Slippery Slopes
Slippery slopes are scary. They’re moss-covered and moist and lead to darkness. Should we foolishly wander onto one, we’re urged to return quickly to safety (they’re slippery!). But what are slippery slopes but change, and gradual change at that? Slippery slopes are nearing the gravitational pull of other ways of thinking long enough to get a sense of the air. And if the air smells sweet, you may fall, off the slope, into black…but what if you’re falling up, into light?
We all seem to think about the changes in our life as distinct acts, as if they were stage plays. Most of us have bright, distinct lines we use to mark the years - graduations, geographies, professions. End dates and start dates. We even have start dates for our relationships. How absurd is that? Is that how the changes in your relationship felt to you; like bright distinct lines? Big step-function leaps of change?
We do this in our work. I can’t tell you how many MBA students have asked me how to get started with startups and haven’t taken my advice - to wade into it. Intern nights and weekends for a company you like, start a meetup on a topic you care about, shoot, just go to meetups on topics you care about. See what you enjoy doing. Maybe you don’t like startups after all. We don’t want that though. We want something we can announce. We want something that signals what we always knew about ourself, that we’re awesome. That other stuff’s extra work that we’re not getting any social credit for…our Mom is not telling anyone about those, they’re not going in our alumni class notes, we get no degrees from those.
We do this with our health. We’re either on a diet or not. We’re gym rats or we never go. Just go outside. Walk more. Play a sport once a week. Don’t eat meat one day. Have vegetables for lunch. If it feels good, do more, if not, I promise you can go back. No one will stop you. Experiment. You will fall off no poorly-tractioned surface.
We do this with in our politics and our social norms. When did you last genuinely entertain an idea from the opposite end of the political or social spectrum? When did you last reexamine one of your own cherished values?
We do this with how we spend our time, and who we spend it with.
One of my favorite things about working in the New York startup community has been the culture of experimentation and almost academic commitment to going where the “data” leads you. What many of them might call A/B testing their life. With so many ways to live out these minutes we’re given, there are slim odds you or I stumbled onto our best lives first. So go explore the slippery slopes.
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