anxiety vs management
When you’re contemplating a meaningful move, you might feel a whole pile of anxiety. You’re alert to the ways things could go badly, no matter what you decide. (Tim Urban illustrates this here for decisions about partnership / marriage). Emotionally, this can feel like weight on the shoulders, or chest, or gut. Postponing the decision is seductive - wouldn’t it be clearer and feel better with the benefit of more time, data, points of view, caffeine, &c &c? This doesn’t work - now you just have more weights and counter-weights cantilevered around your poor head and heart. The decision gets even heavier somehow.
Once you decide, though, things change. Now you’ve got a different sphere of concern. You’re not peering nervously into the crystal ball, trying to see things your eyes aren’t built to see. You’re handling the consequences of the decision. You’re in the relationship, or raising the child, or re-assigning the projects of the employee you let go. You’re managing.
English doesn’t have a verb for anxiety. “Worry” and “fret” don’t really do it - they’re too cute. Romance languages have reflexive verbs for this job and for me there’s a little spiritual lesson in those verbs. In French: “s’angoisser”; Spanish: “angustiarse”; Italian: "angosciarsi”. If you translate these back into English, they’re all saying something like “to anguish oneself”. They’re rooted in the Latin angustia, for narrowness or tightness.
In the fraught time before your decision, all the layers of your analysis may narrow you, despite your reach for greater perspective. Maybe the object of your anxiety isn’t the decision or its predictable consequences or the invisible catastrophes that lay beyond it. The object of your anxiety is you. You’re anguishing yourself.
On the other side, things decided, the object of your feeling and action is something beyond you, outside of you. You’ll have new worries but they’ll be more tractable. You’ll be able to lay hands on them, make plans, act. Your intellect and skills, pointed out at the work to be done, now have the power to navigate, rather than narrow.
If there’s advice hiding here, maybe the advice is
Part 1: “when you’re facing the decision and feeling its weight, remember and look forward to the worries of management that wait for you on the other side. You’re good at handling those. Management is more fun and more effective than anxiety.”
Part 2: “is there a cheap way to get to Management? Run a pilot, shrink the scope, ship the rough draft - bring this thing you’re considering out of yourself and into the world, so you can see it and revise it and ask others to do that, too.”
-eric
