This one’s less personal than the last but still not about tech or climate or product stuff so if you’re here for that kind of thing, click away now. 

I’ve thought and talked a lot recently about ‘considerateness’, not just in the soft interpersonal way the word implies, but in terms of literally considering things. Of being thoughtful in decisions, being intentional with choices. There is of course a lot to be said about the value and goodness of spontaneity and action, but well, I haven’t been thinking about that. 

In martial arts

In almost all martial arts one of the first things you train is to make the fight or flight instinct a split second decision, rather than a reaction. When you’re faced with a scary situation, if you’re untrained, you’re likely to panic and go into an adrenaline-fueled instinct-mode and end up just doing something, whether it’s run, punch, or sometimes unfortunately, freeze. 

But to panic is almost never the best thing to do. In an ideal world you’d stop time and assess the situation (well actually in an ideal world you’d not be fighting at all but that doesn’t help make my point so…). The best thing to do when a fight is about to start is to run. Run away as fast as you can. But, which way should you run? Are you likely to be faster or slower than the aggressor? How far are you going to have to run so you can pace yourself? If you’re slower is there something you can do to slow them down? Is there someone near by who could help? Should you scream and run or would that make things worse? Is running the best thing to do at all? etc. 

In those crucial moments there is no time to think. So in martial arts, at least for self defense, you train those instincts. You practice so that the panic response doesn’t take over and instead your brain can work on what to do next, rather than just going saying, ‘ahhhhhhhhhhh’.

For the briefest of moments you need to not do something, instead, just stand there. 

That’s quite a bad example because really the last thing you should do in a fight is literally stand there, but it highlights the value of being intentional, especially in difficult situations. You can apply the same logic to most any difficult situation, did you cut yourself while cooking? Are you feeling exhausted after work? Did your friend cancel plans on you again? Did you fall off your bike? Did something awful happen? Don’t just do something, stand there. 

Take a few moments to think about the situation, put yourself in someone else’s shoes, consider what else might be affecting the situation, whatever. Be intentional with your next steps. 

Standing there for someone else

Oftentimes not just doing something, but in fact standing there, isn’t only good for you but for other people too. Recently a friend of mine had something awful happen. It turned them around and broke them down. When they were talking about it they mentioned God’s plan, and all the things they blamed themselves for, and how hard it has been. 

Do I believe in God’s plan? No. Do I think they were to blame for what happened? Definitely not. Do I know how hard it has been for them? No. But that doesn’t matter, what right do I have to discount their feelings or their experience? Should I assume I know what’s best and do something? No. Instead I listened, I hugged them, and I reassured them that there was hope, and that they’d be okay eventually. There was nothing more to be done. 

One of the best things you can do for another person is to listen. To let them talk and talk and get whatever is on their mind out of it. Don’t just do something, stand there. 

This phrase ‘don’t just do something, stand there’ is one I first heard and then stole from John Green, in a  video essay on the topic which is quite lovely but I’ve had similar thoughts and beliefs along this line for maybe a decade now. That if you stop and think about something you can make better, more considered decisions, based out of values and beliefs, not out of instinct or your environment.

The ‘How I Met Your Mother’ philosophy

There’s a scene in the final season of How I Met Your Mother that I love very much. The titular mother is in her apartment with ‘the naked man’ (if you don’t know what that means watch season 4 episodes 9 and season 9 episode 16 for the episode I’m talking about). He asks her something along the lines of, ‘If you could do anything what do you want to do with your life?’ And she says, ‘I want to end world poverty.’ And he says, ‘great. Then make every decision you make from here on out in service of that’ and she does. And she changes her life. 

Now this is a fiction of course, for her, getting an economics degree and changing her entire focus was as simple as a few lines in a script, but I like the lesson. If you know what you want to do, if you know what you want to achieve, you can orient yourself so the decisions you make are in service of that. And you don’t even need to know what you want.  A lot of people don’t know what they want, you just need to know what’s important to you.

Parallels in product development 

When you’re developing a product there is a good practice to follow before you actually start building something. First, you want to understand your vision, what you want the world to look like when you’re done, your target users, the problems you want to solve, and your goals. In product development, like in the HIMYM example, the why needs to come before the what. 

So if you don’t know what you want to do, roll it back, what problem do you want to solve? Or, if you don’t know that yet, what is most important to you? What do you value the most? Most people, if pressed, can figure that out. Determine your values and make the decisions that follow in service of them. Use them like a compass to direct you. When you’re making decisions grounded in what you value, you can be more sure of the decisions you’re making. 

Value in values

This is a concept I find the modern world is forgetting. One of the things religions and historical ‘codes of honour’ do well is they give people a base. They gave people values or ideals to adhere to, or to chase, or at least to use as a wall to bounce ideas off. They gave people a standard to uphold. This did the very helpful thing of relieving some cognitive load by limiting your options, it also meant that people were making decisions in service of greater values. 

Now a-days this is starting to fade, at least in the western world that I know. In part because these values and ideals have been abused and used against people rather than for oneself. In part because the number of people and the amount of access people have to new information has increased exponentially and so communicating the value of this kind of thinking is easily lost, and in part because our governing structures and leaders seem to  lead by bad example. 

Outro

But I digress. The point is being thoughtful, being considered, not just doing something, but standing there, can benefit you and the people around you. And it can serve you the way a monk can feel enlightened or the way a knight was sure of his decisions, if you can base.

I write all of this really as a preamble for the article I’m going to publish tomorrow. So, yea, if you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading, now you’re ready for tomorrow.