On Pruning the Need for Preparation Theater

I didn't need a better system: I needed courage; Letting Go of the Anxiety-Inducing Mechanism of Beginning Again

Dear reader, I’m so happy to be back!

I spent the last two years in house hell, a time during which I spent all of my money on a big house in need of TLC → found a bunch of housemates → discovered, among other things, that rebuffing the advances of one man can reverberate for years throughout a shared living space.¹

Lesson #57:

Far too many people’s lives are unknowingly shaped by the emotional demands of men who desperately need therapy.

Before I get into the various emotional baggage of Alfred (emotionally distant father) and Griffin C. (insecure; accepted everything that Alfred said at face value → stopped and stared whenever I did housework and proclaimed ROSIE THE RIVETER, OVER HERE!, I will heretofore discuss what happens when life shoves an un-passable blimp-sized something in your way, splintering your attention and cognitive bandwidth.

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Those Times in Your Life When You’re Desperately Trying to Get Anything in Order

I don’t have kids, but I do have a newfound understanding of what happens when you have no concept of personal time, clean clothes, or cognitive bandwidth—just a bunch of hands grasping at you, needing something now, demanding everything all the time because that is your job. Meanwhile, the bills are piling up and someone is pissed off that you didn’t respond to an email immediately, which you now interpret as within two weeks.

Essays or book proposals were not forthcoming—the demands of the day had whittled the intellectual components of my life down to bite-sized tidbits, scarfed down in odd moments when, somehow, there were no fires in need of putting out.

When your life is in chaos, you need something—anything—to feel stable.

In retrospect, I now recognize that I needed to feel order in some way. And so, I started to organize. Because, for the love of god, I just wanted one thing in my life under control.

Infrastructure Building and the Appeal of a Structured World

“People are motivated to perceive themselves as having control over their lives. Consequently, they respond to events and cognitions that reduce control with compensatory strategies for restoring perceived control to baseline levels.”

Our brains are action-oriented prediction processors, and citing any kind of loss to our ability to control the environment, we cling to anything resembling order. I imagine, on some level, that this makes people who are completely stuck in a maelstrom of shit—stay-at-home mothers of newborns, anyone who’s unemployed and watching the news right now, anyone who’s alive and sentient—more susceptible to believing in conspiracy theories, militant organization structures, MLMs, or whatever ChatGPT tells them.

This idea is called compensatory control: compensating for a loss of control in one area of our lives (crazy parents; horrific classmates) by exerting whatever control you have in others (bullying; self-harm). You can’t un-see this phenomenon: it’s the “CAN I JUST HAVE ONE THING THAT MAKES SENSE” in all of us.

ChatGPT: the Cause of, and Solution to, Most of Life’s Problems

ChatGPT is one of the best and worst things to happen to my ADHD-riddled brain. I uploaded my Substack essays; my books; blog posts on my personal website. I uploaded everything I wanted to get in order.

I asked it about protocols and apps—workflows, repeating themes. I designed entire worlds of content that never saw the light of day:

As time passed, my last post felt like it was fading from view. It would be weird if I returned without absolutely everything being in order, right? I scoured other abandoned projects online. Hilariously, my last essay ( “Honey, you’re just a spring chicken”) had a pretty clear “IT’S NEVER TOO LATE” message—but that didn’t change the fact that my situation felt different.

Substack felt like it changed; online bros appeared. I waited and invented new personas: I could write about AI! Because no one has ever written about AI before!!!

I’ll write about how Chip Heath asked me to work the day of my grandmother’s funeral because he was on vacation in Greece!²

I felt like I was missing just one little thing to take action and move forward. I needed to build the perfect system. The perfect content strategy. Redesign my website, perfectly. Figure out ConvertKit and posting routines and cross-posting to LinkedIn. Perfect my Notion dashboard; have the optimal workflow. I needed to honor my intelligence, my ambition, my way with words.

