Don't be naive

Students are so naive. I was so naive. But I don’t mean it the usual way.

Most people use “naive” as a polite way to say ignorant: you didn’t know how the world worked, or how the company worked, or how people worked. You just didn’t know things.

But I think that’s the wrong definition. I’ve met plenty of people who had all the information and still handled the situation badly. And I’d call that even more naive. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t know, it was that they had no principles to fall back on. No framework for dealing with that kind of situation at all.

That’s a much more interesting kind of naivety, because it’s not the type most people realise they have.

I myself am a strong sufferer of naivety. Through high school, I chased status at school, I yearned to feel like I was getting ahead of others (on any level). And I was pushed around by parents telling me to focus on X, peers doing better than me at Y, some guru online advertising Z.

I was a ship with no anchor out at sea. I had huge momentum but no purposeful grounding to save me from the external forces swaying me around. Even though I felt like I was putting in effort to improve myself in some ways, I was really going nowhere.

So what was I lacking? It wasn’t information, no, I had plenty of that. If anything, having too much information was a problem, but that’s for another time. I lacked a settled sense of what I actually believed in. Not what my parents, some YouTuber or a peer believed, but what I had truly worked out for myself. When you strip away all the nauseating self-help language, principles are really just the conclusions you’ve arrived at through your own experience of the world. Things you know you want to adhere to because you’ve tested them, consciously or not, and they’ve held up.

But there’s something counterintuitive about these principles. You can’t actually go looking for them.

The fallacy of experience

Why not? You might think, I will just go and put myself into more and more experiences that can shock me into developing some new principle. Conventional wisdom dictates that you build these principles from going out and doing things, succeeding, failing and learning. I’d say that’s partially true.

But the fallacy is that you can’t deliberately go looking for the experiences that will give you new principles. This is because the moment you’re consciously searching for a formative experience, you actually already halfway know what you’re supposed to learn from it. Which means the principle is actually already partially formed.

So the experiences that shock into building properly new principles (i.e. ones you’ve never thought of dealing with before), are by definition ones you never would’ve expected or seen coming. The point is that in principle making, the experience side is largely outside of your control. They just happen to you.

Experience is one half of building principles. And it's largely uncontrollable. The other, more controllable half, is reflection.

Reflections are the key

Reflection always got a bad rep when I was in school. I remember being a little kid in primary school, and there were these personal qualities and being reflective was always one of them. I usually would disregard it as useless, it seemed like something only lonely kids would do: sitting around and thinking about their feelings.

Now I think to be able to spend time in nothingness and reflect is one of the most important skills to have. If the experience side of building principles is largely outside of your control, then reflection is the only part of the equation you actually own. It's the one thing you can actually control. If you’re not using it, you’re pretty much leaving the process of principle building up to chance.

When a principle creating experience occurs (e.g. failure, conflict, feeling out of your depth), there’s a window, maybe a few hours to a day long. In that window, the experience is raw in your mind and you’re still turning it over. this is when reflection needs to happen, because that’s when you have a strong recollection of your emotions and it can have a lasting impact on you.

The window closes fast though. Life fills back in and the moment fades away into the background as you get distracted and busy. It’s not like the experience never happened, but the weight you attached to it is lost. No longer is it a rare principle forming experience; it’s now just any other event in your life.

Don’t be a sponge, be like clay

A sponge absorbs and reforms. Clay absorbs and can be reshaped.

There are principle altering experiences, just as there are principle creating experiences. Your principles are not solid pillars never to be moved again. They can be, and should be, updated over time and with new experiences.

Just like clay, a principle should be mouldable when the right experience hits. For example, maybe you have the principle to optimise for grades, but then you read a masterpiece essay on what you should actually be looking to work on at school. Given such an experience, you could sit down, and reflect on your own goals, your own desires and your past experience and update your principle as you see fit.

Now I will say, not everything will be a principle updating experience, and just like anything else, the overexposure to this process is not greatly beneficial to you either. It can be very easy to update too much, or think about updating too much that you end up consuming too much time through the process itself. Consider how emotionally charged you feel after something you believe is principle-altering. If it’s just a tweet you’ve seen and it’s spiked your adrenaline, it might not be it. But if it’s a long form essay that you’ve taken the time to read and ponder upon and it’s left you feeling different, that might be it.

A difficult truth

So all this begs the question, how do we reflect?

I won’t lie to you, I don’t have the best intuition for this. I've spent the last few years practicing reflection, with mixed results in creating and updating my principles.

From my own experience, the first thing that seems to matter is getting the emotions out of your head and onto something external. Whether that's writing it down or talking it through with someone, there's something about externalising it that clears enough space to think more clearly about what actually happened.

After that, I try to replay the experience and find the specific moments where I had no good answer. Not the whole thing, just the points where I froze, or copied someone nearby, or made a call I couldn't really justify. In those moments, I'd ask myself what I actually believe, how I'd want to act if it happened again, and why.

I can't say this has been flawless. I'm still not great at knowing which experiences are worth sitting with. Sometimes if I'm reflecting by myself, I can arrive at the wrong conclusions and find myself just as lost the next time.

So there's a new definition of naivety: the lack of underlying principles to guide your decision making. Everyone is naive in some way, as we’ve explored. These experiences that shape your principles happen to you; they can’t be simply sought out. In this light, naivety isn’t a diagnosis that you can cure, but rather one that you can only keep working against.