We Are More Capable Than We Act
Through ACO and my university work, I spend a lot of time around young Australians. They are intelligent, educated and conscientious. They are also, in my experience, much less ambitious than their abilities would justify.
Universities are full of students carefully constructing respectable lives. Get the internship, the graduate role, the credential, the promotion. By 21, many already speak as though the important structure of their lives has been decided for them. They are choosing among pipelines instead of asking where they actually want to go.
I find this strange. We are young, healthy, highly educated and living in one of the richest countries in history. We carry almost the whole stock of human knowledge in our pockets. We can contact people across the world instantly. AI has made an individual vastly more capable than he was even five years ago. Starting a company, publishing an argument, learning a skill or finding an audience has never required less permission.
Yet the cultural expectation is strangely defensive: secure something respectable, avoid embarrassment and gradually improve your position.
Aim higher.
Stop Confusing Pessimism With Realism
Young people hear constantly about everything going wrong. Housing is expensive. Careers are insecure. Institutions are dysfunctional. AI may eliminate jobs. Businesses fail. Attention spans are collapsing.
Some of these problems are serious. But noticing a problem is not responding to it.
Housing is expensive. You still have to decide what to earn, where to live and what to save. Your industry may be threatened by AI. Then become more useful in an AI-rich economy. Graduate jobs are bad? Apply elsewhere, learn something scarce, move, negotiate, start something, or take the job while constructing your exit.
This is just common sense once you remember that your own agency is the fundamental operative cause in your life.
At ACO I have repeatedly watched opportunities appear because somebody simply asked. An email goes to a person we have no obvious claim on. Usually little happens. Occasionally it produces a meeting, then an introduction, then money, a venue, a speaker or an opportunity nobody could have planned beforehand.
The world is different after you act on it.
Take the Boring Advice
There is too much interest in sophisticated advice and too little in elementary arithmetic.
Exercise. Sleep properly. Stay away from drugs. Save money. Read. Learn to concentrate. Choose friends carefully. Do not surrender several hours of every day to your phone. Take some of the advice your parents gave you and you dismissed because it sounded boring.
It is boring. It also works.
Do these things for ten years and by 30 you may be healthy, physically capable, financially secure, able to concentrate and considerably more knowledgeable than you were at 20. From the outside, the result can look like unusual discipline or good fortune. Much of it is simply the compound return from not repeatedly sabotaging yourself.
People search for secret advantages while stepping over enormous obvious ones.
Do Not Use the Average as Your Ambition
Most businesses fail. Most books sell badly. Most organisations remain obscure. Most people do not become wealthy.
These are useful facts - if you are selling insurance. Strange facts on which to base the dimensions of your ambition.
The average entrepreneur includes the person who worked intelligently for ten years and the person who gave up after six months; the superb salesman and the one afraid to ask for money; the careful operator and the man who forgot to invoice his customers. Their combined result tells me much less than I want to know about causation.
Jeff Bezos has spoken about trusting a strong anecdote when it conflicts with the data. I use a similar rule when thinking about human capacity.
If I want to know what normally happens, I want statistics. If I want to know what a human being can do, show me exceptional human beings.
That is why great people matter. A great company, scientific discovery, novel, institution or building is evidence. Its creator had twenty-four hours in the day, became tired, made mistakes, dealt with fools and occasionally woke up in a bad mood.
Why would I calibrate the upper limit of my life against an average that includes so many people making choices I have no intention of making?
What Exactly Are You Afraid Of?
This question eliminates quite a lot of anxiety.
You want to contact someone important. They might ignore you. Fine. You apply for a job above your apparent level and get rejected. Fine. You start something publicly and it fails. People see it. Who cares?
You state an unpopular view and somebody dislikes you. You may even make an enemy.
Good.
There is something unhealthy about treating universal approval as evidence of good conduct. If you make decisions, defend principles, compete seriously, reject bad proposals and occasionally tell people no, eventually somebody will resent you.
