Draw the rest of the fucking owl
On the unintended consequences of self-help's privilege problem
Imagine, if you will, a book in which Brad Pitt reveals his iron-clad technique for getting dates:
Go to a place where women are
Smile
Think of all of the stories he’d have of getting dates with women with this technique, each one bolstering the validity of his argument. He’d include research on the importance of proximity, and insights like different kinds of women are found in various places, like a church, calligraphy class, or UFC match. Step #2 might turn out to be a little more nuanced: maybe it’s optional. Or
Esometimes, a mere pout or look of longing will do.
That’s it! Just two steps. Anything else is just complicating the situation and is a waste of precious mental energy. Imagine the blog posts, the back cover:
Don't make things harder on yourself. You don’t need style or fashion advice—just wear whatever you'd put on for a table read; no need to dress for a gala.
Just brush your teeth and get your ass to a goddamn bar.
No discussions of hitting the gym; personal grooming; tips on confidence, body language, or feeling comfortable in your own skin. He wouldn't have to think of how to best introduce himself or explain his job. No tips on dealing with rejection or the heartbreak of constant failure. No ideas for using one’s failure as a vehicle for self-discovery.
But that book would sell millions. After all, who wouldn’t believe what Brad Pitt had to say about women?
And who doesn’t want to believe that the answers to life are simple?
Got that? Making progress in life is an easy, two-step process:
Observe the gap between where you are and where you want to go
Bridge the gap
In a few months, Simon & Schuster will publish Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, which I wrote with Chip Heath. (Heath is the New York Times bestselling author of Switch and Made to Stick; I am an elder millennial with student loan debt.)
I learned everything, and as a result of said experience, I've been recovering from burnout/workaholism, re-examining my relationship with work, and researching new book ideas for the past year.
I’ve also been making constant little efforts to finally get my shit together on the marketing front. (If I’m writing self-help, I ought to be able to help myself, right?) In that spirit, I’ve been doing lots of personal work to get over the publishing block that’s kept me from blogging, writing newsletters, etc. for the past 10+ years. Since you’re reading this, I’m happy to report that I’ve made progress.
But my progress has not come from self-help, because of one simple fact: Brad Pitt writes the books on dating. Once you see this phenomenon, you can’t unsee it.
“Don’t complicate things” say rich white men whose assistants are probably writing the books
It’s easy to take advice from wealthy, well-known people who seem to have their shit together. (While most people would use these qualities to define “successful,” you can always steal my secret and define successful as whatever it is that you happen to be doing at the time. If I’m sending this puppy out in 2021, I’m successful. Made it!)
So when we listen to successful people about how to become successful, we run into the real problem. The things that privileged self-help authors need to overcome their troubles don’t cut it for most of us. Money, power, and prestige allow people to be oblivious to the inner lives of others.
Brad Pitt’s dating book would be useless because attractive people often don’t realize that they’re constantly being graded on a curve; they don’t have access to an alternate universe where they learn about the constant injustices of having a crooked nose or unfortunate jawline. They just know that getting women is easy—so surely, the world needs to hear about their two-step process.
The term to know here is hypocognition—when we don't know what we don't know. An article by Kaidi Wu and David Dunning, “Unknown Unknowns: The Problem of Hypocognition,” states the issue well in the subhead: “We wander about the unknown terrains of life as novices more often than experts, complacent of what we know and oblivious to what we miss.”
People in socially dominant groups remain oblivious to their privilege because they are unaware of their benefits. Everyone is blind to their own privilege; we only see what’s been difficult for us. Privilege doesn’t mean an absence of hardship—it just means that you’ve been shielded from additional, structural clusterfucks. (Even Jimmy Kimmel knows this.)
The privileged Brad Pitts of the world would have to constantly see their less-attractive friends strike out at bars—and understand, on a deep level, the energy required to remain positive while the world seems hell-bent on chipping away at your soul.
They’d need to practice empathy in order to develop it, which would allow them to develop the mental scaffolding required to realize that their experience is not a suitable stand-in for everyone’s experience because other people often have to do to get the same results. Without this reality check about what other people have to deal with on a daily basis, the advice often falls flat for people who aren’t like them.
