Extending my Identity - Mental model to get out of scarcity
Hi!
I have had the great fortune of being surrounded by incredibly intelligent, sharp and interesting people. Which means that whenever I feel like I am drowning in existential crises, I often have folks who can hand out rafts to me. Of course it’s not always easy or straight forward to get out of the space where my mind is trying to be all existential and “ what if the way I have been living my life has been wrong all along”. But sometimes I get these golden nuggets that stick with me, and I find myself bringing them up again and again. Both when my mind is in the existential whirlpool and when I am helping others do the same.
A few years back, I was in the middle of thinking about how I want to expand beyond product design. It was starting to feel same-y, stifling and creatively unfulfilling. But I had not framed it in my mind like that. My mind instead was busy telling me “Every time you get good at something you want to leave it behind. How will you build on your skills”. As someone who has always been interested in doing MANY things, I have often felt this internal tug of war. To explore breadth or to have the patience and let myself pursue depth.
At this time, I really wanted to go more into game making but I felt like if I do that, then I would be leaving behind the world of product-making. Maybe, I will get rusty, maybe, I will never be able to get another project in the domain of product making. And the biggest one of all, what if I fall out of love with making products? It’s irrational but liking something new felt like cheating, like I was letting my commitment to product design go.
So I was in this dilemma for a few weeks, before I ended up having a conversation with Charu (my oft featuring sister and collaborator, as some of you might have noticed), After I explained to her my dilemma, she said, “But your mental model is wrong. You are thinking as if you’re moving to Japan, but you’re just trying to learn Japanese. You won’t forget English if you learn Japanese.”
It was such a simple but effective articulation of my cognitive distortion. I was thinking of “I can only have one” in a place where I decidedly didn’t need to create artificial scarcity. I did end up taking on the game design job that was on my plate, and then as I explored more in the directions of media and now AI over the coming years, I found myself thinking of all of these skills as new language acquisition. Yes, I might get slightly rusty without using something, but after coming across it again once or twice, I will remember. It’s a bit like cycling or swimming or driving. You never really forget.
It has been helpful to share this insight with my friends, when they feel like they have to make a choice that closes old doors for them and reminding them that knowledge and skills are treasures that once gained can’t be stolen away.
The most fun impact of this has been a subtle one. It has enabled me to have an easy way of identity extension and thinking in terms of that rather than identity replacement. Identity is a hard thing to navigate through as a person in this world. The mind does not want to change its self-perception. It for sure doesn’t want to let go of things that seem critical to the idea of “who am I” but this feels like an additive way of looking at myself and results in far less internal strife. Yes. it makes it hard for me to easily describe what I do, and who I am to a new person, but I am learning to take up the space and rather than rushing through that story, trying to make it a story worth listening to. But that is a story for another time.
Till next time.
Divya