How to do Anything


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Too Obvious to be Simple No. 1

How to do Anything

by Michael Stuart Kelly

When you fail, do you know why you don't achieve what you want to do?

If you ask around, people usually say poor planning, lack of skill, you goofed-up or some other reason. Accidents happen. And they would be right for some cases.

It is true that mankind does not have enough knowledge to to do many things. When the required knowledge is not within your grasp, you can't do more than dream. But this is not what I want to focus on. The problem here is when you have enough knowledge—or it is easily available—to do what you want to do, you try and still fail.

How often have you had a good plan, you had the skills, you did not goof up, there were no accidents, but you still didn't achieve what you set out to do?

The fact is, people usually get the hard things right. They slip up on the easy ones. That is true for you, for me and for everyone.

While having a plan, skill and proper attention are very good things to apply to any endeavor, let's think about this. Let's simplify. Let's look a little deeper.

There are three fundamental requirements for doing anything you decide to do:

1. You have to have the right stuff to do it,

2. You have to do the right things with the right stuff, and

3. You have to do the right things with the right stuff in the right sequence.

If you get any of this wrong, you will not be able to do what you set out to do. You cannot do the right things with the wrong stuff or do the wrong things with the right stuff. You cannot do them out of the proper sequence. It just won't work.

Let me repeat this because it is so important: You need (1) the right stuff, (2) the right actions and (3) the right sequence.

The nature of things and actions

All things and actions can be broken down into parts. This is pretty easy if you focus on pieces and patterns.

For example, an automobile has tires, body, engine and so forth. Those are pieces. The tires are all in the same shape. They are attached underneath the body. The engine is set inside the body. Those are patterns.

Another example: For you to walk, you need a solid ground surface and your body. You have to have legs and feet on your body. Those are pieces. Your body must be standing, not kneeling, sitting or lying down. You place one foot on the ground, then alternate with the other, time and time again. Those are patterns.

The first example, the automobile, is a thing. The second, walking, is an action. Everything you do entails things and actions. You can use the automobile (thing) for actions like buying one or driving one. For walking (action), you need things like ground and feet. If you want to do something, regardless of what it is, you need to look at the pieces and patterns of the things and actions involved.

You also need to discern another element: What makes the whole thing or whole action a whole—not simply a piece or pattern? In other words, you need to be clear in your mind on what makes it what it is, how the pieces and patterns come together to constitute that thing or action.

What makes an automobile an automobile? When are there enough parts—pieces and patterns—to call it one? Well, it must be a self-propelled vehicle to transport people over land at the very least. When you have enough pieces and patterns to do that, you have an automobile. What makes the act of walking complete? You must use feet to travel by steps over a solid surface. When your pieces and patterns can result in that, you are walking. All the rest is extra.

We discern how things and actions affect each other. This is called causality. Not only that, we can measure the importance of these relationships and put them in lists of priority. If we are looking at the parts of a whole thing or whole action, some parts will be more important than others. They will impact the existence of that whole thing or whole action more than the other parts.

For instance, an engine has more impact on an automobile than a cigarette lighter. Placing one foot on the ground after the other has more impact on walking than bending the knees or swinging the arms.

We call the really important parts fundamental. We call the less important parts nonessential.

The right stuff

When you choose what you want to do, whether you want to make an automobile, drive an automobile, walk, run, or whatever, you start by choosing a whole thing or whole action. You do not start by choosing a part.

For instance, if you want to use a car to go somewhere, you do not think about using a cigarette lighter, then the car. It is more important for a car to transport people than let people light cigarettes or feed power to small devices from the panel. You don't even think about the engine first. If you want to walk somewhere, you do not think about moving your left third toe, then think about walking. What you do with your feet and having solid ground are far more important.

You think about the whole thing or whole action at the start. These wholes exist as single things in our minds and in reality. But they can be dissected. Wholes have fundamental parts and nonessential parts. Obviously, the next step is to identify the fundamental parts and separate them from the nonessential parts. Remember that a part is a piece or a pattern.

If you are missing an engine, you do not have an automobile. You might have part of one, but you cannot call it an automobile in the full sense of the term. Without an engine it is not self-propelled. If you lack only the cigarette lighter, you still have an automobile. If you don't have solid ground, but water or air instead, you cannot walk. If you only lack a knee that bends (but have two legs), you can. If you don't place one foot on the ground after another, you cannot walk. If you are unable to swing your arms (or don't even have arms), you can.

