Growing up

There’s an ancient Chinese saying that “Dragons sire dragons, phoenixes birth phoenixes, and the son of the rat is adept at tunneling.” It reflects the conservative Chinese mindset of not letting the apple wander too far from the tree. Many Chinese then and now proudly claim to be a 15th generation tofu-maker or 12th generation doctor or 16th generation mason.

But that is the path of stagnation, of letting a hereditary line of dictators rule for a thousand years until things get so unbearable that another line takes over. It is the path of the 99.9999%, but it is not the path of founding emperors and other men and women of historical impact. To be great requires one to venture outside the house and village that one grew up in, to face new dangers and seize new opportunities.

If Chinese tradition epitomizes paranoid orthodoxy, American tradition symbolizes reckless abandon. Mass media reinforces that there are at least two impulse-driven eras in the average American life: teenage years and mid-life crisis. Even as literature and movies poke fun at these groups, it imbues such behavior with the legitimacy of the masses — it is OK that you are going crazy and ruining your life, because lots of people do it. But it’s not OK. Lotteries have been called a tax for the mathematically challenged. Charging blindly into a startup or drastically changing your field is essentially playing the lottery. Great impact requires great change, not just vast change.

“Rome was not built in one day.” To me, this adage comments less on the fact that it takes time and resources to do something great, but rather that it is impossible to plan a great end result before even starting. Any design benefits from the crucible of time, and often the limited resources that bottleneck growth are a blessing rather than a curse. Decisions made after examining the subtle effects of earlier decisions are often better than making multiple decisions simultaneously, because interaction effects can more clearly be predicted and identified.

In technology R&D, everybody must eventually change fields. No one problem or solution lasts long enough in the modern world to sustain more than 2 decades of cutting edge work. Success or failure depends on when or how you change. Clinging desperately to your favorite problem/solution until absolutely forced to move on by funding agencies/journals/customers is erring on the side of being too conservative. Boldly hopping to unrelated fields or untested approaches until running out of resources is erring on the side of being too fearless.

Just as biological evolution occurs through gradualism rather than saltation, personal evolution proceeds through small, directed changes. Each month, you do a little more of what’s exciting and useful, and a little less of what’s boring and outdated, and one day you wake up to find that you are now an expert of something completely different than what you were working on 5 or 10 years ago. You wonder about how you got to where you are, and worry about where you’re going in the future. But that worry is pointless, because just as the you from years past couldn’t picture the you now, the current you has no way of knowing the you you’ll become.

I sometimes envy and sometimes pity the people who have clear visions of who they want to be. I envy them for they are never lost; they know where they are and where they want to be. I pity them for in their single-minded pursuits, they may not know if their destinations will still be habitable by the time they are reached; they may have turned away from a new volcanic island in their swim to a sunken cave.