Everyone. Welcome to Non Trivial. I'm your host, Sean mcclure. In this episode, I discuss how the only way to become good at anything is to start at the end acting as though we already knew how to do the thing by placing ourselves directly into real world environments related to the challenge. We are forced to rise to the occasion and inevitably learn the skill, achieve the objective, accomplish the goal. We are creatures of adaptation.
And as such, the only way to truly become what we want is by adapting. Let's find out how, so this episode, I want to talk about how it's important to put yourself into the right environment. If you want to acquire a new skill, become good at something, you know, achieve a new level or position in life or whatever it is, any kind of definition of success doesn't have to be, you know, money related or, or corporate level ladder climbing or anything like that.
It could just be being happy, being content, being fulfilled, whatever kind of definition of success you want to use that. I'm gonna to argue in this episode that the only decision really worth making is putting yourself into the right environment is, is, is looking at the end result of what you want to become or where you want to be and immediately placing yourself there. OK? And I'll talk about more about what that means and how that's possible.
But, but the whole premise behind this episode is that the directionality that we usually approach things in life, which is, you know, we gotta have this big foundation that there are decisions to make in life. I gotta to go left, I gotta go right. I gotta meet the right people.
I gotta do this, this, this and then eventually I will get to that kind of end result to that point where I have that skill or, or, or that position or I'm that person that I'm saying to do it the other way around that it makes more sense to place yourself at the end right away when you're naive and not very good at it and to force yourself to adapt, to become that thing to, to, to adapt yourself to, to undergo the process of adaptation because we are creatures of adaptation and that's what's going to work best.
That's how information works from an information theoretic standpoint. When we think about the information needed to become what you need to be, to make the right kinds of decisions. It has to be imprinted directly from the environment. And so in order to make that happen effectively, rather than trying to, you know, tally up little bits of information as you go and carve out an explicit path.
What I'm arguing and which I've argued before in other contexts is, is that that path doesn't exist, right? What we call a path is really just kind of a post hoc narrative that we uh that we attach to successful outcomes. And we say, well, this is, this is how it must have happened and now I'm gonna teach others how to do it. That's I'm saying that's wrong. It's not that path is kind of ephemeral. It doesn't really exist, it's more narrative than anything else.
And that really the only decision that there is to make is to put yourself into the end result, put yourself into the environment that already exists of what you want to become. OK? So, so I'll use some examples to talk about what I mean and then we'll talk about what that means kind of from an information standpoint and, and some of the mechanisms and the way that I usually uncover it and then, and then just kind of some take home messages at the end.
But that's really the premise of this episode. This is the message I want to get across because people get this wrong all the time. In my opinion. A lot of people get this wrong and you know, people are getting it wrong because they're coming up to you or they're writing to you, you know, whether it's on Twitter or medium or substack, whatever and they're, you know, they're asking you questions but what, what books should I read and what courses should I take?
And, you know, I've kind of harped on this before and, and as soon as people are trying to, you know, kind of lay out that foundation or read the right thing or talk to the right people, they're trying to carve out a path towards success. It's understandable why they're doing this. But that's an immediate signal to me that they're doing this wrong and by wrong. I mean, they're doing it in the opposite direction.
They're, they're trying to lay out the bricks one by one using this kind of false analogy of how life works. As as if, as if life in all its non-trivial complexity can be, you know, kind of paired down to a simple summed process where things add together and, and become what they are just, just through, you know, as if you were laying the bricks to a house, that's not how life works, right? It's, it's not that kind of industrial revolution, bit by bit, everything adds together.
You know, everything's kind of deterministic, it's not like that, right? It's complex, it's nonlinear. And these are not kind of hand waay terms, these are very, very well defined terms. We know what non-linear means. We know what complex means. We know what opacity means.
I talk about these different concepts throughout my different episodes and, and uh, so I'll obviously do it some more in this episode, but that's a signal when people come to you and they're asking you, you know, what about this? And who should I, you know, you gotta stop, you gotta stop because you're making it way harder than it needs to be because you're not, you're not solving problems the way you're supposed to be solving them, you're solving them as if it's a deterministic problem.
And it's not, it's, it's, you know, I talked about this in the last episode where the only kind of control you really have are these highest level signals that exist in the environment, these high level targets and everything else. You have to let the chips fall where they may, you have to take advantage of ad hoc ness and approximations and randomness and the way that your mind uses very high level heuristics to solve problems.
There's a reason humans have adapted to operate under complexity like this. This is what we're good at. So the only real decision to make is to place yourself in the environment, you know, you want to be in because that's something you do know, right? You know what you, you look at different people doing different things through life and you say, yeah, I want to be like that person, I wanna be doing that kind of thing.
I want to be writing books or good at mathematics or I wanna be, you know, a scientist that does this or a politician that does that, you know, what do it doesn't matter whatever it is, an artist. You, you look at people doing things and, you know, throughout history and currently and you say, yeah, that's, that's the kind of thing that I want to be doing and then you immediately revert back to, ok.
So maybe there's courses or maybe there's books or maybe there's a way to get there and I'm gonna go to the business section or the art section or the math section, the science section.
I'm gonna start, you know, kind of following that academic narrative, which is this thing that we're told all throughout our lives that, you know, you gotta start with the fundamentals and you gotta piece those together and you got to lay out that foundation and then through years and years of doing that, you'll start to kind of bring those together and, and, and synthesize some final results or, or, or some skill set that will grow over time and then you'll kind of with that foundation kind of launch off and be the person you want to be.
