I’ve noticed a change in the way my friends talk about the future; especially the way they talk about their future careers. Many of them who years ago laid out long, detailed projections of their career path – companies they wanted to work for, dream roles they wanted to have, advanced degrees they needed to get there – have done away with these long scripts. They’re suspicious of 10 year plans and 5 year plans, and even next year’s plans. It’s not that their dreams have fallen through or that they’re becoming bearish about the future; by all means they’re still “careerists” in the sense that they expect to collect a paycheck and do something meaningful with their working years. But they realize now more than ever how plans can change on a dime. How life throws wrenches. How a job can disappear in the blink of an eye. Or how the goals they made at 25 can wear thin by 35.
Life is uncertain. And though life has always been uncertain, Covidtide has been a concentrated dose of it all at once. It’s put us on our heels. In my lifetime I’ve never heard so many people talk collectively about grief. Part of the grief I think we feel comes from the fear of not knowing how to act, or when to act, or whether to act, while at the same time not wanting to get frozen in indecision. This is one of those recurring life riddles; how do you move forward while being in one way or another, stuck?
I think the answer involves learning, or relearning, how to be proactive. When I was younger, proactive was used simply as an injunction against idleness: I remember my parents saying something to the effect of, ‘don’t just sit there, be proactive.’ Proactive, by extension, meant being some kind of relentless doer; an energetic busybody, someone who gets up, knots their laces and makes things happen. Similarly I sensed that being proactive was deeply ingrained in the American work ethic; it was a resume booster, a virtue that made one fit for a culture of entrepreneurs, opportunists, and self-made moguls; it appeared then and it appears now in job advertisements under the term ‘self-starters’.
Now I grant that none of these conceptions is entirely false. Proactive does mean doing things. But it’s taken me awhile to realize it doesn’t mean just doing things. Part of the old definition I’ve had to shed over the years is the quiet and seductive assertion that action is in and of itself the goal of living; that the chase is the main thing, that initiative is infallible, and that the purpose of keeping a schedule is to fill it. This is a very sneaky and low hanging fruit kind of philosophy, and it is not by any means an entirely rotten outlook; but the dark side of this ‘just do it’ approach is that being busy becomes a habit. Then it becomes second nature, and sooner or later one is throwing themselves into activities, plans and projects as readily as they throw eggs into the grocery cart, without having any context for why they’re doing it. This kind of orientation leads to tunnel vision. They may know what they’re doing, but they’re not sure where they’re at.
It’s taken me a long time to realize that proactive is as much a habit of awareness as it is a habit of action. At the outset of his classic management book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the author Stephen Covey begins to unfold this idea. He lists proactivity first among his seven habits; though what’s often surprised me about his arrangement is that he puts ‘Be Proactive’ first, directly ahead of ‘Begin With The End In Mind’. The first time I read this section I thought nothing of the specific ordering, but at each rereading I’ve come to see how contrarian it is. After all, shouldn’t you know where you’re going before you start making moves?
The counterintuitive answer, which I think is one of Covey’s overlooked strokes of brilliance, is emphatically NO. The reason is that our actions and the consequences of those actions do not always correlate in the way we anticipate. Our foreseeing falls short. Things happen that we did not want to happen – and, alternately, things do not happen that we want to happen. We ask the girl on a date. The girl says no. We expect to get the job promotion. The job goes to the next guy. These may at first seem like only two extremely simplified examples of the effect I’m describing, but they are also, more broadly speaking, the kind of decision-based risk inherent in all of life. To live at all, to move and progress and change for the better, is to swagger into the unknown; not just sometimes, all the time. If you have taken a thousand forks in the road before and known the right way each time, you will eventually come upon a thousand and first fork and not know which way to go. And herein lies the value of being proactive. Proactive means moving in the in-between. It means muscling and tiptoeing ahead despite limited foresight and poor visibility. It means you take the thousand and first fork, not without error, but without fear. It’s a mindset tweak.
In the journey through our careers, as with the journey through our lives, we’re presented with a partial view of the road. We may see certain milestones up ahead and we may anticipate certain highways and rest stops along the way – but there are many steps in-between where the roadsigns are infrequent, the Northstar slips behind the clouds, and our proverbial GPS blacks out. During these moments — which happens to be a lot of life — we must make shift.
If we’re too afraid of making a step in the wrong direction, we won’t move at all. The kind of proactivity I’m advocating is less a technique for acquiring an outcome than a process of creativity and discovery and revision that compels us to be less overprotective and fatalistic about our decisions. It is a kind of inquisitiveness. We can be like the fox who takes more steps than necessary, knowing that two steps in the wrong direction can be more valuable than two steps you never take.
If life is like driving a car, then living well is like driving a car and reading a map at the same time. When we’re lost it’s tempting to pull off the road indefinitely to study the map, to know for certain where we’re going. But one of the navigation myths we succumb to is believing we must know all the map before we hit the road. There’s a difference between being a navigator and a cartographer, and being proactive means being a navigator. When we are proactive in this way, we are no longer heeding a rote command to just do something, nor are we afraid of veering off the broad and beaten way. Rather we can think of proactivity as an invitation, an exploratory outlook which generates new possibilities and new momentum as we go.
show & tell 