Notice that a whole has a normal arrangement of fundamental and nonessential parts. Even though pieces like an automobile's cigarette lighter, or a bending knee or swinging arms for walking are normal, they are not fundamental. They are nonessential.

When people mess up at this stage, it is usually because they confuse normal with fundamental and choose nonessential normal stuff over fundamental stuff. That will never work. A car needs an engine to run, not a cigarette lighter. A person needs solid ground and legs with feet to walk, not just a bending knee or swinging arm.

The right actions

It is not enough to choose the right stuff, in other words the fundamental stuff. You need to do the right things with that stuff.

The same principles for choosing the right stuff apply to performing actions. There are normal actions you do with the stuff you choose for your objective. Some of those actions are fundamental and some are nonessential. To succeed at what you want to do, you must do fundamental actions.

You can perform the nonessential actions if you wish. Most of them are normal anyway, but you can also leave them out. What you cannot do is choose normal nonessential actions and leave out the fundamental ones. You will fail if you do that.

For example, you cannot leave out turning the engine on to drive an automobile. You cannot leave out putting one foot on the ground after another to walk. These are fundamental actions. You can leave out using the cigarette lighter or swinging your arms. These are nonessential actions, albeit normal ones.

When choosing, remember that all actions can be divided into parts, in other words pieces and patterns. You need to separate the fundamental parts from the nonessential ones in your mind so you will choose correctly.

The right sequence

This is the point where most people really stumble. They correctly identify the fundamental stuff and they know what to do with it, but they do it out of order. Then it doesn't work and they blame something or the other for why they failed instead of looking at their sequence.

I believe that incorrect sequence accounts for the vast majority of failures. Most people are not stupid. Most have a plan when they want to do something. They have the proper skills and actually do pay attention to what they are doing. Accidents might happen, but they are not the rule.

We are creatures of habit and our own misconceptions. We sometimes get it in our minds that we can do things out of sequence because we are special. Believing we are special is great for self-esteem, but it is a poor substitute for reality. Knowing the right stuff and right actions does not grant anyone special causal privileges. We cannot step outside of time. Abracadabra works in fiction, not reality. Opinions are great at the dinner table, but they do not work as replacements for facts.

We need to open the door of an automobile before we can get in. We need to turn the engine on before we can drive. We need to stand before we can walk. Reality does not allow us to do these things differently—not on a fundamental level.

With nonessential actions, however, we can change the order at will. We can light a cigarette before we drive or do it after we start. We can swing our arms while standing or after we get underway. The order of these actions does not matter, not even doing them.

Proper sequence means effective sequence of fundamental actions with fundamental stuff.

When we mess up on this point, maybe we never learned the right sequence. But all we have to do is look at the skills we have. We had to acquire them in the proper sequence. Otherwise we would not have them. We had to learn where to put the key in to turn the car on—which position to place the gear shift and which pedals to push with our feet to make the car go and stop—how the steering wheel affects the car in motion and what that feels like. We had to practice driving slowly. Only after all that (at the minimum) did we acquire driving skill. For walking, we had to learn how to move our legs as infants, then how to stand, then how to move around standing while holding onto something, and only then how to walk.

We had to learn all our skills in proper sequence. It only stands to reason that we need to use them in proper sequence to succeed at what we want to do. A man can be an expert race car driver, but he still needs to follow the right sequence in order to drive. All the skill in the world will not let him perform his race car magic if he does not get in the car and turn the engine on first. There is a Chinese saying that the longest voyage begins with the first step. You have to take that first step in order to walk.

Some sequences are deceptive because the universe is user-friendly. There is almost always more than one way to achieve the same result. However, when you look at the nature of the specific pieces and patterns of the fundamental stuff and actions you chose for doing what you want, you will always see there is a right sequence for those parts. Also, you can become confused because some nonessential parts look like they are fundamental. In any case, if you use the wrong sequence, you will almost always fail or achieve a poor result at best.

Some people think they can invent a sequence based on nonessential actions, normal or otherwise. Lots of mediocre people in authority do that and use the incorrect sequence they dreamed up as a form of imposing power on others. Of course, this is the reason they do not produce their intended results. This is one of the reasons they are mediocre and stay that way. They think their way is better even though reality tells them otherwise. They do not do the fundamental actions with the fundamental stuff in the proper sequence.

