#19: The benefits of following a circuitous path
an exploration of uncertainty
One of my favorite parts about living in NYC is getting to work from coffee shops and eavesdrop on the sometimes intimate and sometimes menial conversations that people share over cups of coffee. Actually, one of the most memorable moments that motivated me to move here in the first place was working from Ground Support in SoHo over the summer and hearing a girl my age pitch the company that she was developing with her roommates to a prospective investor. It was a conversation that I didn’t know I needed to hear until it happened, a reminder of how much agency we have in life to create the things that we want without needing to ask permission. The same thing just happened as I sat down to write this week’s newsletter from Marlow & Sons.
I listened in complete admiration as two stupidly attractive men, seemingly my age, caught up over coffee and ham & cheese baguette sandwiches. They covered so much ground in this conversation that at a certain point, I gave up on feeling creepy for how intently I was listening because it really felt like a conversation that I was supposed to overhear.
It so perfectly complimented what I had already been planning to write about for this week’s edition of Char’s Web, which is about the utility of uncertainty.
My friend Alex recently forwarded me a new newsletter called “Where the Road Bends” by a NYC-based professional coach named Steve Schlafman. He talks about how the current human population is living longer than we used to and cites a study from Pew Research suggesting that by 2050, the number of centurions— or people 100+ years old— will be 8x what it was in 2015.
This prolonged lifespan necessitates the skill of self-reinvention.
Instead of life looking like this…
Schlaf suggests that it’ll look and feel a bit more like this…
There’s no one way in or through. We all have very different paths and while the latter picture has probably always held more validity in the lifespan of any naturally messy human, it feels particularly representative of our endlessly optionful lives today.
These images were top of mind as I listened to a podcast with Dolly Parton this week. She talked about the book that she recently wrote with well-known author, James Patterson. When he reached out to her with the treatment for this book, she was all but certain as to why he wanted to write it with her.
Up to this point, ‘author’ was not a title by which Dolly Parton self-identified. But when he explained the importance of Nashville to the storyline, she realized that her depth of Nashvillian knowledge made her a perfect candidate for the job. Due to her unique blend of confidence and humility, she was able to rise to the occasion and embrace being the least seasoned fiction-writer in the room. Her freshly curious eyes and intellectual honesty added to the experience because as a novice, she helped experts recognize how people unfamiliar with the trade rules of a particular craft approach things differently. (This also reminds me of Rick Rubin talking about how he broke many rules due to his lack of musical experience and his success happened as a result of that, not in spite of it).
Throughout life, Parton says that her authenticity in expressing herself has continuously led to new and unexpected opportunities. She has been on a continued path of self-reinvention and the most important meta-skill that she’s formed above any trade-skill like singing, acting, or writing is learning how to adapt and remain flexible in the midst of uncertainty.
It was cathartic to read that Dolly Parton, one of the best-selling female singer-songwriters of all time, still feels the wobbles of self-reinvention at 77-years-old.
When we are first figuring out who we are and what types of projects we like to work on, it can feel like our entire identity and self-worth follows the question, “and what do you do for work?” So to hear Parton talk about the evolution of her character and the success that ensued from unabashedly expressing her interests at the time— very well knowing that they are bound to change over the years— had a relaxing and reassuring effect.
In an alternate reality, I would have interrupted the conversation being held by the two aforementioned emotionally intelligent young men that were sitting beside me at the coffee shop to contribute this piece of insight. They, too, were discussing the trials and tribulations of being young authors, screenplay writers and models and feeling the frustration of seeing a foggy glimpse of the path forward but feeling like it’s still too far off in the distance to appreciate its rewards in the present.
This was when I remembered what cookbook author, YouTube personality, wine-brand developer, former Bon Appetit senior food editor, Molly Baz said in her interview for the Second Life podcast.
The whole premise of the Second Life podcast is to feature women who have departed from the early days of their careers and gone on to do something usually very different than they initially expected. The opening questions are always: 1) what did you study in school? 2) more importantly, what did you think you wanted to be when you grow up? and 3) what did you learn in your ‘first life’ that ultimately informed your second life, whether you knew it was going to at the time or not?
