Do the Stupid Stuff

A MOST UNLIKELY LIFE HACK…

After reading one of the more controversial posts¹ I’ve read on Medium, I wanted to share another perspective on the subject of people thinking they know what they don’t need to know. I won’t link to the article because it was full of willful ignorance written by a tech bro. Instead, I highly recommend the flip side of those perceptions, written by a Nobel Prize winning psychologist.²

Throughout history, societies have created institutions and rituals that force young people to do stupid stuff.

In primitive societies, rites of passage can kill, maim, or mutilate initiates. In modern society, we have institutions like boot camps, hell week, hazing, and 24-hour resident shifts that force people to do things no sane, intelligent person would do. But learning something that doesn’t matter (or seems insane) may often yield a deeper, completely unforeseen wisdom. Not going through some form of initiation turned out to hamstring my first career, and caused additional financial pain when I failed to teach my son the same lesson.

I thought I knew what I didn’t need to know.

As a rebellious teenager, I couldn’t see the point of doing things that didn’t seem to matter — chores, homework, family responsibilities — or submitting to any kind of authority, be it a fraternity or going into the military. I thought I was smart because I was able to screw around my senior year while getting straight A’s, get into the university of my choice, and take an easy major that allowed me to spend all my time training to make the men’s tennis team (which won two consecutive national championships completely without my help). At age 20, I had plenty of opportunities to teach lessons on the side, network with rich alumni, and develop some social skills. Since I was sure that these things were not directly related to my goal of becoming a great tennis player, I chose to ignore them.

When you don’t know what you don’t know, how can you know what you don’t need to know?

I know this sounds like a quote by Donald Rumsfeld,³ but how else can I say it? A few years later, I started to teach tennis and was amazed to find that helping my students taught me more about correcting the flaws in my game than all the years I struggled to make it on the professional circuit. By moving the focus away from myself, I finally found the clarity I was missing. It reminds me of the story of Mark Edmondson, an Australian player who worked a year as a brick layer in order to save up enough money to travel the circuit. His reward for doing a stupid job, ultimately, was winning the Australian Open (one of tennis’ Grand Slam tournaments).

A few years after that, I started competing again in the 35 and over category, where I had a little success.⁴ At one of the tournaments, I ran into a respected coach I had known about as a teenager and we started talking. He said he had followed my career and observed something in me that I had never known existed. Besides the warm feeling of validation he gave me, I wondered how much higher I could have climbed the rankings if he had been my coach. But I never reached out to him when I was younger, because I hadn’t felt the social skills needed to create that relationship really mattered.

Like father, like son

I thought we were being fair as parents. We set what we thought were reasonable standards (nothing less than a B in his honors classes) for our oldest boy. I didn’t realize he was so much smarter than me he could breeze through school and avoid two of the only three things a kid really needs to learn in high school: be the best you can be, regardless of your level; and, be willing to get outside your comfort zone.⁵

Doing the the bare minimum allowed him to spend all his time hanging out with friends to play video games. He thought AP calculus homework was dumb, so he never did any. Even though he aced every test and got a 5 on the AP test, his grade got marked down to a B in the class. Doing that a few times reduced his GPA enough to drop him out of the top 10 in his graduating class. So even though he tutored the high school valedictorian in math, she got a full academic ride to the school of his choice, while he got offered a scholarship to a lesser school. Since we felt the higher ranked school offered our son the best opportunities for both personal and professional growth, we sent him there for an extra $30,000 in tuition.

If you’re under 30, there’s still hope.

According to recent scientific findings, the human brain does not reach full maturity until at least the mid-20s. If you haven’t gone through tribal rites of passage, the military, or other institutionalized forms of initiation, you can still do the stupid stuff — in school, on an internship, or working at a startup. Because when it really gets tough, you will have learned the discipline and strength to keep pushing through toward a goal that really matters to you. And trust me, if it really matters, you will feel boredom, fatigue, doubt, fear, and even excruciating pain⁶ before you hit the finish line.

As the Dutch say, “geluk is met de dommen.”

Translated, it means “luck is with the dumb.”

All I can say is I’ve been very lucky in my life.

Here’s to better writing.

Footnotes:

¹Even though it got a ton of recommendations, about 80% of the comments were negative and completely refuted the logic of the article.

²From Noble Laureate David Dunning, Ph. D:

³Multiple student deferments allowed this arrogant and willfully ignorant man to avoid learning the horrific lessons of Vietnam. His part in the tragic and disastrous invasion of Iraq will go down as one of the worst foreign policy decisions in the history of this country.

⁴In three years, I reached the finals of 15 out of 16 tournaments, winning 13 of them. The year I went undefeated (5 tournament, approx. 20 matches), I only lost one set.

⁵Just in case you were wondering, the third thing is learning how to get along with other people.

⁶I learned my lesson the hardest way possible, as my first major business crisis coincided with a life changing personal loss.