And I'm saying it's the opposite of that. I'm saying that you need to enter into the environment that you can see right now, right? That, that if you want to be a musician, you can see what that environment looks like. You're playing an instrument, you're doing performances, you're working with other musicians, you can see what that looks like. You don't think you can be there right now. But I'm saying yes, you can be there right now.
And I don't mean that as a motivational thing, I mean, you just have to place yourself naively into the environment, you know, you need to be in now because when you do that, that's when you are now doing you, you, you're solving problems the way humans solve problems correctly, right? The way the way humans are really good at solving problems, which is through adaptation, you can become your environment.
So you have to enter that environment naively and uh without really knowing what you're doing, but you have to enter it. OK. So I want to talk about in this episode what it means to enter that environment and why we need to flip this narrative about how to, how to really become what we need to. And so the title of this episode is if you want a clean house, invite people over, right?
It's not if you want a clean house, put yourself on a cleaning schedule so that you're, you're maintaining a clean home. Nope, don't do that. Invite people over. That's the only answer. That's the only decision to make. Yeah, but I don't want to invite people over because I have a messy house. Yeah, I know that's the point. So what do you think that's going to do?
It's gonna force you to adapt, it's gonna force you to clean, it's going to make you clean quicker, which you should be because you're not cleaning a bunch of things. You don't need to clean all the kind of things that fall into place to make decision making proper, you know, done correctly, done the way humans are really good at it, not wasting time on things that don't matter and only focusing on what matters all that falls into place by adapting to stressor real world stressers.
So, so anything in life, anything you want to get good at, you know, become uh i it's about really just one core decision, right? And, and that's putting yourself into the environment.
And so what this is an example of is something that we see in, in all areas of complexity, which is the dramatic simplification of decision making under complexity, the dramatic simplification of decision making under complexity, which is kind of obviously counterintuitive because we would think that well, the more complex a situation, the more you must have to think about, the more you know, the more pros and cons you got to balance, the more intricate you need to get in your analysis.
But we know that's not the case. The the lack of causal that you have access to in complex situations means that you don't get to think like that you don't get to reason and, and nitpick and Penny pinch, as I've called it before about all these different decision, make uh decisions that, that that's all false narrative and that's a waste of time and that's demonstrably going down the wrong path when you do that because you are by definition, not solving a complex problem correctly.
I mean, that's not an opinion. We know how complex problems get solved. We know this from computer science, we know this from complexity science, from computational complexity, different ways of, of, of understanding the tractability of of, of, you know, simple versus hard problems and all that kind of stuff.
So, so you you're not supposed to be trying to use more information to navigate through, through, through the complex problems of life, which is, you know, most problems in life are going to be complex, right? They're going to involve many different pieces, many different interactions.
And so, so I've talked a lot about that before, but this dramatic simplification of decision making is what happens because because we don't have access to all that kind of information that would make problem solving really complicated. Right. Right. If you, if you think about, you know, I use this analogy a lot because it's, it's absolutely the case.
Uh you think about a uh you know, academic courses that you would take in, in school in stem let's say science, technology, engineering, math, you, you, you think about like mathematics as kind of the most fundamental and then you have physics and then you have chemistry and then you have biology and then on top of that, you get into kind of your sociological studies. And, and one thing that you see through all of that is is the reduced amount of math used in the course. Right?
Math of course is math. So if you go walk into a math class, you can have math all over the chalkboards. If you go into a physics class, still gonna be pretty mathematical, not as mathematical as math itself because it's not pure math. It's trying to understand uh you know, physical concepts of the world, but still very mathematical chemistry class, even less decently mathematical. But you got more drawings on the board, you got pointy arrows, biology, much less math and on and on.
And so what you're doing is is as you go from the math to physics to chemistry, to biology, you're increasing the complexity of the phenomenon you're studying and because of the increased complexity, you don't get to use something as low level as mathematics as easily. OK. Math can still be used in biology. It can still be used in sociology, but it's not going to be as uh explicit.
It's not going the the chalkboards in those classes of the sociology class are not going to look as complicated as the chalkboards in the physics class. And that's not because certain people like math and certain people don't like math. That's because of the complexity of the phenomena that are being studied, the more complex the phenomena, the less nature condescends to give you its operations. It doesn't let you know how everything adds up.
It doesn't let you know its underlying mechanisms, not at that level of detail. OK. So, so the reason why I'm using this example is it's, and I, and I've said this before is really important that people understand that as the complexity increases, nature, less and less gives you that kind of low level information about how outcomes are produced. And that's why we can only do things at higher and higher levels of abstraction with increased complexity. OK?
It's not, oh, it's too complicated, it's too complex and I don't want to spend the time to do it. It's like you don't have the option to do it. OK? We, we know this, this is a fundamental property of complexity. You do not have the option to have that kind of low level causal information. So the chalkboards of complexity are going to be more picturesque, right? They're going to be more conceptual, you're gonna have more dots and arrows bouncing around as opposed to explicit formula, right?
And, and that's, that's a fundamental reality and that of course, is never going to change. OK? That's never going to change. I'm not saying you can't use any kind of mathematics, but the mathematics is going to become more abstract and there's gonna be less of it. It's gonna be more approximate. OK? As soon as you add one electron to the hydrogen to hydrogen up here at a table, you start getting into gross approximation.
