When I swam, my coach would write out the working set on a whiteboard. Some days the set was easy, most days it was hard. But every couple weeks, there would be a monster on the board. Something off-the-charts difficult, a set that made your chest tight and breathing shallow. You would look at the squiggles on the board and suddenly be overwhelmed with a sense of doom.
You know in two hours, you’ll have swam what’s on the board, but you have no idea how. It appears impossible and unconquerable.
For the first few months of my time off from school, I was working at a startup. We were a small team, just three people for most of my time there. One of the funny things about working a startup is that no one really knows what they’re doing. This can be good because it gives you a lot of freedom. But it sometimes sucks because no one has been where you are going. There are no rules, best practices, or pre-outlined steps for how to do your job.
My first month there, we had a goal of hitting a certain number of users. As we approached the deadline, it was becoming increasingly doubtful we would hit our goal. What do you do in this situation? There is a seemingly impossible thing that has to get done and there are no sure ways to succeed. You just have to stare down the challenge and do it.
What I felt while working was uncannily similar to what I felt looking at difficult sets as a swimmer. How do we react when we face a challenge that we must overcome, but can’t even see the path to doing so?
I’ve read other people write about “staring into the abyss.” Even though it seems they are getting at different ideas, I like the phrase and it feels like the right way to describe what I’m referring to. Looking at insurmountable challenges is like desperately searching for an answer that doesn’t yet exist. You scan what you know and what’s already been done, but you don’t find what you’re looking for.
I’m advocating for people to put themselves in situations where they have to stare down at the abyss more often. It’s one of the most uncomfortable things you can do, but you can see and feel the personal growth happen in real time.
Learning is literally when you previously didn’t know something but now you do. Your mind has to struggle and make connections that didn’t before exist. Facing challenges that you have no idea how to solve is like injecting this process into your veins. You have something you not only don’t know, but have no idea what the process is.
You start by looking at the levers you’ve already pulled. You think maybe I just need to try harder. Sometimes this works. This is actually how I got through most of my swim practices which makes sense when you realize that one of the main levers for improving at swimming is your cardiovascular endurance.
But for more complex problems, try harder only gets you so far. Instead, it requires you to discover new levers and do things you didn’t know were “allowed” to do (stuff like cold emailing, starting a company, doing things that don’t scale, making wacky internal tools and dashboards).
It also increases your sense of self-efficacy and agency. To look back and know that you did something you previously didn’t think was possible. The weird thing is, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what you learn from living through these experiences. The value is less of a tangible/technical/hard skill and more strengthening your ingenuity muscle.
I came across this thought1 on Plexus:
I feel like we need to have more respect for people that epically fail. My heart cannot take epic failure but my mind wants to take big risks. I think we need to have less conversations like “you’ll get em next time” and more conversations around what did you actually learn and what did it empower you to do next or how do you plan on recovering. Failure is such an emotional experience, it breaks a ton of people and is probably the most human thing you can do and one of the most vulnerable.
Our hearts cannot take failure, but our minds recognize the value in taking risks.
Something I heard a while back that has stuck with me is self-confidence is built by setting out to do hard things and then doing them. It’s a rewiring of your thinking—where you train yourself to believe when you say you’ll accomplish something.
Staring into the abyss trains you to believe you can figure out the answers to unanswered problems and the solutions to insurmountable challenges. It doesn’t make you immune to failure, but your heart becomes a little less scared.
You need an account to view the thought. Message me if you’d like an invite to the platform!
Fire read as usual