 5% of total raw material. That doesn’t mean the raw material is lost to the void. It becomes embedded in my brain, a new way of circumnavigating the world, a vocabulary and knowledge base that I can repurpose and understand future concepts with.

Waste might actually be the point, is what I’m trying to say. All of it cultivates the mind as the product — a mind that can write and produce the work you want to.

Making the work you’re meant to

Cultivating increased personal agency helps you make changes faster, with fewer fictional constraints. There couldn’t be a better time for me to read the recently released You Can Just Do Things, Cate Hall’s practical guide on the topic. Agentic people have a “navigational finesse” in life, Hall says. But this is not some magical, inherited trait. It is something you can learn how to dial up or down, so you can make decisions that help you become “progressively more alive.”

One method is “embracing the moat of low status,” which means keeping your ego small, allowing yourself to look out of touch, corny, cringe. Any skill acquisition fundamentally incurs short-term penalties: misplaying a hand, dancing in an un-coordinated fashion, writing incoherently. The moat of low status exists for learning new things, but it also exists for moving from good to great. Elite level performance in poker, the example she gives, requires trying radically new playing styles and methods, which might look rudimentary or strange.

“Another word for agency is opportunism,” she writes,

A sensitivity to notice that a potential diversion from your life’s path has presented itself, the inventiveness to come up with a way of pursuing it, and the courage to say, “Hey, what’s the worst that could happen?”

There might be a call to adventure being extended to you right now.

So, I tell myself: follow the diversion, stay in a constant state of readiness. Be not afraid of the next sound; be not afraid of spent time. Sprinting really hard has begun to feel really good, a full-body lightness. The trees shimmer in the light. Rather than counting the points, I simply let myself enjoy running around and hitting the ball. And when I swing, my heart beats strong and fast. I make sure my grip is just right, and then I let go.

Nix.