OK. You can't, you can't even have an exact mathematical equation to describe uh the sun moon and earth, right? You, you have to start using approximations as soon as you go from three bodies and up. OK. So, so the point is, is, is, is not to nerd out on all that stuff. But when we say complexity, we, you know, we we do mean something quite specific and that's many things are interacting in such a way that the properties of what you see are not apparent in the individual components, right?
Nature is not condescending to give you that information, you cannot see how things causally add up to produce the outcome. So this is why decision making in nontrivial situations in complex situations looks quite simple because the dearth of information available, your chalkboard of life, if real life cannot be loaded with equations, right, that would be, that would be uh hampering you down.
If you tried to do that, it would be naive, it would be demonstrably going down the wrong path because that's not how complex problems are solved. So, so a manifestation going back to this uh of of complexity, uh an example that we're using is is this is an example of the dramatic simplification of decision making.
When we say look the only real decision to make when you want to try to become something is to put yourself into the environment and you could say, yeah, what about Yeah, what about no, look that that's all gonna, that's all gonna come, that's all gonna come because as you put yourself into the environment and you start working towards, you know, becoming your environment, right?
Uh you know, playing the music, swinging the golf club, you know, making trades in the market, whatever it is you want to become, you're gonna naively be make, you know, obviously be making all kinds of mistakes, you're gonna be failing all the time. And we all know that, you know, the importance of failure and you're going to either adapt or die. OK?
And so, and so if you the more you want something and so this is why perseverance study after study shows is, is, you know, a universal trait among those who are successful by any definition of success, right? It doesn't have to be monetary, right? Can just be content or happy or whatever. But by any definition of success, perseverance obviously is going to increase the likelihood of you achieving the outcome. That's not a mystery.
And you don't need studies to show this, you just need to understand the properties of, of real world situations. OK? Understanding those properties doesn't guarantee success, but it it allows you to see the kind of actions that lead to good outcomes and and, and one of those actions is obviously going to be perseverance because perseverance, you know, mechanistically speaking, is just you constantly sampling the possibility space right? In, in, in, in the, in the thing you want to become.
So, if I want to become a golfer, I'm and I keep swinging the golf club, that perseverance is going to make me better. As long as the perseverance is defined correctly. If perseverance is, I'm never changing the angle of my approach, then. No, that, that kind of that, that, you know, that's not real perseverance or that kind of perseverance is going to be detrimental, right? You have to keep mixing and matching, you have to keep doing things from different angles.
So I'll start with a golf example and then we'll start talking about things like investing and playing piano and building software and I don't know, writing books, whatever things that people typically want to do want to achieve, but often kind of put to the side and never really get into. So I kind of like the golf swing example and I think other people may have used this to, um, you know, let's say you want to become a good golfer. It's not an easy thing.
Nobody golfs that well, from day one, right? Even the Tiger Woods out there had to, had to do a lot of practice. Well, you know, we know whether it's, you know, you want to take the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hour approach or people that have kind of gone off from that and say, well, that's not quite right. It's actually look, it doesn't matter. We all know what this is.
We should, you know, intuitively, I say we all know because intuitively if you stop and think about this, it's, it's actually quite obvious if you want to become good at golf, put yourself into the game and, and start swinging that club and of course, it's going to go into the bush and of course, it's going to go, you know, all kinds of wrong ways and you're gonna be creating all kinds of divis in the grass, but that's not going to be a problem as long as you keep switching it up.
Let me try this, let me try that you're putting yourself in a game and, and maybe you're just going to, you know, the driving range or something and you're gonna keep trying to practice and practice and practice. But again, the right kind of practice, right?
You gotta keep switching the angle, switching your feet, stance, the direction eventually if you were to go every day or even every week, once or twice a week and, and just the perseverance, the persistence uh under the premise that you are constantly changing, the approach is going to improve your golf swing. It will, it will, it's going to improve the goal swing.
Now, I'm not saying you're gonna get to pro level, but without a doubt, you will adapt right, because you've got this high level stressor, this high level target of hit the ball smoothly, right, or hit the ball relatively straight in land or maybe close to a flagpole. So you've got that high level target, you always know what that target is that never changes. That's always the goal. But how you arrive at that goal is in constant flux, right?
We've talked about multiple reliability and how the details need to die when you solve complex problems, right? So the details are you constantly changing your angle of approach and you keep switching that up and eventually it will get better and better at, get closer to the pin. So you gotta keep, you know, putting yourself into the environment of I'm going to keep going to the driving range and swinging. OK? Now this isn't the whole picture yet, but I'm gonna leave this a little bit later.
I want to use some other examples and then I'll talk about why, why this isn't quite complete yet and, and, and it's not quite out of the patient yet, but we'll talk about that. OK? So that's a golf example. Uh you know, investing, right? A lot of people might have mutual funds or ETF S, but how many people really get into investing?
But it's always in the news, you always got these ticket tapes going by and you got MS NBC talking about whatever and you know, and, and part of you is like, man, I feel like I should invest more. I should know more about investing and maybe it even sounds kind of fun, especially if you're a little bit technical, you'd be kind of neat to, I don't know, maybe build some models around this stuff or maybe nothing that sophisticated but, you know.
