Waiting for The Call

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Neal Stephenson – Snow Crash

I really like Derek Muller-aka-Veritasium's video about trying to become a filmmaker. He describes calling a local film director looking for... something – a way in, maybe, or just some idea of what to do. He uses that to launch into a larger exploration of learned helplessness and the way we tend to assume that it's up to other people, rather than ourselves, whether we succeed. It's a good point, but the story reminded me of a slightly different thing I've noticed.

I call it waiting for The Call. You have a great idea, an ambitious plan, some new amazing direction for your life. You're a tightly coiled spring of potential energy ready to unleash on the universe, but you never quite feel ready. Suddenly, the phone rings. "Hello, this is The President. We need you. It's go time." Okay, let's do this! At last, you can commit completely to this particular course of action, safe in the certainty that this is definitely the right thing to be doing and now is the time to do it.

But, except for very rare exceptions, it's unlikely you'll get that kind of call from the president, or indeed anyone. There probably won't even be a clear signal to say that this thing is the right thing to do. In fact, most of the time the great idea doesn't look like much to start with, and you have to spend a lot of time convincing other people that it's worth anything. Yet it's all too easy to put that hard work off, waiting for some sign that isn't coming.

I don't think this is necessarily anything to do with learned helplessness. In fact, I would say it's probably more like a kind of backwards impostor syndrome. Instead of feeling like you're missing some indefinable genuineness quality that other people have, you feel like you need that quality before you even start. I wrote before about the strange phenomenon of feeling successful, which you experience second-hand from successful people, but not first-hand via actual success. I think this is similar: you feel an imaginary destiny in the lives of others, which you could have too if The Call would only come in.

It's truly hard to accept that remarkable things don't necessarily feel remarkable when you're doing them. Most likely if you do ever get The Call, it's not going to be before you start, or even while you're working to make your thing a success. Instead, it'll be years later when some kid calls you up to say "hey, since you obviously have the success-nature, is there any chance you could tell me that what I'm doing is right?"