Month: February 2020

Everything in moderation.

The world isn’t black and white.

No man is an island.

These are just three of the mantras I remember from my mother growing up (leading to plenty of eye-rolling from me and my sister).

All of these, together with finding the right balance, and so many more, reflect a similar concept at their core. That we become better, that the world becomes better, when we embrace the tension of ‘yes and’ instead of succumbing to the comfort of ‘either/or’.

Lightbulbs lit up in my head as I started seeing this everywhere: Independent and Interdependent. Profit and Purpose. Acceptance and Change. Atelic and Telic. But they gradually dimmed as I began putting the concept into practice.

Turns out it’s really, really hard.

At some point during the altMBA last year, after having ruminated about the tension between scarcity and abundance, my mind suddenly leapt to how we model dynamical systems – essentially anything that moves. If we imagine little red balls rolling along the blue curve below, we can see that it would take a lot of energy to get the first red ball out of A, that the second ball between B and C will almost certainly roll down into C, and that a small push is all it would take to get the third ball out of D, over the little hump into E.

In dynamical systems, it’s all about reducing energy. If you drop a ball, it might keep bouncing for a while, but eventually it’ll lose energy and stay still on the ground. The ball at A is in what we call a stable state, a state of least energy. The ball between B and C is unstable – it’s heading downwards. The ball at D, though, isn’t really stable, but it isn’t unstable either. It’s somewhere between the two.

Meta-stable.

And this is how I make sense of why embracing the tension of ‘yes and’ is so difficult. I’m like that little red ball, perpetually being pulled towards the stable states of A or E – the ‘either’ and the ‘or’. Getting out of ‘either/or’ (A or E) takes huge amounts of energy. Finding which version of ‘yes and’ (B, C or D) is the right one for me takes more energy as I go on a mini-rollercoaster of exploration, feeling uncertain and vulnerable in my instability. Even when I finally settle for a version of ‘yes and’, I know that it’s only temporary, that the right metastable state for me will change as I change, as the context which I’m in changes. And all the while, I have to resist gravitating towards the oh-so-comfortable ‘either/or’.

It’s not easy. But I believe that it’s work worth doing.

What metastable states are you exploring?

I decided at some point last month to post every week. Writing – and sharing what I write – is still new for me. Turning it into a habit will likely take a few months. Current behavioural science provides plenty of wisdom to increase the chance of this happening. Piggyback on an existing routine. Make it frictionless to do. And build in a dopamine hit when it’s done.

Despite my routine being disrupted (in the nicest way possible) these past few weeks while I’ve been on the road, I’d set everything up so that I could keep that weekly commitment. I posted on schedule the first week. And then the second. But by the third week, I was feeling uneasy. What’s more important here, I was asking myself. Is it spending the next couple of hours communing with my screen so that I can honour my commitment to myself (me, my, I)? Or is it being fully present with people I love and care about deeply, most of whom I seldom see? Using the language of character strengths, do I need to activate Perseverance, or Love?

This is, of course, like so many things, a false dichotomy. It’s not, and rarely is, a case of either-or. And Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, or the Buddha’s noble eightfold path, to name just two wisdom traditions, remind us to be weary of dogma, of clinging rigidly to extremes.  

Here, Perseverance was pushing me to maintain a streak. I decided to privilege Love, trusting that Perseverance would get me back on track once I was back at home. On the spectrum ranging from pushing through with my weekly commitment no matter what… to giving up at the first hurdle, I found the right balance. Not for everyone, and not for all situations. Just for me in this precise context.

How do you find the right balance in striving for your goals?