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Wanting the Right Things
You tend to become the things you believe are important. This idea alone defines much of the different trajectories people take. Luck, talent and habits constrain the path, but they matter less than which direction you decide to take.
If your finances are in order, that’s probably because being responsible with money is important to you. Ditto for school, career and relationships. If you never miss a week without exercise, then it matters to you.
This is all obvious—people who accomplish more in an area have more motivation. Duh.
What is less obvious is that you can change the things you feel are important. If you shift the things you value, you can shift the results you achieve. Many people obsess over how to get what they want, but perhaps it’s better to focus on wanting the right things.
What Things Should You Want?
At first glance this question sounds like it should be left to religion or professional ethicists. “Should” is a loaded word, so when you talk about changing your values, the topic quickly enters esoteric realms of which principles should be of ultimate virtue.
But values aren’t just about the ultimate meaning of life, they’re also cover the non-moralistic details of living well. For example, of the following things, ask yourself how important they are to you:
Sports
Following the news
Understanding science
Speaking a second language
How clean/organized your home is
Eating well
I’d guess none of these things are really moral decisions for most people, they’re simply preferences. I’d wager almost all of the values people use which guide their lives are similarly detached from any direct link to moral philosophy.
This suggests to me that changing your values, is in most cases, a tool like anything else. You can shift which things you find important, and in doing so, generate different results for your life.
Things People Say They Care About (But Actually Don’t)
Part of the problem is that what people say they believe and what actually drives their actions are not the same thing. In many areas, the two diverge so radically it’s hard to see how they come from the same person.
Every entrepreneur has had to face a painful moment when developing a product or service that everyone claims to want, but nobody ends up buying. Most good marketers eventually learn to treat requested features or products with at least a little skepticism.
The difference between espoused and actual values is a big part of the explanation of many people who seem to care about a facet of their lives, but never take any action. Yes, habits, talent and genetic endowments matter, but if someone is motivated enough you’ll usually see it manifest in taking steps forward.
I believe that this dissonance is largely from social expectations. People tell you that getting good grades, being thin or traveling are important, so there’s an unconscious pressure to at least espouse these values, even if you don’t possess them.
Because of this, most efforts to change values are simply empty gestures. They aren’t the genuine effort of trying to change the things you want, but mock attempts to lie to yourself and others that you’re doing so.
What Kind of Shifts Should You Make?
I can’t tell you what you should find important. For me, the entire history of this blog is about the ever-shifting values I’ve gone over as I try to pick out and enhance the parts of my life that I either want to magnify or improve.
Before I started this blog, I had felt weak and lazy, so I made discipline and habits important to me, which is reflected in a lot of the early posts on this blog. Later I made building social skills more important. Fitness, travel, learning and languages have been just a few of those shifts.
The shifts don’t need to be permanent either. Reading my articles or bio may make me sound like I do a lot of things, but part of the secret is that I’m never doing them all at once.
Even now, as I’m nearing the end of one of those shifts, I’m contemplating my next focus. What should be important to me in 2013? I don’t know for sure, but my feeling is that it may be dramatically different from how I spend my days right now.
Choosing Who You Want to Be
I’ve always hated the advice to, “Be yourself.” What if you don’t like parts of yourself, does that mean you shouldn’t change them? Does it imply you can’t change them, so you’re better off just accepting your destiny?
Friends and family often don’t want you to shift the values you have, because they worry (rightfully) that it may change you as a person. If you’re introverted, but you want to be more social, those people may resist your efforts to be more outgoing. If you’re overweight and try to get in shape, they may resent your suddenly different, health-conscious attitude.
I believe the advice should be “be your best self.” That also means being flexible in shifting the things that are important to you when you realize your current values conflict with that ideal. Don’t be fake, but don’t let a rigid conception of yourself prevent you from being a better person.
Who Should You Become?
The meta-ness involved in thinking about what you should think you should do makes talking about shifting values difficult. After all, if you feel something is important enough to be a value, isn’t it, by definition, a value you already have?
These philosophical paradoxes tend to disappear in practice. First, an ideal can be an idea but not a commitment. You may have the inkling that you should be more ambitious, but not hold it as a conviction which could influence your actions.
