How to Drown Elegantly: 6 Tips for What To Do When You Have Absolutely No Idea What You’re Doing

I’m going to diverge today from our regularly scheduled programming on community-building, and put on my Listicle Wisdom Hat. Let’s talk about failing forwards.

I’m a Former Gifted Child (FGC). Us FGCs learned one lesson: you only need to be good enough at something to get praise, and then you can drop it.

I learn first steps quickly. But there is an inflection point where being able to get by on quick-wittedness isn’t enough; you have to buckle down and learn the skill. A point where the tortoise beats the hare.

FGCs are trained to be rabbits. A lot of my energy goes towards wrestling my rabbit-tendencies into submission, and convincing myself that yes, these long-term lessons are things I actually need to learn. The best way for me to do that is to put myself in situations where I have no choice but to learn.

So, I like giving myself challenges. Not challenges like “Get 10,000 subscribers in 90 days!” (I’m real bad at those ones); challenges like “wow, I suck at working with other people. This year, I’m going to do EVERY PROJECT with collaborators, and see if I improve.”

My challenge this year was to get in over my head.

I took (and was given - the universe tends to catch on to my intentions and gleefully pile more on) several jobs and projects that I am absolutely unqualified for. I am now:

• A research director, despite having no grad school education or training in research

• A designer of transformative rituals for an erotic performance collective, despite having no background in ritual design OR erotic work

• The co-developer of a land-based living community, despite never having developed property or lived in cohousing or ecovillages

• The organizational designer transitioning the nonprofit I work for to Sociocracy, despite never having worked for a company that uses Sociocracy OR seen it used OR formally studied it.

How do I get myself into these things?

Anyways, my other toxic trait is having extremely high standards for the quality of my work, so I can’t just phone it in. I’m about 6 months into this year’s experiment and have learned some strategies for doing good work on a nonexistent mental budget. Time for a listicle!

🎶 I wanna talk about what I’ve learned, the hard earned wisdom I have earned… 🎶
if you get that reference without looking it up you are my kind of nerd. DM me and I’ll give you a free month of paid access to my Substack.

Right now, I’m trying to analyze a bunch of data I managed to gather for my research director role (see next tip for why this is hard). It seemed like an impossible task at first. I have NO IDEA how to do data analysis. When I realized I’d been avoiding it and doing busywork for a month, I sat down and broke the project into pieces.

For each piece, I marked a person whose help I needed, and a next step.

I kept doing that GTD-style until it felt manageable. Then I put the tasks on my Asana and started them during Death to the Soul Eaters (a weekly Friday Zoomspace where we do stuff we’ve been putting off. Also DM me if you want in on that.)

Thus far, the ones I’ve found are:

• Trying to replicate experiences you haven’t had, and

• Statistics

Alfred Adler has a great quote on the first one:

The best knower of the human soul will be the one who has lived through passions himself…an individual who has lifted himself above the difficulties of life…found power to profit by bad experiences, and elevate himself as a result of them, understands the good and the bad sides of life. No one can compare with him in this understanding, certainly not the righteous one.

-Alfred Adler, “Understanding Human Nature”

We can empathize with others in their experience, but we cannot truly tell them “I get you” unless we have been through the same things they have.

Secondly: statistics. As it turns out, one cannot BS their way through math. One can use programs to help oneself - but even those have to be learned. I’m excited to take one of MIT’s wonderful EdX courses on statistics and check out Atlas.ti this week to help, plus perhaps seeing what I can do with this article to help me create some GPTs for qualitative analysis.

I’m also following my own advice in the arena of “wtf statistics”, with the most important item on this list…