If memory serves, Baz majored in art history and romance languages but spent two separate semesters in Florence and then in Paris and realized how much she loved food. Upon returning, her college roommate at the time also had an affinity for food so they started a dinner series together that garnered some community attention. Upon graduating, she moved to NYC and was thrown into the literal fire of the kitchen as a line cook. She learned quickly and made a lot of mistakes along the way. Ultimately, she loved the dance of the kitchen but knew that her pipe dream was not to be head chef or owner of a restaurant so she pivoted by starting a private cheffing company with a friend and then transitioned into the world of recipe testing. She weaseled her way into the Bon Appetit kitchen over time and throughout her recounting of all of these separate chapters of her career, she laments the unique experience of being in each.
She wishes she could sit at the table of her college dinner series and taste the embarrassingly over-the-top menu that she and her friend served. You wouldn’t catch her dead featuring a chocolate macaroon with foie gras buttercream plated with a saba grape must reduction and endive on her menu or in her cookbooks today… but at the time, there was something about those ingredients and fine-dining aspirations that appealed to her.
There were so many moments in her career in which the end-game seemed a mile away and also times in which she felt on top of the world. She just wishes that at each of those moments, she would have paused and acknowledged the idiosyncrasies of each chapter for what it was worth.
This struck a chord with me because I have been in a moment of wondering what’s next. Of wanting to figure myself out a bit more professionally. But I also know that I will look back on the freedom and structurelessness of the moment that I am in and long for these days again.
Part of getting comfortable with uncertainty is embracing the inevitability of change. This moment, this conversation that I am eavesdropping on in which these two men are also experiencing a great deal of uncertainty in their lives, will never be the same. And in the act of pausing to appreciate that, there are often calming clues about the path forward.
No matter how far we feel from what we ultimately intend to do with our time in the future, there is a kernel of experience that we are gleaning now that will prove to be really helpful.
Moving Beyond the Wobble
In these moments of wondering what’s next, it’s easy to feel paralyzed by inaction.
We think that confidence must precede action when in reality, it’s just the opposite. Action precedes confidence because in showing yourself that you can do what it is that you’re attempting, in getting feedback, in seeing your contribution mirrored back to you, you begin to embody the confidence that you were looking for in the first place.
Reese Witherspoon talks about the irony of action preceding confidence in an interview with Adam Grant. When filming the 2005 movie “Walk the Line,” Witherspoon felt utterly incapable, fearful and out over her skies. She pulled out all stops to quit but, luckily for her, she was unsuccessful in her attempts to leave the film that would ultimately win her her first Oscar.
Once on the other side of an achievement, no matter how big or small, it’s easy to forget the wobbly feeling that came before it. That’s why listening to this interview with Witherspoon was such a good reminder that not only is it okay to be riddled with uncertainty when we act, but often times it’s necessary to actually bring forth change in our lives. That same wobbly feeling indicates that you are doing something different, and on the other side of such uncertainty is something new, unexplored, and ultimately life-shaping.
A friend recently asked me what it would take for me to feel ready to take a next step in my job/career/hobbies. I sat with it for a moment. What I thought was an issue of value or self-worth was actually an issue of… hesitation. Nothing more than that. It was a moment of feeling like I needed the confidence to jump off the ledge rather than building the confidence and deriving the feeling of contribution by just going for it.
So if you are feeling lost, if you are in the face of uncertainty now or know that at some point in the future you will be there again (because we all inevitably will), I hope this serves as a reminder of how exciting it actually is to not know. It often works out better than we could ever imagine. In order to build momentum, it’s important to remember that confidence is not a prerequisite for action. In fact, the very lack of action is often the reason for your lack of confidence.
Take the leap. Identify the underlying unmet need. What is it that you actually want? What do you not have in life right now that you are striving for?
There’s a difference between feeling uncertainty because what you are about to do is misaligned with your values and feeling uncertainty because you haven’t done something before. In order to exercise discernment between the two, check in with yourself on what underlying unmet need is necessitating change in your life. When moving forward with clarity around what it is that you really are trying to solve for, the actions that you take will result in more confidence, life experience and direction.
That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading and I look forward to getting Caught Up with you next week.
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