The other day, I was cycling through an avenue of yellow-leafed trees with bald crowns, while listening to an interview with the author George Saunders. The sun was piercing through the clouds and dazzling me when, suddenly, I heard Saunders say something that hasn’t left my mind since: “In the anxiety of this very subjective practice, everybody wants a method. But part of the method is to say, there isn’t one.”
Saunders was talking about the practice of writing — which, at the time, seemed fascinating enough to me. I own at least a dozen writing guidebooks. And yet, if Saunders is right, none of them is as good a teacher as actually sitting down to write. I’m reminded of a writing workshop I once visited. The author told us that the whole purpose of the workshop is to get us to write. We could wholeheartedly forget all lessons from the workshop, if only we went home that day and felt a little more excited to apply ass to seat and write. Of course, he conceded, there are some things worth knowing as a writer. But ultimately, the only way to learn how to write is… to write. That’s the method. Write, delete, and rewrite. There is no method.
But obviously, this isn’t just about writing.
I may be biased, but I’ve come to realize that whenever someone talks about the practice of writing, they also talk about the practice of life. Since life is full of anxiety and uncertainty, like writing, everybody wants a method to live a better life. But once again, part of the method is that there isn’t one.
When I look back on my modest career as a human being, there’s no piece of advice, no wisdom, no method that exhaustively taught me how to live. No guidebook, no coach, no sage has conclusively taught me how to date, how to choose a career, how to handle mental illness, how to get on with strangers, how to be a good friend, how to be confident, and so on. Of course, I’m not denying that there are many resources out there that can provide scaffolding to overcome these obstacles. However, all our lives are so infinitely complex and unique that no method could ever do them justice. At the end of the day, we’re on our own. No one can tell us what’s the best way to live for us, specifically, in this moment. There’s no method for that. Except, of course, living itself.
A few years ago, I made a drastic professional change from engineering to philosophy and writing. I spent four years in engineering until I realized it wasn’t for me. Sometimes I like to imagine what would’ve happened if, before starting my engineering course, someone had told me all the reasons that would eventually lead me to quit. Chances are, I would’ve ignored those reasons. Screw them, I would’ve thought. I’m doing this. I’m becoming an engineer.
Why? Because learning what works and what doesn’t isn’t a matter of reason. It’s a matter of practice. I needed to go through the whole shebang of realizing I didn’t like engineering as much as I’d thought. No method or cheat code could’ve accelerated that process. There was simply no other way.
From a professional standpoint, it’s easy to say those four years were wasted. It’s indulgent to think I could’ve been a much better writer if I’d started four years earlier. But those four years were indispensable in shaping who I am today. And who knows, without them, I wouldn’t have listened to an interview with George Saunders, let alone write these lines.
I would even go as far as saying that Saunders’ observation applies to any skill. That is, the only reliable method to learn a skill is to actually perform the skill and learn from the practice, rather than relying on theory.
For example, I recently got into baking sourdough bread. Ostensibly, there are thousands of books and videos and gurus out there claiming they’ll teach me how to bake the best sourdough bread in the history of humankind. But even if I remembered all the advice on baking sourdough bread by heart, I’d still have to do the actual baking. It’s not like in the movie The Matrix, where Neo downloads kung-fu moves into his brain and immediately turns into a kung-fu black belt. That’s not how it works. To bake good bread — to do anything well, really — I must fail. I must make mistakes, many mistakes, until I finally get a feeling for the moisture, the texture, the kneading.
Now, here comes the embarrassing part, where I’ll explain why Saunders’ words sounded so true to me. In my early twenties, after I quit engineering, I became kind of obsessed with personal development. I bought books like Atomic Habits, The Four-Hour Work Week, and How to Win Friends and Influence People. There’s some interesting stuff in these sorts of books, and some of it has sustainably changed my life. But the thing about personal development is that learning about living well can quickly become conflated with actually living well. The theory can become a defense mechanism for not doing the practice.
It’s not surprising, then, that the most likely customer for a self-help book is one who previously bought a self-help book. It’s worth pausing on the irony here. If self-help books only delivered on half of their promises, you’d expect their readers to have most of their lives in order. And yet, the self-help industry is booming, selling books on the same topics to the same people, time and again.
I, too, remember how, after finishing a personal development book, I became motivated to change my life. And yet, a large part of that motivation was then channeled into buying and reading more books or listening to more podcasts on personal development.
In other words, learning about the path isn’t the path itself. The path is paved with mistakes, despair, and defeat. That’s how it becomes walkable.
One of the novels that encapsulates this lesson beautifully is Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. The tale is set during the time of the Buddha and tells the journey of a young man, Siddhartha, and his process of self-discovery.
Throughout the book, Siddhartha lives through wealth, poverty, ecstasy, depression, love, loss, and transcendence. He goes from being a priest to a beggar to a merchant to a father to a ferryman. He sees some shit, in other words. And yet, after all this time, when his best friend Govinda approaches him as an old man and asks him for advice, he tells him this: “I have had many thoughts, but it would be difficult for me to tell you about them. But this is one thought that has impressed me, Govinda. Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.”
The only way to acquire wisdom, then, is through lived experience. Which attests that part of the method is to say —
fuggedaboudit.