Once a month, I’ll be sharing a curated collection of ideas I keep returning to: concepts that are surfacing in my work, questions I’m wrestling with, patterns I’m noticing. These posts are my way of thinking out loud and sparking some interesting conversations along the way.
This series is part of an ongoing experiment in exploring how to most meaningfully share what I know while connecting with others who care about similar ideas. (See also: my weekly office hours.)
1) The conditions are always impossible.
In a recent Women of Letters interview, author Noreen Masud shared that she often thinks back to a saying of Doris Lessing’s: “Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
“And oh my goodness, it’s so true,” Masud says:
“The conditions are always impossible, particularly if you’re a woman, if you’re a woman of colour — the conditions are always impossible. So you just have to.
Whatever feels too overwhelming to do, do a kind of adjusted version of it. If you can’t write 500 words, write 300 words. That’s the other thing I do. I’m very indulgent with myself about targets: if I don’t meet a target one day, I halve the target. I don’t double it for the next day.
If I can’t write a paragraph, I write a sentence. If I can’t write a sentence, I open the document and look at it. I’m a big believer in that. And once you’ve opened the document, you can write a little bit. You know? That’s usually how it works.”
Lessing and Masud’s words have been running through my mind lately.
Particularly in the context of recent events, it seems that the conditions are going to remain impossible for some time, and that the onus is only going to increasingly be on us to find some way to make a life in the midst of it all. I’m reminded, here, of something Marshall McLuhan shared in 1966:
“There is a well-known story by Edgar Allen Poe. It is called ‘The Maelstrom’ — about a sailor who goes fishing one afternoon and becomes so absorbed in his thought that he forgets to notice the turn of the tide and suddenly is caught in a great whirlpool. He realizes he can’t row his boat out of the maelstrom and so he begins to study the action of the maelstrom. He observes that certain kinds of materials are sucked down into it and never return while other kinds pop up again. He attaches himself to one of these recurring objects and survives.”
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2) The thing that gets you to the thing.
There’s a scene in Halt and Catch Fire — one of my favourite shows — where Lee Pace’s character says, “Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.”
I think about this often in the context of success. From what I’ve seen, where many tend to stumble, in their way up whatever ladder they’ve chosen to climb, is in placing an overemphasis on the expectation that any particular rung of that ladder will be The Thing™. In reality, any given rung is more likely to be the thing that gets them to the thing.
To use an example from my own life: I’m in the middle, now, of finalizing the details for a professional opportunity I recently agreed to take on. It involves travel and the coordination of plans among some 10 or 12 people. The final product is shaping up to be fairly different from, and not quite so exciting or beneficial as, what was originally pitched when I said ‘yes.’
It would be easy, at this stage, to get discouraged about the lack of my desired outcome. I certainly would have — certainly did — in the past. But with the perspective of where I’m at now in my career, I’ve been able to remind myself that it’s completely fine if this experience doesn’t end up offering what I thought it was going to offer. Why? Because I know that this thing is not the thing: this will simply be yet another thing that gets me to the thing, and keeping that in mind has helped me to temper my expectations in ways that have been allowing me to appreciate the opportunity rather than focus on what might be suboptimal about it.
I’ve seen something similar keep any number of people from making progress on something they’ve long wanted to do, or from finally hitting ‘send’ on something they’ve been tinkering with. At some point in the process, they developed the expectation that that thing would be The Thing™, and when — with time — they realized that it wasn’t going to be, it was enough to keep them from moving forward with it at all.
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3) Optimizing for compatibility.
Over the years, I’ve lived, worked, and studied in many different countries, using several different languages. I’ve lived in big cities, and I’ve lived in small ones; I’ve lived in places whose names anybody would know, and I’ve lived in places that few have ever heard of.
What these experiences have taught me is that amazing people are not a finite resource. There really is no shortage of people who are exceptionally smart, funny, kind, generous — insert whatever quality you find impressive or important here. Similarly, and particularly as I advance in my career, I’m finding that there are no shortage of opportunities to meet those amazing people. What I’m coming to realize is in somewhat short supply, however, are people who are whatever combination of amazing things you’re looking for and are able to be a part of your life in a way that makes sense for you both.
A perspective I’ve found freeing in navigating this is optimizing for compatibility. I’m no longer interested in having someone be a part of my life simply because they have the most brilliant mind, or because they tell the funniest stories, or because we have the best time when we’re together. That was enough for me, at one time; it isn’t any longer. Instead, at both a personal and a professional level, I’m now drawn to filling my life with the people with whom I’m most compatible.
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Recommended reading
- “A tiny press took a big risk on experimental books,” by Alexandra Alter
- “20 years working on the same software product,” by Andy Brice
- “We live like royalty and don’t know it,” by Charles C. Mann
- “How my book came to be,” by Emily J. Smith
- “Growing up Murdoch,” by McKay Coppins
- “Why Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint won’t require blurbs anymore,” by Sean Manning
- Good Material, by Dolly Alderton
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Thanks for being here. 👋 If you enjoyed reading this, stay tuned for the next collection at the end of March or join me in my weekly office hours to talk more about it in the meantime.
Jana M. Perkins is a computational social scientist. An award-winning scholar, her research has been federally funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada since 2019. She is the founder of Women of Letters, a longform interview series celebrating women’s paths to professional success. Together with Miranda Dunham-Hickman, she is co-authoring a book that will be published by Routledge.
To learn more about Perkins and her latest work, visit jcontd.com or follow her on Bluesky.