Charles Mackay put it more harshly:
“You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure, must have made foes. If you have none, small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip. You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip. You’ve never turned the wrong to right. You’ve been a coward in the fight.”
Do not manufacture enemies for entertainment, and do not confuse obnoxiousness with courage. But hostility is not evidence that you are wrong.
Some people will hate you. Not for your failures. For your successes. Don't engage. Pity their smallness.
As Ayn Rand wrote: “The sound perception of an ant does not include thunder.”
This matters particularly in Australia, where earnest ambition can attract suspicion remarkably quickly. We are excellent at puncturing pretension. We are less good at distinguishing pretension from genuine aspiration. Say you want a decent career and nobody objects. Say you intend to build a major company, become outstanding in your field or create an important institution and suddenly the sentence seems to require a joke at your own expense.
Why?
If you are boasting without producing anything, produce something. The cure for empty ambition is achievement, not smaller ambition.
Do Less, If You Must. Do Not Want Less.
My own life is probably overfilled. In one day I might work on a philosophy PhD, teach students, deal with ACO, speak with a donor, negotiate with a cinema about a premiere, work through a commercial problem with my business partner, learn the economics of an industry I barely understood a week earlier, exercise, have dinner and then walk at night thinking through whatever remains unresolved.
There are obvious costs. Administration accumulates. Too many good opportunities compete with each other. Sleep suffers if I am careless. I regularly need to eliminate things.
I do not recommend copying the volume.
Someone may sensibly spend twenty years building one company. Another may become an exceptional surgeon, physicist or musician. Someone else may concentrate on raising a family and building an excellent private life.
Focus can be ferociously ambitious.
Do fewer things because the important things deserve more of you. Do not make the important things smaller merely because large ambitions make people uncomfortable.
Start Before Anyone Certifies You
Universities teach an implicit sequence: first become qualified, then experienced, then senior enough, and eventually you may be entitled to do something important.
Life is less orderly.
Often you attempt something slightly beyond your ability, discover what you lack, learn it quickly and become qualified partly because you did the thing.
Youth makes this unusually cheap. A senior person ignores your email. Nothing happens. A job rejects you. Nothing much happens. Forty people attend the event instead of a hundred. You learn. A small business fails without catastrophic debt. You have bought an unusually concentrated education.
At 20 or 25 you can recover from an extraordinary number of mistakes. It seems wasteful to spend those years primarily avoiding them.
Make Ambition Concrete
Wanting an extraordinary life is cheap. The interesting question is what it requires on Tuesday.
Wanting wealth becomes decisions about income, ownership, saving and risk. Wanting to write produces pages. Building an organisation means recruiting people, finding money, asking for things, making decisions with incomplete information and fixing mundane problems nobody will admire you for solving.
At ACO, the grand sentence is that we are bringing an important film to four Australian cities. The Tuesday is cinema contacts, budgets, ticketing, travel dates, follow-ups and discovering why something promised last week still has not happened.
This does not diminish the ambition. This is what ambition is made of.
Nearly every impressive achievement, examined closely enough, dissolves into thousands of ordinary actions performed toward an unusual objective.
Find Out
I do not believe everyone can become anything. Ability differs. Luck matters. Some ideas are terrible. Some ambitions should be abandoned when reality produces enough evidence against them.
But let reality produce the evidence.
I am 25. I genuinely do not know how capable I can become, how large an organisation I can build, how much I can learn or what work I might produce over several decades. Why would I answer those questions in advance?
One of the great facts of youth is how much remains untested. There are abilities you have not yet developed, people you have not met, industries you know nothing about and opportunities that do not yet exist because you have not created them.
Build your health. Accumulate skills and capital. Study people who accomplished extraordinary things. Choose something worth doing. Risk embarrassment. Ask. Build. Fail intelligently. Adjust.
Perhaps you will eventually discover that you aimed too high. Good. You found the boundary by reaching it.
But perhaps you won't.
There is only one interesting way to find out.