Yeah, I can't stand hearing talk, people talking about investing and I don't really get the jargon. I feel like I should be involved. You know, a lot of people talk like that. Right. But they never really end up getting around to it and, and, and it's not that they're not trying. It's probably because, ok, I, yeah, I bought this one book on investing or I went to a couple of youtube videos. Maybe I signed up for a platform once, then it fell to the wayside.
Inevitably you kind of fall off that wagon and then you're not investing. But if you really wanted to do it, just like the, the, the, you know, person who wants to golf showing up at the golf range every day or every few days, you know, you need to put yourself into the environment. You need to start trading. It's not, yeah, but it's not just start trading. Yeah, but I'm gonna lose some money. Yes. Yeah. But I don't know what I'm doing. I know you don't know what you're doing.
You gotta put yourself in the environment, you gotta have that information imprinted directly. From the environment and you have to adapt to it. You can't adapt by, by, by reading books and taking courses that's not adaptation, that's pretending that there's a path in order to become something. When there's not people who become, things will look back and say there's a path because this is what humans do. We come up with that post talk narrative all the time. We have to do that.
They listen to my episode and we don't create the way we consume, right? But the the consumption of information has to sound like a narrative. I'm giving you a narrative right now because that's the only way humans can understand information, but that's not the way you create things. And so at a meta level, I'm trying to to to communicate this process to you that even though I'm speaking to you in a narrative right now, it's not the narrative that gets you there.
You have to just simplify the decision making under complexity and do this one thing which is to put yourself into the environment. So if you put yourself into the environment as an investor, then you are going to start to learn how to invest. Let's say you want to play, let's say you want to make software, right? This is a common example too. Software is huge in the industry. So a lot of people, especially younger ones think, you know, I should probably learn to create software.
I mean, at least websites, but maybe, maybe something more, it would be nice to become a software developer or a programmer. You know, even if I end up going into management later on and being able to, to program computers or to create software or even more on the design side of things. I mean, that seems like a pretty important thing to open opportunities uh up in my life.
And it would be, I mean, the world runs on software right now, you're, you're not going to hurt yourself by learning how to create software. But inevitably, and I get this all the time because that's the industry I'm in, you know, what, what books and what courses, same thing, you know, and, and I keep trying to tell people, like, just start making software, which sounds crazy to a lot of people because, well, what do you mean just start making? I don't know how to make it. Yeah, I know.
You don't know how to make it. So just start making it. It's, it's not paradoxical even though it sounds like it. Right. Because, because if, if you had a gun to your head and, you know, if someone was telling you, you have to make software do it now, what would you do? Well, you would go to Google and you would start Googling things and how do I make software? And you'd come across a blog and you come across a video? So it's not that, that courses, blogs and videos are necessarily bad.
What I'm saying is the decision is not what course, what book, what video it's just start making it. Give yourself a project, give yourself a goal. I want to build this. I know you don't know how to build this. You're not supposed to know how to build this. Here's a little secret. Anybody who is successful at any point in their career doesn't really know exactly how to build something, right. Life would be amazingly boring if you always knew how to do the thing you're doing.
Of course, you know, a lot and you're bringing a lot of that experience as years go by to bear on the problem. But at, at any given time, you don't know exactly how to do it. So that's something you got to get used to. Anyway, you got to be a uh uh you have to be a creature of adaptation. You are a creature of adaptation. So you need to follow along with that. That's how you solve problems.
So it's it, you know, you got to stop asking those questions about how to get started and who to talk to and what course to take. There are right people you will meet to talk to and there are those opportunities, but it's not a strategy. It's not something you're piecing together bit by bit and carving it out because there's a path towards success. It's just putting yourself into the environment it's just doing the thing, it's just doing the thing. You have to start at the end.
Ok. You have to start at the end.
Um, let's take, uh, piano playing and that's, I think that's not a common example, either guitar or piano, you know, some people maybe played it a long time ago and they want to get back into it or they've never picked up a musical instrument and they've always wanted to how many of us know that have that kind of uh situation where you've got that guitar that, you know, electric keyboard that you bought years ago and it sits in the corner and it collects the dust.
Oh, yeah, there was a time I was going to start playing and I was all excited and motivated and then life happened and things got in the way and now I'm not, I'm not playing and, you know, it's just the same old story. Right. Well, you know, it's not really that surprising because you probably bought the key. You, you did all the things, right?
You did all the things you, you bought the keyboard and then maybe you bought a book on how to learn chords or you went to youtube videos and it was all kind of that academic style narrative where I'm going to learn the fundamentals, I'm gonna learn scales and I'm going to learn all this boring crap that quite frankly has nothing to do with producing real music.
It, it does have something to do with producing real music, but not in the, not in the sense that those little things come together to produce bigger things. In order to create music, you just have to start pressing the keys, you have to start moving, you have to start doing the thing. OK? And that's not to say that you won't learn scales and chords and all this kind of stuff.
But you know, this, this is a big thing about academia, you know, in my opinion, and some others opinion, I, I is look when you, when I say academia because it's, it's, you know, this academic approach, right? This idea that the fundamentals lead to the thing when you're learning those fundamentals, what you're really seeing are people who have realized stuff that other people have built and then they've tried to kind of capture what the fundamental pieces of those things were.
