The danger of easy paths

easy pathBeing a quick study can get in the way of learning what you need to understand. Midway through elementary school I went on my first field trip to the Museum of Natural History in Milwaukee. The enduring memory from that trip was my first encounter with a buffet line in the museum cafeteria. My tray was loaded by the end of the line and I was mildly ill for the remainder of the day. This was merely the first in a long line of lessons about the difference between theory and practice; lessons that I continue to trip over half a century later. There was the 4th-grade teacher who sat me in the back of the classroom and challenged me to see how much of the World Book Encyclopedia I could finish by year’s end whenever my other work was done. By the time I got to college, I had been nudged by so many teachers and other supporters in the direction of thinking over other kinds of doing that I was on track to graduate in three years.

As that second year in college was drawing to an end, I realized that I had no idea what I wanted to do when graduation arrived. My parents didn’t flinch when I concluded that I wanted to take the full four years to finish school; I wasn’t insightful enough to grasp the financial hit I was imposing on them. Regardless, they bought me an extra year to work out an answer about a next step.

There’s a running debate whether competence or passion should drive your career. The passion wing cheers that heart should drive your choices; find your passion and the career will take care of itself. More recently, the counter-narrative that expertise precedes engagement has regained ground. This is the realm of the 10,000-hour rule and deliberate practice. Better that you should become good at something and trust competence to evolve into commitment.

We now have two false dichotomies—theory vs. practice and passion vs. competence. There are others we could add to the list. The world isn’t organized into these binary choices. It’s necessarily messy and complex. This is not a popular position; we all want to believe advice that begins with “all you need to do is…” Everyone is offering proven systems or guaranteed methodologies. Instead, we should seek to accept complexity without letting it paralyze us. We need to remember what H.L. Mencken said “there is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Today, in particular, we live in a world full of bright, shiny, objects promising to address their narrow perspective on a narrow conception of the problem. We need to become adept at framing opportunities to incorporate messiness. That’s a process that benefits from traveling companions walking the same paths.