Learning and growth
Excellent Sheep
Can clear, can't choose
Excellent Sheep (2014 · William Deresiewicz) — Can clear, can't choose.
What actually happened?
He left academia after writing it. The book began as an essay that circulated very widely, and the argument it makes — that the institutions doing the selecting are the problem, not the students being selected — is not one that makes a person welcome inside those institutions. That is worth knowing before reading it as a lecture to young people. His target is the machinery: every step in it rational, and the sum a life with no direction.
Two abilities that don't substitute
'Be best at this' is drilled constantly inside any evaluation system. 'Decide what's worth doing' can only be trained where there is no correct answer. So the smoother the run, the likelier the second is blank.
Never having failed makes failure unimaginable
The price of an unbroken record is no experience of failing, so failure gets imagined as catastrophic — and the result is avoiding anything you might not be good at, with a range that narrows year by year.
The prescription is time with no scoreboard
Not a different subject or a different job, but a stretch long enough to get past novelty, doing something nobody is grading. Where a metric exists, attention slides to it, so the question can only surface somewhere without one.
How do I use it today?
If you can say exactly what counts as doing well and can't say what you want, do one thing that isn't scored, for long enough to get past the novelty. Facing any opportunity, separate two things: is it the content that draws me, or is it simply the next hurdle on the track I'm already on?
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Superb at clearing hurdles, and unable to say where they were going.
Never allowed to fail, you imagine failure as unsurvivable.
Only when nobody is grading you do you find out what you want.