But the people who built the thing didn't use those fundamentals to build the thing. They were just tinkering, right? Uh They, they were just moving, you know, Naseem Taleb talks about this all the time. You know, hobby science is what really led to, you know, the innovations and it's true, people didn't go in with fundamentals, they, they, they, they just failed and they iterated and they made a mess of things until something popped out.
Once it pops out, then the universities and, you know, create the textbooks, right? And Oh, that's an interesting phenomenon. That's an interesting discovery. It must have been because boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the problem with that, right again, we don't create the way we consume now that people are consuming, that you have students coming to university. And I think that's the path towards achieving the thing, but it's not the path towards achieving the thing.
In order to achieve the thing, you have to make a mess, you have to not know what you're doing. You have to enter environments naively and it's not. And, and when I say you have to, I actually mean that in the most rigorous sense, information theoretically, I mean, this is the way information works, this is the way complexity works. This is the way solving hard problems works.
And, and that's what this is in real world situations is solving by definition, hard problems, you can go look at PNP and all this stuff in computer science. Again, it doesn't really matter if you want to put some rigorous sounding smart sounding in uh you know, language around it. You can do that, you already know this, this is intuitive, you have to put yourself into the environment to become the thing.
So we see that in software, we see that in, in, you know, learning piano, uh you know, learning guitar, you have to. So, so what does it mean to put yourself in the environment though? Well, just start playing right? Just start playing, just start swinging the golf club, just start creating the software and just start playing. I'm gonna add to this a little bit at the, at the end because it's not the whole picture.
OK. This is kind of the Nike just do it thing, which is true but not, it's not quite complete and I'm gonna talk about that in a sec. Um, what's another example? So we've got the software, we've got the piano, you know, we've got learning musical instruments, uh, investing a fitness. That would be another great example. Right? I mean, people want to be fit. Most people are not fit. Right. Um, you know, we, we see people, you know, whether it's in magazines or whatever.
I'm not saying you got to be super, super fit, but most of us would like to look, you know, good in a t-shirt. We don't want to be too overweight, we want to be healthy. Of course, I mean, health is the number one thing and, and so we've all done this thing where we, you know, we, we get the membership for the gym and we go for a few weeks, maybe even a few months.
But then, you know, inevitably we, we fall off the bandwagon and, and we're back to being whatever we do and life gets in the way and we're probably not eating as well as we should be and we're not really exercising as much or at all. As we should be. And so what's the problem there? Well, again, people are taking that kind of academic style, linear path carving approach to something.
Well, I've got to pick a gym and then maybe I've got to get, maybe I'll, I'll sign up for courses on, uh, you know, with a trainer or maybe I'll go to some youtube videos. I'll get that app that tells me how to, you know, you know, it'll create a schedule for me and it'll create a diet for me and I'll take all the information about whatever my BM I and this and that and my lifestyle and I kind of put something together for me.
It's this big recipe approach to getting fit and inevitably you don't get fit because that's not how you solve problems in real life. You can't take a recipe approach like that, that little nice sounding linear causal path towards the outcome doesn't exist. Ok? I know after the fact you can tell that story, but that's not how you get there. Ok? We don't create the way we consume. So, so what I'm arguing is like, look, you need to just start lifting and maybe that means you're lifting at home.
Maybe that means you go to the gym but stop thinking so much about which gym just get to a gym and start lifting. Yeah, but how do I lift? Just start lifting? Yeah, but what's the proper form? Just start lifting? Don't be an idiot and lift something super, super heavy. Everybody knows that's gonna pull your back out. Right. You don't need to be an expert to know that. But that doesn't need to be, you know, your form doesn't need to be something super perfect. Right? You're a human being.
You, you lift things all the time, you just need to start doing it and as you do it and as you're looking at yourself in the mirror and you'll realize, oh, wait, that form maybe doesn't look quite well and then maybe you'll start talking to people or somebody will walk up to you. Right? And the opportunity will arise or someone just walks up to the gym. Oh, actually you should keep your back straight.
Oh, actually you should, you know, soup at your arm on the way up and then you'll learn as you go, all that stuff will come from the environment in real time as it's supposed to. Right? And then you're going, you enjoy yourself more because you're not there to follow a strict regimen. You don't when you deviate from some so-called plan, you know, you're not feeling bad because there is no plan.
You're just there and you're doing it and you're choosing the exercises and you do what feels good and then you talk to people and then maybe you start stretching yourself a little bit more and maybe you start joining a group and maybe that group starts to encourage each other and on and on and on and on, but you're just doing it, you're in the environment. So the decision again is to put yourself into the environment. The decision is to just go to the gym.
OK. A golfing, uh, investing software, uh, you know, playing a musical instrument, fitness, whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is in life, you just have to be in the environment. Ok? Now, so, so that's kind of the just do it thing, right? It's, it's a dramatic simplification of the decision making. If you just do it.
Ok, then, then, then you're where you, that's the way to approach the problem, but it's not the full story because we've all heard the kind of just do it thing before we all get that. You know, you hear a lot of, you know, in writing or something like that, people say it's like just start writing, right? Just start writing, stop thinking about it, just start writing, stream of consciousness, just go and it's all very true. It's all very good stuff, but there's still something missing in that.
So in the golf course example, you, you're still kind of scheduling your time to go to the golfing range, right? Or to go play some games, it's, it's still kind of contrived. It's, it's still a bit, I got to force myself to do this right. In the investing example. Yeah. OK. Maybe I'll set myself up on a new program or an app that helps me invest and I'll play with it a little bit, you know. But eventually that will kind of probably drop off. You don't really have time software.
