I never thought of myself as a scientist.
I struggled to feel excited about my research paper last year, even though it was on a topic I enjoy (anxiety, attachment and developmental psych).
Then I came across this in Tom Vanderbilt’s Beginners, quoting mathematician Richard Hamming:
“”Science…if you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing it.” Meaning: Science was about probing beyond the edge of what we know. It was about experimentation and failure. In engineering, however…”if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.” Engineers are tasked with making sure things do not fail, with ensuring certain quantifiable levels of performance. No one wants to drive across an experimental bridge.
Many of us are more familiar with operating as engineers, or seeing that as valuable skill:
We quantify and measure as much as possible, from sleep to step counts to OKRs.
We try to optimise processes, management, productivity
We often have sense of what “110%” looks like, and rate ourselves on this
We check, recheck, hesitate about submitting something for a major project, or to senior management, and scrutinise details to manage this worry
Conscientiousness and tireless optimisation are specific, valuable skills that don’t come naturally to everyone (trust me - my dad is a lifelong engineer, my siblings are data analysts, and I’m the outlier).
Seeing pitfalls is also actually a strength, but one which often gets overused to the point of being overwhelming, or causing anxiety (related to last week’s post).
What’s often regarded as less valuable, and less reassuring, is seeing what can go right.
Yet, the higher up you go, the more it matters that you can do things you don’t know about.
Funnily enough, even the most precise, analytical people I know can mistake their lack of confidence for incompetence, especially when the context changes.
Precision and risk minimisation is often not the path to performance and growth (role-dependent, of course!).
Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, deliberately chose to take big risks - he preferred to fail big, rather than have many small safe bets (Ride of a Lifetime is a good read, and relatable because of Disney’s cultural influence).
If you’re starting your own endeavour, there isn’t a blueprint, regardless of what entrepreneur bootcamps tell you.
If you’re starting a new role, a job description or predecessor doesn’t always reflect the best way to approach it.
If you’re figuring out your career path, no excel sheet will tell you how work can serve your life.
Learn before doing or learn by doing?
I’ve realized that most people tend to prefer learning through courses rather than action.
That’s understandable; most jobs don’t intentionally create space for experimentation, reinforcing what many of us learnt in school. Plugging new information into a received framework or structure also seems faster.
But it means we lose out on the process of becoming:
Learning comes in different forms. Probing the edges of our knowledge and skills to
deal with uncertainty,
lack of structure,
a new context, where we don’t yet have intuition to guide us,
is a particular form of learning that becomes embodied. It isn’t stored in a specific “knowledge box” to be retrieved; it’s reinforced when thought, emotion and action are connected in a complex interplay.
And, it lets you develop your own intuition.
Figuring stuff out yourself, figuring out what you don’t know, how to start knowing it, and how to operate without complete information, is a whole skill.
Yes, it’s less comfortable or familiar without a blueprint.
It’s also where growth is, and how confidence is built.
A little compass and structure that might help:
1. Figure out what’s needed for your role, or your stage, or context
How much precision and perfection is actually needed? How do you know?
Is this in a particular domain? Some parts of life benefit from being optimised, some parts of life will inevitably bring the unfamiliar.
2. Get comfortable with not knowing everything
Start by being aware if you’re acting / reacting out of discomfort, or habit. If you are, decide if you want to change that.
Leave space for serendipity and possibility.
3. We are scientists when it comes to ourselves
You will constantly have to find out new things about yourself
How quickly and accurately you do that is up to you. What you do with what you find out is within your control.
4. Build flexibility between states and contexts
We all have a range of ability to be fluid vs fixed, precise vs ambiguous
Whichever part of this range you tend towards, try to build and practise the other end, and practise switching
5. Build trust in yourself
Expanding your range of competence and comfort will help adapt to multiple contexts and roles. The best way to do this is to try something unfamiliar, that may even feel “not you”.
Consistently tackling unfamiliar stuff until it becomes no big deal, or alternatively consistently practising precision if you’ve rarely done that, helps remind you that - hey, it gets easier.