They say that if you explore too much, you will be a mile wide and an inch deep. This mindset leads many to commit to something as early as possible. Committing too early, on the other hand, comes with risks of its own. You can develop tunnel vision, or you can pigeonhole yourself into a career for which your motivation is mediocre.
Commit too much to one thing and you lose context. Commit to a hundred and you’ll be spread too thin. It’s a delicate balance; however, if you get it right, you will reap the benefits of both having a broad background and having deep knowledge in a specialized domain. This begs the question, is there a way for us to extract the benefits of an exploratory lifestyle and a focused mentality simultaneously? With careful consideration, it may be possible to construct an approach to life that gives us the ability to go wide and go deep.
I have developed a few systems to help me fine-tune the balance between breadth and depth. Exploration is a skill, as is deepening your commitments.
Firstly, I rigorously maintain notes on everything I think about. I use Notion for this. When I come up with an idea while working on something else, I create a page for it, write down the idea, and return to it later. This allows me to stay focused on the task I am currently working on while storing the ideas I’d like to explore further in a central repository. This creates “bins” where I aggregate my ideas until they are ready for my full attention.
This system helps me keep my mind clear. It’s like saving my ideas on a hard drive, freeing up working memory for more immediate thinking. Saving things for later allows me to engage with a much broader range of ideas: things don’t have to fit nicely into a structure when they first occur to me.
With my notes page, I can go out into the world, collect experiences and write down my thoughts. Here and there, and in places you wouldn’t expect, I’ll find pieces of the puzzle. Once I have amassed enough of them, I’ll start to put them together. I’ll compile them into blog posts, opening up my thoughts to the rest of the world. This creates an opportunity for feedback, and it allows me to find other people who are asking the same questions I am. It takes a village.
By writing stuff down, I give myself more space to think. It becomes easier to focus. Frequently I get blocked because I can’t see past the jumble of thoughts in my head. Once those thoughts are out, the next step becomes obvious. With a good note-taking system, I can tame the chaotic mess of ideas that arises from exploration, allowing me to keep oriented while I develop additional context.
A while ago, I read Essentialism by Greg McKeown. In the book, he argues for the importance of aligning one’s efforts in a singular direction. By focusing one’s efforts, he claims, one takes advantage of compounding effects, and wastes less time going in circles. In McKeown’s view, those who have a clear direction go much further in life.
While I agree with McKeown’s conclusion, this advice is misplaced for those who don’t know which direction to head. For those who are at a nexus in their lives, it’s not a great move to commit to a path merely out of a desire to “focus”—really, a desire for certainty. If you are in this situation, it might be better to simultaneously explore all of the paths in front of you with detachment, waiting until one stands out, or until the paths converge. The desire to “choose a path” is fraught because the most impactful careers are typically ones where you have to create the path yourself.
Fear of uncertainty can inhibit exploration. One can fall into a sort of “negative commitment,” where they end up focused on something not because it is the most interesting or impactful path, but because they were afraid to explore the alternatives. Curiosity is a wonderful guide—it will lead you where you need to go, but you cannot be curious if you are afraid of the unknown.
While fear can lead to negative commitment, a consideration of the risks a given path presents is nevertheless worthwhile. Most paths can be de-risked by thinking them through, talking to experts, or running small experiments before taking a more significant leap. Are you thinking “hell yes?” If not, then perhaps it could be better to start with a smaller step, and then see what happens. Commitment arises out of a clear conception of your situation, and the affirmation of a specific course of action. Trial and error is a great way to develop the clarity you need to take the next step.
Exploration precedes commitment. Any creative process requires an iterative cycle of conscious thought, note-taking, and feedback. Explore, comprehend, commit, and repeat. Exploration unlocks deeper, truer levels of commitment, which then enable more informed patterns of exploration. By simultaneously taking our lives seriously and being open to new ways of being, we invite the deepest levels of meaning, wonder, impact, and passion into our existence.
It is well known the drunken sailor who staggers to the left or right with n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance . In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and the others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.
Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.
Richard Hamming