Yeah, I'll give myself a project but I kind of ran into a hurdle and then I got discouraged and then something else came up and then I never really got back to it. Um, learning the instrument. Right. You know, II, I did just buy it and I did just start playing and I tried to be really creative, but I kind of just hit this wall and then I stopped and you know, fitness the same thing, whatever.
So, so there's, there's always that kind of dusty piano or guitar sitting in the corner because even though we just did start, right? It's not really that hard to just start, but we didn't maintain it. We didn't keep it that perseverance that that is obviously needed to solve these kinds of challenges to become the environment wasn't there, right? So what guarantees the perseverance, what actually keeps us in the environment?
It's not enough to just start, it's not enough just to enter the environment, you gotta stay there. And so to understand this, I think we, we got to go back to that complete reversal of the of the kind of academic narrative that I was talking about earlier, the directionality of information as it works in terms of solving problems under complexity So the usual direction we take again is I'm going to carve out a path, the decisions, dictate the outcomes in life.
And so I'm going to make this decision, this decision, this decision, I'm gonna ask people what decisions I should make or the kinds of decisions I should make. And then I'm gonna carve that path out to the end. And I'm saying that it's the exact opposite of that. I'm saying all of that is just a narrative story that you can tell people once you're doing it because you can't create the way you consume, you gotta kind of tell that story.
But the only real decision to make is just to start at the end, which is to put yourself in there, put yourself into the environment. OK? So, so this is the complete opposite of that academic narrative. It's not the fundamentals leading to the outcome, start at the outcome and, and, and let the chips fall where they may and that that is what forces you to adapt. That is true adaptation. So what does that mean for golf?
Well, I think it comes down to let let, let's use learning, let's step back and just use learning as an example. Uh because everything kind of comes down to learning. If you wanted to learn anything, how would you do it? Read, write, study, uh you know, consume, right? You're thinking in terms of consumption, but no, that's not really learning. I would argue.
And I think a lot of people with any kind of success in their life or agree, genuine learning comes from, from creating right, from building, from doing the thing, from forcing yourself through the thing again and again and constantly changing your angle of approach, like I've said with the golf course, which means there's a kind of performance. You, you have the action and then you have the performance, the action of the golf skill is swinging the golf club and trying to get the swing better.
But what's the performance? Well, the performance is the game, it's the competition. It's the thing. Why are you learning to golf? Right. Why are you, what, what is the end result there? Well, to be a good golfer, how would you know, you're a good golfer? Well, if you were able to compete with other people, right? If you were able to, and it can just be for fun.
I'm not saying it's going to be major competition and maybe you still even just kind of want to play by yourself, but still you, the only way you would know you're actually good is if you could play with other people and have a game where you're not hitting every ball into the bush, right? You could have a game of golf, even if you want to play by yourself, that would be, you know, kind of the, the real world test of it because if you're just playing by yourself.
You don't really know if you're that good. Yes, you can keep score and, and you can compare those scores to, to well known handicaps and things like that.
But, but there's something about being in the real environment playing with other people where, you know, you might perform well by yourself or maybe that, that's not really performing well when there's the stress of other people competing and they're hitting the ball and you've got to wait your turn and you've got to see how they're playing compared to how you're playing. I mean, that's the real environment.
Not to mention other people making comments, maybe about your swing good and bad, but probably usually fairly good and saying, maybe try this, maybe try that. I noticed you did this, you know, getting uh ideas and information about equipment and techniques and approaches, you know, again, it's, it's placing yourself in the real environment, right? And now doing that uh naively doing that when you're actually not that good, making whatever skill that grows, grow authentically, right?
I've talked about this before. The best preparation is no preparation in the last episode.
Uh You know, the thing that you want to accumulate is something that's been informed by the environment by real world situations, not your own little ticking marks off on a paper in the golf course and this was good and this was bad and this compares to well-known stats and boo boo boo, you want this to be organic, to be rough, to be approximate, to be growing with all kinds of variation and changes in communication within a real, in this case, competitive, even if, even if it's just for fun but competitive environment.
So, so it's not just doing it right. It's not just I'm going to show up and start swinging the golf club. It's giving yourself a reason to be good at the thing, which is I'm going to grab could just be a group of friends. Maybe you're gonna enter an actual competition right? In the, in the community. I'm gonna enter that competition and I'm going to just start playing, I'm going to just start playing right and that if you keep doing it is going to be to, to force yourself to adapt.
So again, it's this difference between I'm just going to start something which has all kinds of different flavors to it, most of which you're probably gonna get wrong compared to, you know, the real high level goal is the performance. It's not just the action, it's the performance. We got, we got to understand the difference between action and performance. The action is just swinging the golf club that the performance is to actually go and compete with some people.
So, so to really put yourself at the end of something, the end goal to make that your starting point is to go perform regardless where you are currently in skill set. OK? And I'll talk a little bit about how to do this better at the end because this could seem kind of embarrassing and you don't want to make a fool of yourself. Obviously, some of that has to be the price you pay, but you don't want to go so far that, you know, ruins your motivation to ever do it again.
