Human Nature

Identity Crisis, Part One

by TomLaPille on May 18, 2011

I think we use “identity” to mean two different things.

The first form of identity is one of self-description. How would you, or someone else, describe you? Are you a writer? A martial artist? A speaker?

I’ve been described as all three of these things. Why am I a writer? Because I leveraged a previous blog into thousands of dollars of freelance writing and because I’ve written a weekly column for a website for the past two years as part of my job. Why am I speaker? Because I gave a talk about game design at the University of Washington. Why am I a martial artist? Because I have a purple belt in kenjutsu.

Does any of that tell you anything about me, fundamentally, as a person? I claim that it does not. Tim Ferriss is also a writer, speaker, and martial artist, and that doesn’t help you compare him and me as overall human beings.

This is because all three of these identity descriptions are based on results, and we don’t all agree on the results necessary to earn a description. A “writer”, under this discussion frame, is a person who trades words for money… unless you choose to measure someone’s writerhood by how influential their ideas are. The definition of “speaker” is equally malleable, and may or may not require paid work. And who can possibly define what a “martial artist” is in anything resembling a useful way?

Most descriptive identities are vague, and they are especially so when we look at them as aspirations. If you told me that you wanted to be a doctor, and I was feeling particularly snarky, I might ask you how you will know when you’ve succeeded. Will you be a doctor when you get your M.D.? Will you be a doctor when you finish twenty successful heart surgeries? Will you be a doctor when you own your own practice? If you don’t know, then when can you be secure that you’ve made it?

It would be fair to describe me, right now, as a game designer, as I receive money in return for time spent making games. If I wanted to transform from a game designer into a pizza delivery guy, I could quit my job, call up a Domino’s, and deliver twenty pizzas. If I wanted to transform into a college professor, I could start reading behavioral economics journals, apply to graduate schools, get a Ph.D, and then fight for tenure. If I wanted to become a pop star, I could start taking voice and dance lessons, then recording and posting YouTube videos of my performances until a record label signed me. Some of these transformations can happen faster than others, but the point is the same: results-based identity is eminently hackable with some work.

That should be exciting to you. Do you want a new and different description? Define the specific results you want that would make you feel that you’ve earned it, then go and produce them.

There is another consequence of the hackability of descriptive identity: becoming attached to a descriptive identity of oneself is silly. These descriptions are results-based, and you can change them on the fly to match anyone else’s set of descriptions, so they’re useless for the purposes of defining yourself for yourself.

If descriptive identity isn’t useful, we are clearly missing something, as I don’t know anyone who would claim that every human is the same. What is the second form of identity, and how do we find it?

That is a question for tomorrow.

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Ten Thousand Hours

by TomLaPille on May 12, 2011

A few years ago, Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers released. As often happens with such books, one tiny quote from it became a meme, to the exclusion of almost everything else in it. In this case, the meme was that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to get truly good at anything.

Ten thousand hours is an absurdly long time to perform one activity. It is 416 days, 59.5 weeks, or 1.14 years. The ten thousand hour claim became a meme exactly because of how audacious it is. Who has done anything for that long? Most people I’ve talked about this with have one activity that has hit at least a few thousand hours, but nowhere near ten.

That idea was enough to get me to read the book, in hopes of getting some kind of clarification or increased insight about it. I received none. Gladwell was content to observe the ten thousand hour trigger and move on with no further commentary, other than that many of the people who had hit ten thousand hours were lucky to have opportunities that allowed them to get there. Other than “be lucky”, Gladwell had no suggestions for the reader.

This didn’t stop people from trying to infer some. The most common one I heard was that we should choose a profitable field, then dump hours and hours of effort into improving our skills in that area.

While that’s a reasonable thought, it blithely ignores reality, giving far too much credit to the human brain. Human willpower is an extremely powerful force. Everyone I’ve ever met has been able to exert willpower to achieve extreme focus and rapid results, but only for short periods of time. Eventually, the turbo-engine runs out of fuel, and they go back to their defaults. That level of willpower-induced focus won’t last more than a good ten hours. After that, if you’re not genuinely interested, you’re not going to make it.

What skill have you spent the most time practicing? It’s probably something you like doing, and that’s not a coincidence. You naturally spend less time doing things you like less. You can race to ten hours in any skill, you will not complete the marathon that ends at the ten thousand hour mark unless you would have done it without the target to hit.

You’ll never get to ten thousand hours deliberately. You can only get there by accident. Your ten thousand hour skill has already chosen you. Your job is to figure out what you can do with it.

You’re a Pack Animal and That’s Okay

May 5, 2011

Today, I had a chat with one of my best college friends. I discovered that he was trying to adopt the same slow-carb diet that I and everyone I know is now doing, but that he was having some problems with compliance. “It would be nice to have other people around me who were doing [...]

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