You're good enough and so am I

So It Turns Out, #55

Hi,

So here are some things I’ve been thinking about since last year.

You’re good enough and so and I

“Whatever else I am, I’m not enough.”

That’s, honestly, the core driver of far too much of my personality, and, I’m guessing, many of yours, too. So I’m writing something down, both as a reminder to myself and, hopefully, something helpful for some of you to read, too.

There’s something about the Highly Successful People, that tends to correlate with that. I don’t know if it’s a cause of being Highly Successful, an effect, or a little of both.

I do know that there are so many words to describe this trend, because it shows up in so many places:

• My college debate team used to talk about how the ideal debater was an “insecure overachiever,” one capable externally of projecting perfect confidence while arguing a point and simultaneously running an extremely detailed and paranoid parallel internal mental assessment of all the ways that their argument could be attacked by the opponent or fail to be persuasive to the judge.¹

• Many of the best consultants I knew were constantly driven by their fears that their clients wouldn’t think they’d done enough to earn their princely fees, and so worked themselves half to death, and modeled the same for their impressionable junior colleagues. (Occasionally, I wonder now if they chose a profession where the fees were so high so that they had to always prove themselves).

• Some of you, dear readers, have told me you feel this way, terribly afraid that your contributions to the world — which already are so much — don’t possibly measure up to the impossible standards you have for yourselves. (This isn’t a breach of confidentiality, because you’re not alone. A lot higher percentage of people feel this way than people generally think is true…)

• Heck, even Lin-Manuel Miranda Hamilton wrote like he was running out of time.

You might have your own words for this problem, if it affects you. But you might not have any words for it at all. So, for better or worse, here are some of mine:

• I’m too much

• I’m not enough

• I’m not smart enough

• I’m not good enough

• I don’t know why people don’t care about me more

• Why does everyone leave

I work on it, in therapy, all the time.² I have for years.

But I think one thing I’ve come to realize, after all that, is that I have been working on only one part of the problem, but not another. And I want to articulate something about the problem underneath the problem, that I haven’t heard other people say in quite this way.

Let me explain. But as I say to my therapist all too often: I have to take a step back first; I promise I will get back to the point in a second.

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Last fall, I had a Really Weird Experience in Berkeley, California. (Or at least, as weird as one can have there get while consuming nothing harder than a single cocktail.) I decided at the last minute to fly out there the weekend before Yom Kippur for the Manifest 2023 conference, which despite its name was a serious conference about the use of prediction markets to better predict and plan for the future, and in keeping with its name and by being in Berkeley, was also a deeply weird experience.³

I had one heck of a great time for the 2 days I spent there: I met amazing people, I got into a lot of fun arguments, I went on a hike, I got tasked with running an impromptu seminar to Explain DC Policymakers to the AI Engineers, I gave Eliezer Yudkowsky an Otolmens Red Card, I argued about the Roman Empire with Robin Hanson and Scott Alexander, I was mistaken for both Noah Smith and Dario Amodei, I accidentally stumbled upon and arbitraged hundreds of dollars of vintage mint-in-box legos for a 100% profit, I even made a prediction market on whether I’d get back to DC in time for Kol Nidre. (Resolved: YES).

I had fun, I felt smart and clever, I learned things and taught things and did things. In short, as a friend of mine later suggested in response to hearing about it, I’d found some of my people.

But, well, last year’s Manifest convention was right before Yom Kippur. And I had to make it back. After all, my synagogue is one where the High Holidays dvar torah occasionally does things like, “present an arguably-successful answer to The Problem of Evil.”⁴ I try not to miss it.

So then the whirlwind redeye back, the sleep deprivation, the showering and quickchanging, the running to synagogue, the realization I’d lost my kippah on the Metro and had to hunt one down (not easy when your synagogue is hitting Maximum Jewish Occupancy), then hunting down a spare prayer book too.

And suddenly, then I’m there standing in the back of services, pressed up against the wall without a seat, and I take a breath as the stress and the feelings — of being unprepared to reflect on a really hard year, everything I’d lost, and all my failings — washed over me.

And I feel, I literally feel, my brain try to pick up the “you’re not smart enough” cudgel and hit me with it on behalf of all that stress and all those feelings…

…only for the hammer to TOTALLY bounce off. After all I had just come from a conference where I had, for a moment, felt Smart Enough.⁵ Felt…just… Enough, Generally.

(This is an exceptionally amusing mental feeling, if you’ve never felt it: your brain saying, “G-ddamnit, hate yourself!” and another part of your own brain answering back, “NOPE.”)

So, I had to go hide in the synagogue library and laugh my ass off about myself for a few minutes.

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Part of the timing of this essay is an unsponsored pitch for going to Manifest, for which tickets to its 2024 conference (In early June this time! Not right before Yom Kippur!) are now on sale. And part of it is getting my reflections down before that next conference. Drawing a line across the page, as it were.

But the rest of it is something else, talking about what I think I’ve learned, maybe. Something that has meant that this essay has stayed in my drafts folder for months now, out of sheer cowardice. And maybe me talking about that is useful for you, too. (To be clear: understanding that problem doesn’t mean it’s solved. I’ll probably work on this for a really long time, maybe my whole life.)

And, hell, maybe half the point of going to a conference is that it’s a commitment mechanism, including for sending out the drafts that scare you the most.

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Here’s the lesson: It’s easy to work on Fixing Problems Your Brain Assigns, or to try to Fix Yourself so that those Problems no longer feel so bad: fix being not smart enough, or successful enough, or prestigious enough, or happy enough, or sexy enough, or, loving yourself enough, or, OR, OR.

But if the real problem is that your brain wants you to feel bad about yourself, it will keep on shifting from problem to problem. Even fixing one problem won’t help always, because your brain wants to find something to be a problem so it can tell you you’re a failure. Your brain’s objective function really is, “find evidence of failure,” not, “defeat the Monster of the Week.”

The reason the people you love telling you that you’re enough doesn’t work isn’t because it’s untrue. It’s because there’s no set of things, sometimes, that anyone can tell you that could make you believe the obvious fucking truth.

So maybe if you think you’re not enough, maybe you should parse that sentence word by word. Yes, you think that. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t.

You are.

The evidence is all around you. Go looking for some.

And maybe hunt out a few more wild conferences in Berkeley until you believe it.

Manifest Conference is in Berkeley, California, from June 7th to 9th. It’s preceded by its sister unconference, Less Online, May 31st to June 2nd. (I’ll be there.)

Disclosures:

Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or prediction market counterparties.

1. Yes, in retrospect, this is a good reason to run away screaming.

2. As the meme goes, for any X, men will do X to avoid going to therapy. GO TO THERAPY.

3. Disclosure: I have since then done a little bit of consulting work for a nonprofit entity related to one of the conference sponsors.

4. Or, less enjoyably, occasionally be the means by which you learn that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. That was a shittier year.

5. Smart enough, very much not smartest. I, uh, cannot emphasize that enough. We have the data. Ain’t me.