Two-Inch Things We Never Consider
Author’s note: Only a few hours before writing this, I finished rereading Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. It is one of my favorite books. I’d like to give him credit for connecting the ideas in my head [some of which are probably his in the first place] that inspired this week’s writing.
We often believe the good things in our lives are directly reflective of our hard work. I mean, we put in a lot of time and effort, and the payoff is worth celebrating. And we believe that we deserve the recognition. That we earned our success. True enough, but severely incomplete.
What about when things don’t go our way? When we don’t get the promotion or win the game? Well, at that point it’s just bad luck. We worked just as hard, if not harder, than the other guy. We tell ourselves that it didn’t happen today, but we’ll get the recognition we deserve next time. After all, some things just aren’t meant to be.
It is far less comfortable for us to believe that sometimes we deserve to lose, because it was someone else’s day to deserve to win. Or that good luck is the largest component in every single one of our successes.
Effort and outcome are much more independent of each other than we like to believe. Effort is the energy you put into something. Outcome is a result. An outcome is one possible result of countless variables coming together at one precise moment. Your effort is only one variable that impacts an outcome.
Yes, the effort you put into the things that matter to you is absolutely important. Your effort is one of the few things you have control over. And the more times you try, the more likely the outcome will sometimes be in your favor. That’s just probability in action.
When things do go our way, we are quick to accept credit for making it happen. Whatever it is, we did it! It’s only when we miss that we readily accept that life is random and mostly outside our control. But what if we were willing to credit randomness when we win over crediting ourselves?
Personally, I find it freeing to focus on my effort and not worry so much about the result I want. I know that if I keep putting in the effort, I’ll eventually get to something I’m proud of. And often that something I’m proud of is pretty far from what I thought I wanted anyway. I like to remind myself that randomness and countless other factors are on the field with me at every given time. The outcome will be whatever it is, and that’s just life.
Getting the outcome you want in any given situation is like playing a game of rock, paper, scissors with 50 people at once. And you happened to be the only person to throw scissors while the other 49 people all decided to throw paper. It’s possible, but [to use a math term] just so incredibly not likely.
Then you have to remember that before your miraculous winning game, you played at least 17 other rounds of rock, paper, scissors against who knows how many other people, winning and losing along the way. And those were just the games from this morning. Who could even tabulate all the games you’ve played in your lifetime that impacted this exact moment?
In Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull writes about the impact of the two-inch and two-minute moments in our lives. How some of these moments forever alter us while most of our two-inch moments go unnoticed.
For example, I’ll never forget the time I had two seconds to choose speeding up instead of braking in a snowstorm when the car in front of me lost control. Literally two inches different and I would have been in the pile-up instead of barely in front of it. I’ve never seen a snow covered highway since without feeling that moment. We remember our close calls. Our lucky moments and our near misses.
But what about all those two-second moments we didn’t see? The countless times when all of the universe aligns for our day to be precisely unremarkable, even though life-altering forces were lurking nearby. Maybe the avalanche doesn’t happen until after we’re just far enough down the trail to not know about it. Or we just rounded a curve on the road and didn’t see the accident only a minute behind us. We will never know many of those moments have shaped our lives too.
We can’t know, and we aren’t supposed to. Our lives are an intertwined mishmash of far too many nouns, verbs, and equations for us to ever find the path of even one thread. We are wonderfully tangled together, and it is the messy that gives our lives meaning. It’s when we assign meaning to past moments that we often forget to given randomness the credit it deserves. But lucky for us, randomness doesn’t mind. It will keep showing up anyway.
