On Vectors

2024.09.15

LXIV

Like vectors, in life, we have magnitude and direction.

This is your call to focus less on direction and more on magnitude.

Vectors

In life, we have both direction and magnitude. We are going in some direction with some degree of speed or impact or force. See the dummy diagram below that has two axes, one for personal well being and one for societal good:

Note that the green line is less ordered towards societal good than the blue line, but still has a larger impact due to it’s greater magnitude. This is very possible. Interestingly enough, though, we tend to spend more time fine tuning the direction than we do increasing the magnitude.

This is particularly problematic when we realize that we are far more than 2-dimensional vectors; societal & personal well being are egregious over simplifications. To call someone a leech on the grounds of two arbitrary dimensions is absurd… what even is society? Your family? Your community? Your nation? The world? Certain things can be good for some of those and bad for others. That’s without mentioning on what time scale.

Critics & optimizers can spend all day pining over getting the direction perfect, while doers focus on increasing the magnitude.

Too Much Directional Focus

Perhaps the complexity of getting direction right is what makes it fertile for debate, but that’s besides the point–Critics & Optimizers alike focus too much on direction and not enough on magnitude. 

Critics

The critic hyper fixates on fine tuning and perfecting the direction of someone else.

“T Swizzy should NOT be with Travis Kelce right now, oh my god.” 

“Elon should be solving world hunger, not sending rockets into space.”

“Stop taking your health so seriously, yolo.” 

Each of these statements begs the following up question of the asker:

Is your relationship healthy?

Are you acting to solve world hunger?

Do you feel that you’re appropriately taking care of yourself?

Evaluating the world around us is a good way to learn from others and get a hint at whether or not we want a life like theirs. If we spend more time trying to hypothetically optimize the direction of others than we do on improving our own state, however, that can very be a red flag. 

The world is nuanced; if someone’s magnitude is large, of course there will be flaws in some dimensions of their direction.

Optimizers

On the other end of it, the optimizer hyper fixates on fine tuning their own direction. 

I must wake up at exactly 6:00 am. 

I must take an ice bath once every 36 hours. 

I must do 100 pushups a day. 

I must abstain from caffeine for the first 90 minutes of the day. 

Now, I chose some of those examples because I do a few of them myself. I would never knock on anyone for doing things that are healthy for them. However, if you are not careful, they can feel like a substitute for needle moving actions. 

I am trying to make a profitable software business. Getting up early helps with that, but it doesn’t do it for me. To actually do that, I need to focus on product and users.

Doers

You should be less concerned about the perfection of your or someone else’s direction and more concerned with the magnitude of your own direction. 

Take two people tasked with making rockets, for instance.* 

Person One, Obidiah Vor Thunker, works at a legacy company with a huge research budget and resources out the wazoo. His team is full of both Critics and Optimizers; they criticize the make ups of existing rockets and labor away writing reports on the perfect rocket.**

Person Two, Max Nih Tudor, just starts making rockets and sending them into space. At first, he’s an idiot who blows up rockets. Years later, he’s sending more rockets to space than anyone else. 

Meanwhile, Obidiah’s still researching the perfect rocket, and, once it’s done, he’s sure it will be far more “optimal” than any of the hack jobs thrown together by Max.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people have strong opinions on Max’s rockets as they fly in and out of orbit. Some of those opinions are negative. Most of them (including mine) are uninformed.

Not many people have opinions on Obidiah’s paper rockets, though, unless he’s paying them to or they are similarly writing reports on what should be done without actually doing it.

After all, the magnitude of the vector really is zero unless you take action.

*While you can potentially argue that sending rockets into space is not a “good” thing, this section presupposes that it roughly is.  

**In this way, we can see that the critic and the optimizer really aren’t that far removed from one another and may be different sides of the same coin. 

Do More

So, do more.

If you’re embarrassed about not having the perfect direction, get over it.

If the magnitude of your actions is already sufficiently large to have haters or enemies* who will critique you unless you do the “perfect” thing, also get over it. Spoiler—to them, it never will be the perfect thing.

The world is super nuanced and what’s “good” is impossible to nail down perfectly. Of course your direction won’t be “perfect.” That’s no reason not to try, and it’s also no reason to spend your days criticizing the direction of others.

Don’t let others or yourself stop you from maxxing that magnitude.

*This is really not a very high threshold at all.

There’s that age-old question–if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it still make a sound? 

The answer is yes, with a little qualifier–it makes a sound, but nobody cares.

Live Deeply,