So I'll talk about that in a bit. But you, you have to do the thing, OK? You have to do the thing. Um you know, so in investing, you know, you could, you could uh just start to try to make trades, you know, but again, there, there's a bit of a competitive aspect to that, right? Your, your other people are making trades too. And so there's this kind of community aspect to investing.
So if you really want to do the thing, you would, you would, you know, at the the end, you would be someone who was making trades in the market against other people, maybe against isn't the right word to use, but with other people in the market, you know, and, and in some sense, people are trying to use information that others don't have. So you have to think about what that looks like. How can you enter that kind of environment right away? How can you get to that kind of environment right away?
Building software. It's not enough just to say I'm just gonna start and I'm just gonna give myself a project only to see that die away again. What is the end result? What is the performance? The action is to create the software? But what would the performance be? Well, the performance would have some kind of like all performances, some expectation of you, there'd be someone at the other end of that performance, expecting you to compete, expecting you to deliver something, right?
So instead of just giving yourself a project, maybe build something for someone, maybe have someone at the other end of that and say I'm going to build it for you now again. Well, I, you know, I'm not supposed to do that. I mean, I don't even know how to build software.
I'll get to that in a bit, but the end result is the performance actually deliver something to someone who can use their tool to accomplish something that would be the real genuine environment, that would be real genuine stressor, right?
Um The musical instrument, you can just go buy the keyboard, buy the guitar, pluck away, do the thing and then only fall off the the it's not just starting because anybody can just start, it would be to actually perform, put yourself, put yourself in a situation where you have to actually perform a piece.
Now, maybe this is like an online thing, maybe you're going to make a youtube video of, of the first piece you composed, you know, or maybe you're, you're really going to go for it and, and there's this little small coffee shop somewhere and, and you ask someone, hey, you know, two months from now, I want to have a, a little set where I want to play a couple of things. Can I be in the corner? You know, maybe that's too much for some people. But the point is it's got to be real.
Ok. The online one is kind of a nice example because anybody can kind of just record themselves doing it. But there's still someone on the other end of that, there's still a performance there. I know you don't know how to do it right now. But in 234 months, you know, put yourself out there or forget the 234 months, put yourself out there now. I know that sounds a bit ridiculous because you don't know how to play now, but I'll touch on that in a second. Um, the fitness right again.
Yeah, just go to the gym or again. Maybe you're posting your results online. Maybe, maybe people don't want to, you know, put themselves out there that much. But that's just one example. It's something real there.
There, there's a receiver on the other end of it, you're accountable to it if you don't want the online stuff, you know, maybe you, you, you form a group, I'm, I'm forming, you know, a fitness group where we, you know, 67, 10 of us go to a a certain gym or we go to a park, you know, and we do something. It's real and there's expectations there and, and it, it's not a boat. Yeah. But what's the right way and what's the path and what skill set do I need to have? What's the prerequisite real life?
Real life doesn't have prerequisites. It doesn't, I mean, and that, that's kind of true and kind of, kind of, kind of false. it's true in the sense that real world problems again, so are, are solved just by you putting yourself in there. The prerequisites that are quote unquote needed are ones you either already have, right? Or ones that are going to accumulate through time, but via adaptation anyway.
So, so this idea of having prerequisites is just kind of BS, it's, it's not, it's not the right way to think about it. It's about putting yourself into the environment regardless and making sure that environment is real.
So get a group of people together at the park where you do something specific, you know, you know, maybe it's, it's like a game that you play, right, or whatever, but it's real, there's expectations, there's accountability, it's not about the way to get there, it's about just doing the thing, right?
Uh And so, and so those are examples of, again, just, just differentiating between the action and the performance to really put yourself into the environment where you have to adapt, you should think about the performance, right? Not, not just what's the action, not just swinging the golf club or making trades or, you know, um you know, writing code, building software, not just, you know, lifting weights or getting on the treadmill, not just buying the piano and learning some skills.
What, what, you know, those are the actions, but those actions fall into place under a high level target. What is the real high level target? It's the end result. It's, it's the thing that would demonstrably show that you are actually good at this thing. So put yourself there when you're not good at the thing, right? You got to reverse that. We know what, what I usually call the academic narrative. It's not the foundations leading to the thing.
You got to start the thing, all that so called foundational stuff is, is going to emerge, it's going to precipitate out. But you gotta do, you gotta get the direction right? So you gotta put yourself at the end first. OK. So, so, so just to end off though, uh you know, there's kind of a question that gets begged here. It's like, OK, so I understand what you're saying.
Just put yourself at the end, just do the thing, put yourself in the environment directly and, and force yourself via adaptation to become the environment because that's the way humans really, really excel at what they do. But you know, if I, if I'm gonna go start golfing, I don't know if I can play with anybody else because, well, I'm not that good and then all the balls are going to go in the bush. If I start investing I could lose a ton of money because I really don't know what I'm doing.
You know, if I start telling someone I'm actually going to build them a tool, you know, that this thing could be an absolute piece of crap because I don't actually know what I'm doing, right. You know, if I just go to the gym, I can pull something. If I, if I tell some, you know, post online, my performance of piano, it's gonna sound like a piece of junk because I don't actually know what I'm doing.
Well again, you, you, you want, you, you want the reach to exceed the grasp, but not so far that you break yourself, right? I mean, you gotta be somewhat smart about this. So in investing, you're not gonna go blow all your money, right? You're gonna think of a way to put yourself into an environment in a way that you can maybe, you know, uh uh invest a certain percentage each month or each few months, you know, of your money so that it's real.