AND YET IT FELT LIKE IT WAS TOO LATE

I started feeling like “I was too late to start” when I was 16, when my friends Leah and Scott had a band and I wanted to learn how to play the guitar. But then I started reading about guitar legends who started early. And I thought about the prospect of playing with friends and not knowing what chords there were playing. And they already have a band! What would be the point of learning how to play the guitar at the ripe old age of 16? I thought. I’d already have to be great if I were going to be any kind of success.

But what definition of ‘musical success’ depends on such a brutal timeline? What about the soft and human enjoyment of playing guitar, simply because music is lovely and magical?

Alas, it’s a part of getting older: there’s more time behind you to muse about what could have been. You feel like you have less time in front of you to muse about what could be. The potential for anger at your former self builds, alongside the sorrow of never achieving whatever mighty life you once imagined could have been—the sorrow of the life unlived.

Ignoring the Mental Chatter of “What If I’d Started Sooner/Not Stopped” Regret

In the brilliant Stumbling on Happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert maps out a great explanation for one reason why we do a great job of making ourselves miserable—the regret of the alternate forking path: if only I had ________, I’d currently be __________.

We’re turning our imaginations against ourselves, investing a story that one change would have sent us down a different journey, entirely—it’s the Sliding Doors of it all, and the older we get, the more sliding doors-type moments there are to look upon, wistfully and regretfully:

• If I hadn’t been waitlisted at BIG NAME SCHOOL I’d be more successful

• If they hadn’t caught me doing that stupid thing

• If I hadn’t followed those people…

• Why did I put my money into Bitcoin?

• I shouldn’t have ordered the tuna salad

• What if I hadn’t taken time off to attend to the kid/house/nervous breakdown/sick relative

Each changed scenario ends with our lives in a vastly improved outcome—one with toned thighs, an endlessly ample bank account, and a network of friends willing to jet you off to Santorini and take care of your domestic life in the interim. The solution is humility: to accept the fact that we don’t actually know how life would have turned out in a different set of conditions. All we can do is learn and use those lessons moving forward. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Overthinking can have no limits

My the anxiety to do the perfect thing increased. But the longer you wait, the less time you feel like you have to do THE PERFECT THING, and the more pressure builds.

It’s a beautiful system, really. Self-maintaining. Self-reinforcing. The kind of trap that keeps smart people stuck. Behind the scenes of this post, I’ve been building systems to escape my broken system of procrastination.

My gut check for preparing vs. procrastinating

How do I tell the difference between “readiness theater” and actually preparing? Ask yourself this simple question:

If you spent every week like this week, where would you be a year from now?

It’s fine and human to take breaks, but pure anguish to tell yourself that you’re making progress when you’re actually just building a pretty cage of systems, especially when no one else is privy to the entangled jungle of thoughts in your own head.

From the outside, building systems and creating content calendars looks productive. I taught myself web design and designed my own website this year. It feels productive. But it’s also the perfect procrastination—because you can spend forever building the infrastructure for the thing you’re afraid to do.

Researching behavior and systems does not prevent someone from practicing what they tell others not to do. I know how systems maintain themselves. I know that depression is the opposite of luck—it narrows your aperture, makes you less likely to take the risks that generate serendipity.

Knowing doesn’t save you. That’s the humbling part.

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So here’s what I’m doing instead: I’m starting before I’m ready.

I’m publishing this essay even though it’s not perfect, it doesn’t tie in to a master content strategy that culminates with my TED talk.³ Even though I haven’t figured out the optimal content strategy or mastered ConvertKit or built the perfect Notion dashboard.

I’m starting because the courage to start again is the soft skill I need to practice right now.

What pattern are you caught in? What cage are you building while calling it preparation?

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Karla Starr (@karlastarr) is the coauthor of Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers. Her first book, Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others, was a Fast Company book of the year. She also gives workshops and writes The Starr Report, which you are reading the very end of.

1. ALFRED, YOU WILL DENY THIS BECAUSE YOUR CAPACITY FOR SELF-DECEPTION IS LIMITLESS

2. It’s coming, I promise

3. P.S. I also have a story about how I was un-invited from giving a TEDx talk in India