Here’s Atomic Habits author James Clear's page on productivity:
Let’s appreciate the stunning “what works for me must apply to everyone else” of Clear’s list, whose “simple ways” to increase productivity apply to a very specific group:
Knowledge workers with enough autonomy to have an entirely self-directed schedule.
People whose bosses, coworkers, etc. are totally cool with them ignoring email for half of the day and adjusting all the thermostats.
Those with so few responsibilities as to have spare time at night for “real thinking” and free time in the morning for a locker room dance.
People who are not caregivers with potentially pressing tasks, and can completely disconnect for hours.
People who seemingly do not have to think of anyone but themselves.
Neurotypicals. “Sit up straight or stand up and you’ll find that you can breathe easier and more fully. As a result, your brain will get more oxygen and you’ll be able to concentrate better.” As someone with ADHD, I wish I would have known that my brain was merely suffering from a lack of oxygen! Thanks, I’m cured.
It’s a narrowly-defined demographic, and one treated as the default rather than a privileged, specific class. These are not “ways to use your limited time on earth more effectively,” but “what James Clear does before he writes a blog post.”1
When we only listen to a very specific group of people—privileged white guys who have the luxury of assistants, stay-at-home wives, flexible schedules, and working under the assumption that people are automatically going to take whatever they have to say seriously—we’re missing information. We’re missing the exact kind of lessons that most of us need.
Why the simplicity of privilege makes us feel like crap
Clear doesn’t mention everything required to get to where he is. My path to “productivity” online has taken 10 years, and a few more steps:
Getting divorced from someone who expected me to be the default housekeeper
Navigating the health care system
Getting the right medication
Managing mental health issues
The belief that the only feedback won’t be from people criticizing me for not having a graduate degree in psychology, or otherwise belittling me
Lots of therapy
Lots of family therapy to disconnect from old codependent patterns that had me believing that my constant availability was required
Getting sober
Getting validation from an author I admire
Finally believing that what I write has value
The belief that my words will be read and taken seriously by someone
Life has, historically, been easier for some people. Many of them seem to think that an accountability buddy is that “one, neat trick!” because that’s all they need. Good for them! But they often have simple answers—maybe they want to project an air of effortlessness. Or maybe it has been effortless. Or maybe they’re just whittling their message down to the simple, most marketable answers.
The simple answers that wind up getting repeated and sold come with the unintended consequence of making us feel worse. We feel like there’s something wrong when we can’t just sit down and type; when we can’t just smile and get a date; when we’re not allowed to ignore email for a long time to get our “deep work” groove on. We read that the key to forming a habit is to “make it easy, fun, simple,” and feel ashamed when we can’t stick to a diet. We read about “manifesting” our soulmate—wanting to believe that all we have to do is believe—only to wind up spending a lot of time with our pets.
We feel like something’s wrong with us when we can’t just draw the rest of the fucking owl. We don’t realize that other people bought the damn owl drawings, were raised in an owl-drawing environment, or are hiding their own owl-drawing efforts.
We don’t realize how many people feel just as tired and frustrated as we do that elegant solutions aren’t enough.
Don’t feel ashamed if simple answers don’t cut it. Feel human.
A longer version of this essay is on my website.
I’m going to love you either way, but if you like this, feel free to help out: forward it to someone who’d like it, read my book, or hire me to get your numbers-related point across. If you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can get more here:
xoxo, Karla
hello@kstarr.com
Side note: some of my James Clear bashing is due to envy, as Atomic Habits was annoyingly good. It was just incredibly incomplete.
I stumbled on this while I was researching a blog post on how the "draw the rest of the fucking owl" lesson has percolated into every piece of popular content on learning AI skills. This is a gem and it's as true now as it was in the olden days of 2021. Privileged white men with the time and training to "automate their entire workflow with AI from a single prompt" (see this if you need evidence: https://x.com/obie/status/2013955736292704342?s=20), while the rest of us futz around thinking that we're inadequate because we can't get the Slack connector to work properly.
Great, loved it. I also found this post when I was searching for the "draw the rest of the owl" meme, so yay for your cunning title SEO!
Continue with the James Clear bashing. Overly simplistic and incomplete. But well written and confident.