But, you know, you've got safeguards, there are ways to do this to put safeguards around your investments. It can only go so low and only go so high, you know, whatever it is, right? So it's, you know, let, let's not get into these kind of dumb excuses where we think. Yeah. But I could lose all my money. Well, no, there's ways to not lose all your money. Right. Um, there, there are ways to be smart enough but that doesn't mean it's not a real thing.
There has to be real risk, it has to be real, but you can kind of put some guardrails on it. Yeah. And, and this is true of any kind of situation if you're talking about, um, you know, building the software, you know, maybe you're building a tool for a friend or maybe, maybe it is a real client. Maybe you just started a business and you're getting into some software and you're going to do some pro bono work for a client or something.
So it's free and there's less stress and look, it's not the end of the world if it doesn't work out. I mean, there's still some reputational stuff on the line. This might depend on how far along you are on your, on your software development skills, but do it for a friend or, or even do it for yourself. But it's a real tool that you plan on actually using. Right. Build yourself a software tool that you will use.
It doesn't matter if it's a piece of crap, it's going to be a piece of crap, but you're gonna try to make it not a piece of crap. Why? Because you got this high level target of trying to build something real. It has to be real. You have to start doing the real thing. You have to start doing the real thing. It's not the same as, yeah. But I could just go learn about programming in a book and I could just go take this course and then I'll know what to do.
No, you won't, you won't, because it doesn't work by sums. It doesn't work by piecing little bits together to produce the whole. It, it, it, it works by just trying to do the thing and not being really good at doing the thing until you can do the thing. OK? Not a very rigorous sounding way of explaining it.
But, but the underlying uh concepts behind all that are extremely rigorous from a scientific standpoint, from an information theoretic standpoint because this is how complex problems get solved. So put yourself in the environment so you can go actually build a real tool for real people. But I'm not saying you go, you know, to an absolute real company and, and, and put everybody on the line by doing that. I mean, there are ways to do this with guard rails, make it real.
It could still be a bit embarrassing if you get it wrong. Embarrassment is a powerful thing. It's actually good, you know, but it's not gonna break you, right. So there, there, there are ways to do this, uh you know, music. I'm not saying you got to go do some big performance. I mean, why would anybody accept you anyway? Because they don't know who you are.
You know, maybe the coffee shop shop is a bit too much of a stretch, but maybe it's your friend's coffee shop and maybe it's on a day where almost nobody's there. I don't know. Right. And so again, there's kind of these guard reels you could put, it's almost like not even a performance. Maybe you're just kind of in the corner playing and, and some people are kind of just sitting there and it's, it's almost like Zac, it's like background music. Right.
So all of a sudden, a lot of that stress is kind of removed, but it's still real and you're still going to be a bit nervous and it's probably, maybe going to be a little bit embarrassing if it's your very first one. But that, that embarrassment is worth its weight in gold in terms of the education that's going to give you or the coffee shop thing is too much and, and, and you're doing it online. Well, I'm not gonna put myself online if I don't know how to play. Well, hold on.
Maybe there's a way to do that under a different premise. Maybe what you're doing is you're, you're showing your musical journey online. So it's not so much. Hey, everyone, look, I'm a musician now, I'm performing for you. Maybe it's, I am just starting and I'm not that good, but I want to kind of document this online for people because I know other people are struggling through this too. And I want them to see this, this journey of me, you know, trying to get better at music.
Let's see how it goes. So it's real, there's a performance. You have people on the receiving end, you're part of now this, this kind of online forum and there's this bit of a, an organ, organic back and forth conversational aspect of the environment, which is massively massively beneficial to you and your learning. But the premise is, you know, this is a learning journey for me and that's what I'm putting, I'm not putting myself out there as an artist, right?
I'm putting myself out there under the premise that this is a, is a musical journey for me as, as much as anybody watching. So there's some guard rails around, you know, that's probably not gonna break you even if it doesn't work out, but it's real. You're doing the actual thing, you're not buying the course or, you know, learning chords. You're, you're saying, you know, maybe once a week I'm going to put something out there and take it or leave it. There's a real performance aspect to it.
OK. Uh, you know, and again, fitness, you know, have some accountability, uh have, have people there, you know, may, maybe it's a group of friends but every week that you get to the park. One of, one of, one of you is, is the person in charge for that, that session that day and you come up with a workout plan and you guys are expected to follow that plan, whatever, right? You, you see what I'm saying, there's a way to put yourself into a real environment without it breaking you. Ok?
So, so I don't think that's an excuse that just because you don't know how to do something, you can't do the thing, you can do the thing and it can be real and it should be a little bit stressful and it should, you know, your stretch has to your your reach story has to exceed the grasp, but not so much that it breaks you. Ok. That's all I have for today. So thanks so much for listening. You can also find on trivial episodes in article format on both substack and medium.
So on substack, you can visit Shaler dot substack dot com. That's Sean MC Clure, one word dot substack dot com. You can also find me on me, Sean mcclure dot medium dot com. You can find these articles which are the same thing that I'm talking about here if you'd rather read and, or read. And if you like what you heard, please as always consider getting nontrivial a five star rating and maybe a short review on your platform of choice. I'm Sean mcclure. This is non Trivial. Thank you so much.
Until next time.