I’ve noticed the same thing as Visa — the gaps in people’s lives when the metaphorical camera’s not rolling.
[This week, while watching the amazing creation of the blue LED I noticed it again in Nakamura’s life. You can brush the technicalities aside and just appreciate an extraordinary human story in that video.
The nondescript gaps in a narrative can be hard to notice because our minds rely on memorable signposts to chronicle stories. But I hope after today’s musing you will also start noticing and celebrating those gaps — because they are the seeds, light, and water of the achievements that make into our stories. By normalizing your recognition of them, you will have another weapon to fight your biggest battle — the battle against fear.
[Related aside: The writer
argues that our largest failures are often “failures” of nerve. I profoundly agree. I often think about nerve as having something to do with time. Like, if you are in a major rush you are more likely to have nerve. Urgency manufactures nerve in the same way you’d ignore the speed limit if your aunt was in labor in the passenger seat of your car (this happened to me 1 week after I got my driver’s license en route to my goddaughter’s birth).
But recently, I’ve been thinking Chris Rock’s observation that “life is long, especially if you make the wrong decisions” is an argument for having nerve. Having a long time horizon increases the ROI on explorative gaps. Nerve can come from fight-or-flight but also from taking the long-view. Like many things, it’s the “medium” perspective or horizon that is self-defeating — in this case by assassinating nerve. To use poker-speak, if you find yourself calling a lot you’re making a mistake — before you call ask yourself if you should really be folding or raising.]
A personal perspective on gaps
I hit a reset button in 2021 leaving a great job once I was sure I didn’t want to keep doing it for another decade. It turns out that having a good career but feeling antsy about it mid-life is very common. You should see how many people reach out wanting to chat about transitions (btw @khemaridh & @p_millerd have really done great work on decision-making and framing in these transitions)
Speaking from experience, transitions are hard especially if you don’t know the object level “job” you are transitioning to. All the expected difficulties (what’s your identity, sucks to be making little $) apply. But as someone still in the thick of it I’m confident that it will work out so long as I feel both “flow” and validation that I’m adding value. Sustainability (ie monetization) is a challenging technical problem (but that is even true for companies like twitter or any number of early stage startups looking for product-market fit.)
Even if a transition feels right you still need to be careful because “unsustainable forever” is definitely wrong but “unsustainable as an investment in finding the right match of me to work” is necessary. When you get off W2 autopilot, you are threading a different needle than the one you have when your 9-to-5 is a drag and you’re side-hustling your exit strategy. (Make no mistake — you are threading a needle in either situation unless you work for someone and are genuinely stoked about it).
There’s always “voice” that tempts to take away the uncertainty — “you can go back to having a job” but I know it would be swapping one pain for another. Incubating any risky endeavor requires some amount of mental shelter from that “voice”.
That shelter is exactly what Visa points out and how I see it personally — when you read a biography or hear a person’s story there’s gaps. This person did X and 5 years later they did Y. In biography form we don’t bat an eye. But that person lived through those 5 years. It wasn’t a blink for them. They tangled with everything and just because the tangling wasn’t legible in a tidy chapter doesn’t mean this years were insignificant. Hell, they might be the prereqs.
I’m an immigrants’ kid. I’m not free of the scripts at all. But I reframe them lest the self-doubt keeps me from hunting down my match. The grand upside is coming out of this with true self-determination. If you are going to gamble, do it for a big prize.
The game, the practical challenge is to get where I want to be while being who I want to be. I could have gotten financially to where I’d like to be with the job but I wasn’t enjoying the path anymore. It felt low stakes as far as what it meant to my identity. Likewise, I could be more of a whore in my current path but that would also betray my taste (also, to channel the slow productivity lessons it’s bad strategy).
My last few years of p/l at the job were my best and yet I felt nothing. That told me a lot. It confirmed feelings that started years earlier that I pushed down to the cellar.
Let me be clear. None of this advice. It could be cope for all I know. But it’s most definitely a bet. These years that don’t leave receipts will very much be ones that I remember. Self-doubt and all. I’m not comparing myself to Arnold or anyone but it’s hard to deny that our internal representation of our lives is like a personal movie. It would be tempting to get up and go to the bathroom at this part. But there’s a lot of detail in the dialogue, not everything has to be explosions.
[And if your a touch older you know life off the immediate achievement carousel goes down a lot easier when you have a elementary age kids that still wanna play with you].