65. Get Stronger or Live Small

(Epistemic status: Tutorial level advice; spelling out things that some people find tacitly obvious and others haven't thought about and still others aren't shaped to naturally accept.)

It never gets easier - you just get stronger. If you don't get stronger, you'll have to settle for living small. ...Alright, that's going to require a lot of additional background to make sense.

There's this idea in the game Go of "living small". You settle for less, for making a tiny shape worth very few points, because you know you're not strong enough - as a player, or in a fight - to get anything more. This is often the right move. However, you can't win a game this way. At some point, unless the game is going very strangely, you need to be large, take up space, and make points somewhere.

For another bit of background, there's the common refrain that "it gets better", or that something desirable about you is "not true yet... growth mindset". This is only sometimes true. Sometimes some task is permanently beyond you. But sometimes it really is true, and all you need to do is reach far and try hard and be ambitious.

As life continues and challenges mount, your life may get better, but it will never get easier, not so long as you're still trying, so long as your reach exceeds your grasp. If it were to get easier then you would probably just aim for more difficult things until your life got harder again.

But - and this is the obvious-feeling part - if you don't get stronger, you won't be able to tackle the bigger more exciting challenges. There's no point in trying to go large when what you have means that you should live small; no point in burning down scarce resources chasing underprovisioned dreams. But (growth mindset) you are not a fixed being. You can grow and change and become stronger, and it's exactly that that you'll have to do, if you can find a way. And to be clear, I don't remotely just mean physical strength! When I say "strength" I mean it in the Go sense, or the academic sense - you can be strong by having a lot of mental horsepower, or knowing lots of things, or knowing the right people, or knowing lots of people, or having the right resources. There's lots of ways to be strong, and lots of ways to apply different kinds of strength to succeed at going large.

So: be clear with yourself about your own capabilities, and your own shortcomings, and what exactly it would take in terms of time and energy and resources and setting and surroundings and background, in order to do the grand things that you want to do. Then: decide for yourself whether you'd rather grow strong and lead the tales, or else live small and be comfortable.

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