Second, it tends to ignore what values are and where they come from. Most values (like the list of trivial items earlier in this article) aren’t ultimate values, but simply labels we attach to different strategies for living well. We can know about a strategy without following it yet, just as we can be aware of a value without necessarily holding it deeply.
The process of gathering new possible values is an important one. Meeting people, reading books, traveling and personal experiments are all ways you can expose yourself to possible different ways of living. The more you see, the more options you have to live. Rigidity is probably good for a few core values, but in most things flexibility is better.
Being open in how you achieve your goals is good. But perhaps it’s even better to be open about who you might become.
Nonconformers Need Better Social Skills
A few readers have emailed me, following my own self-education, whether they should drop out of college and learn on their own. If you’re smart, you can probably learn better on your own, so it’s not an unreasonable question.
Unfortunately, it’s a really hard question to answer. If you plan on becoming a surgeon, licensed engineer or lawyer, you need a degree. For entrepreneurs or programmers, the value of a piece of paper is murkier.
But these limitations ignore a bigger one: most people suck at marketing themselves. Even if a degree isn’t a prerequisite to competing in your field, the advantage of credentials is that they do the signalling work for you. The more unconventional you are, the less you can leverage positive stereotypes to define yourself.
Does the World Punish Nonconformity?
Bryan Caplan thinks so. He wonders why employees don’t offer free trial periods of their work, to encourage employers to hire them. Yes, there’s a risk you won’t get paid, but that risk is balanced against being unemployed.
Bryan thinks the reason is being unconventional in the hiring process sends a bad signal. If you’re good, why offer a return policy on your services? Breaking the rules here might mean you’ll break the company’s policies, not take direction or be unable to fit into a team. Being weird can hurt you.
If you graduate from a great school, you’re signalling intelligence. But you’re also signalling your ability to conform. Pursuing a self-education may show people you’re smart, but also that you don’t have the patience to obey the rules when needed. Even if many employers say they want creative geniuses, most really want obedient workers.
The world mostly punishes nonconformity. If we see people who are different, we almost always shun them instead of admiring them. The great men and women of history, who heralded new discoveries and ways of thinking, were more often met with pitchforks than with praise.
Being Weird as Risk-Taking
I’m definitely not normal, and I think my eccentricities have helped me greatly. So the fact that society punishes nonconformity, in general, doesn’t mean we’ll all be better as sheep. Instead, I’d like to argue two things:
The world tends to punish nonconformity. All else being equal, it’s easier to be mediocre and normal, than mediocre and weird.
These constraints mean a lot of conventional behavior is highly inefficient. If you pick the right moments to be an outsider, you can reap huge gains in your life.
Nonconformity is a form of risk taking. You move away from the fat middle of the bell curve and onto the edges, where both extreme successes and spectacular failures lie.
Social Norms and Unconventionality
Much of social skills is simply being normal. Not “normal” in the sense that you need to have conventional hobbies, interests or beliefs. Instead, I mean “normal” in that you follow social norms—you make eye contact when speaking to people, you’re not overly arrogant or meek, you speak at the right volume. Most people who are “weird” break these unstated norms in ways we often can’t articulate.
Scientists have known for some time that what we consider beauty is mostly looking normal. Beautiful people have more averaged faces, their faces and bodies have fewer deviations from symmetry. This underlies a lot of the more variable appreciation of beauty which depend on fashion and culture.
This suggests that what we think might be an exceptional trait, such as beauty, may actually be the result of lacking major deviations from normalness. I think social skills is mostly normalness, overlaid with extroversion. We see people as charming, largely, because they make fewer social mistakes than the rest of us.
This is why I believe charismatic leaders and speakers can get away with being so weird in many other ways. Their social skills allow them to appear “normal” on a subconscious level in so many ways that their eccentricity doesn’t matter. If your unconscious communication builds rapport with me, I care less that your higher-level weirdness sets us apart.
My friends who are extremely successful (and unusual on many dimensions) tend to have excellent social skills. Their on-paper weirdness is more than compensated by their charm.
The Rewards of Being Different
Of my friends, it’s the weirder ones that are the happiest. They earn more money, have more adventures and lead more interesting lives. Part of that might be because they’ve found some opportunities they can exploit by avoiding the herd.
But I suspect much of it is that these people have embraced enough unconventionality in their lives, that they’ve learned to offset its costs. That gives them a freedom to be themselves in a way that people who haven’t learned those skills cannot.