No One Knows What They Are Doing
And that’s okay.
One of the best pieces of career advice I’ve ever gotten is from a full-time streamer. He runs a gaming studio, has been a host of several Magic The Gathering tournaments and a commentator for Dota 2. He’s also one of the first streamers still around on Twitch.
He goes by the name of Day9[TV].
Beyond him being entertaining and funny, there are moments in between where he offers sound wisdom or different perspectives to life and gaming. And whenever people ask him about advice on interviews, one piece of advice that he stresses is this:
No one knows what the fuck they are doing.
The person conducting the interview is likely to be someone the company just roped into asking you questions. That or it’s someone who used to do the work years ago.
Keeping that in mind is meant to soothe a lot of anxieties around interviews. It helps you to keep in mind that this really comes down to a conversation and whether you get along with someone and the company itself.
But while this advice is directed to handling interviews better, I’d stretch this logic far beyond that. Like a wide-sweeping stereotyping brush, this general rule that people don’t know what they are doing can be applicable in several contexts.
And even though we all don’t know what we are doing, it’s all okay for several reasons.
It Provides Reassurance
So if people don’t really know what they are doing then why are people taking action? Why are people making statements? Why are people offering help and guidance?
The statement that people don’t know what they are doing is not designed to be a sleight on people. It’s not a criticism of their work or views. In the end, we do have to give some level of trust to people.
But while that is the case, it also provides a lot of reassurance in various contexts.
In interviews, we know that the person has gaps in their knowledge about the position and is simply asking questions and making conversation.
When it comes to people offering advice, especially from gurus, we know that anything and everything they say is just a guess as to what the problem is and how to best solve it. That guess hinges on ones own experiences and views as well which they took the time to interpret and grow from.
It provides reassurance because we truly don’t know the best answer. What we can do is offer some guidance to what we think is the best answer.
And it says a lot about someone when they claim or imply their answers are the best for everyone.
It Allows Us To Be More Explorative
In the context of self-help there is a diverse view of all manner of things. It’s just a matter of finding it. When we learn that not everyone has the complete answer to our problems, it spurs us to take the initiative to be curious and explore.
The top-tier education systems in the world are structured in this fashion. When students learn about something, they are encouraged to take their own initiative, ask questions, and to explore new possibilities. They don’t just take whatever they learn as fact and never question it moving forward.
For a lot of us, we lacked that sort of structure and we still do.
It’s for this reason that a reminder that no single individual has all the answers let alone knows everything can serve as a bridge for us to this particular path. It leads us to having a healthy amount of skepticism in our lives that can lead to us being ultimately better people.
By extension of this, it can also break one of the biggest problems that self-help faces — the fact that gurus encourage a loop-like thinking.
It’s hard to notice it in cases when things go right for those of us who take advice to heart, apply it, and succeed. But it becomes more apparent in situations where advice is wrong or that the guru or the user makes a mistake.
So often in the industry people think that when they fail, it’s a result of other flaws in their life and that the guru has nothing to do with it. Even though it was the gurus own words that spurred one to take action in the first place.
When you have a curious or skeptical mind around these things, you can break through that loop by reminding yourself that these are just guesses. There are more options out there and to use that experience to learn something from it.
It Allows Us To Not Take Things So Seriously
There are plenty of things out there to take seriously for sure. Climate change. Politics. Our goals and dreams.
However there is something amusing when we think about the fact that literally every person in the world is taking guess throughout their entire lives. For sure, some of those things work out well for people and others don’t. But where someone ends up in their life really just boils down to multitude of guesses over their lifetime.
In a sense, it’s a way to determine someone’s intentions or views of the world.
In a world where we are all making literal guesses on everything from what are the best goals to have, what habits to work on, and so on, it speaks volumes when a person assumes their answers are the best or the correct ones all the time.
The reality is we don’t always have the best answers. We can be blindsided by experiences that we never experienced before or witnessed. We all have to accept that fact that every one of us is wrong about one thing or another.
And that’s okay.
Because not only does that help us break away from self-help loops, and provide us reassurance, it helps us not to get strung up details all of the time or take everything seriously. It helps us to breathe and help us form our own loop of reassurance.
A loop that allows us to bounce back when things don’t go as planned.
A loop that helps us to laugh or smile in the face of problems or unfavourable outcomes.
The idea isn’t to diminish the bad things that happen. But rather to get into a mindset that if something good comes from our guesses great, if not, then we learn from it, grow from it, try again next time, and not sweat about it.
We all make mistakes and there are certain ones that cost us a lot more than a few steps. To me, reminding ourselves that we are just as clueless about things as others is a way to keep things real and authentic.
That we give creditability and trust to those whom we deem worthy. And that who we decide to give it to tells a lot about ourselves and our own beliefs.
With that in mind, the best way to learn about ourselves is a matter of asking who do we trust the most in our lives and why.
And if we want to change, it’s a matter of finding more people we can trust and asking ourselves do we really wish to trust these people?
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