Many businesses are not successful because the manufacturing process was done out of sequence and an inferior product resulted, or the sales process was designed too far out of sequence to be effective. Many written works do not have good impact because good subject matters were presented out of proper sequence. So many things in our lives do not get done well or get done at all because we get the sequence wrong.

Checklist

Now, let's go back to the opening question. When you fail, do you know why you don't achieve what you want to do?

Why don't you look at your past failures and take stock? Take one failure and analyze it—just one for now. You might be surprised.

Get five pieces of blank paper. On the first, write what you wanted to do as clearly as you can. There is no problem if there is a lot of blank space left over. You might want it for later notes.

Label the second "Stuff" and write down all the stuff you used in your failed attempt. Look at each item. Decide if it was necessary to achieve what you wanted or not. If so, label it fundamental and if not, nonessential. Do this for each item. Then try to imagine if there were any items you needed but did not have. You can often find a reason for the failure here.

Label the third "Actions" and do this same procedure with actions. List all the principal actions you did. Judge each action as to whether it was needed to achieve your goal or not. Mark clearly when you did nonessential actions with fundamental stuff, and fundamental actions with nonessential stuff. See if you wasted an inordinate amount of time doing any actions with nonessential stuff. Also, check that you did all the actions needed to do what you wanted to do. Maybe you failed because you did not do something you needed to do.

Label the fourth "Actual Sequence" and write the sequence you used that resulted in failure. Don't forget to mention the stuff you used and actions you did, even if they do not appear important now. After that, label the fifth "Ideal Sequence" and rewrite your sequence using only fundamental stuff and fundamental actions. Include any fundamental stuff and/or actions you added that you did not use before.

Review all these pages. Take your time. Think about what you did and what you could have done better. You might want to put them away and look at them after a few days. Your reason or reasons for your failure should be clear by now. Make notes. The next time you want to do what you failed to do, or do something similar, you can now ensure success.

Is all this obvious? Yes it is. But these are the points we all have stumbled over time and time again when we failed to achieve what we wanted to do. So while this is obvious, it is too obvious to be simple.

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Also, and equally important as the other stuff you mentioned, we often have to work with incomplete information. The way we find out exactly what we don't know is to attempt things and fail. Also, human memory is faulty. Very few of us are eidetic and none of us are omniscient. We evolved as hunters and scavengers. Abstract intellect developed by co-opting the neural facilities that were initially developed for running, climbing, throwing and bringing down meat animals. Our abstract intellect is a less than perfect adaptation of neural capabilities developed for other purposes. In short, mistakes will happen. You may bet on that.

Homo sapien sapien is a work in progress. Our kind evolved from earlier hominids, perhaps a half million years ago. We were initially adapted to live in the grassy lands of Africa under climatic conditions that no longer exist. We were preliterate for most of our existence (as a species) and we only recently learned how to count, to measure and to keep records (less than fifty thousand years). Discursive writing has been around for less than ten thousand years. We developed this skill by using abilities that were not initially adapted to the task. We are kludges. If we can keep our technology intact for the next hundred thousand years (don't bet on it!), we will probably adapt to it biologically and become even smarter than we already are. The evolution of language as a means of mutual warning and team-work huntings has lead to adaptations which have produced a more efficient brain. The current model of homo sapien is currently pre-wired to talk, as a result which is why babies of all races and cultures acquire a language prior to the age of two (except for neurologically damaged individuals).

Bottom line: keep in mind our biological limitations. These will be overcome in time by further evolution.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited by BaalChatzaf
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Bob,

We make mistakes all the time and there are things we can do about them. This will be one of the topics I will cover in another article in this new Too Obvious to be Simple series.

I thought it was clear in the article that I was addressing the problem of when you fail to achieve something you already know how to do, not something where you don't have enough knowledge to do it. I am adding a line to the article to make sure this is understood.

My intention in this series is to give practical advice on dealing with some of life's problems, not simply make philosophical speculations. Or, more to the point, apply philosophy in a practical manner.

For instance, the above article is based on the law of identity, causality, hierarchy and integration. But it doesn't sound sexy stated that way and it's hard to use.

Michael

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