I can’t go on that vacation. I can’t apply to that school. I can’t approach that girl. I can’t buy that house. I can’t ask for that raise. I can’t quit my job.
In the vast majority of cases where people use this phrase, it is completely unjustified. On occasion it is the proper phrase to use, but for the most part, people overemploy it and it causes them to not get what they want from life.
I want people to get what they want out of life, and so it is of deep importance to me that people get out of their own way.
Language is a strange tool. People play fast and loose with it, usually because they don’t take the time to say what they really mean. Even more insidiously, it is often the case that they don’t take the time to figure out if what they mean is actually true.
When you use language imprecisely, it makes it very easy to accidentally convince yourself of things that aren’t true. This has a fairly predictable result of making you suffer more than you would have had you convinced yourself only of things that are true.
I think a lot of people can intuit the reasons that “I can’t” causes you to suffer. Most people have somewhere in their minds the idea that you can do anything you set your mind to. Yet, it seems there are far fewer who reliably live out this maxim. So why is there a discrepancy? I genuinely think it is because they convince themselves that they can’t do the things that they want.
Over the last few years I’ve been trying to examine the phenomenon of people who are hyper-competent across many different unrelated domains. Odds are you know at least someone like this. Even if you don’t know someone who is impressive when compared to famous household names, there’s probably someone you know in your life that seems to stand above the rest when it comes to just being able to make shit happen in their own life.
The defining feature of competent people is that they can do things, often extremely well. If doing things well is just the logical conclusion of doing things at all, we should really focus on what it takes to do things. So it seems natural that if we want to build this meta-skill of doing things, we should try to push through the all-too-familiar statement, “I can’t”.
As I was graduating college, I remember watching one of the famous Steve Jobs interviews where he talks about an important realization that everything in the world that you see around you is “made up by people no smarter than you”. I remember this feeling like an important idea even though I hadn’t quite figured out exactly why. It would be many years before this tenet became a fully integrated feature of my psychology.
When we’re young, it’s not often that we get to see impressive things getting done up close. Even in my own experience, I sort of knew that my dad worked on spacecraft, and yet it was something I didn’t get to observe directly. By default, most of us don’t get to see enviable things being created from scratch, and so it’s tempting to feel like everything impressive is just a feature of our environment. Every building, vehicle, website, album, or corporation gives the illusion that it always existed. Even if you know it was created, it feels like maybe it was created by people who differ from you in some fundamental way.
I think the impact of Jobs’ statement is that it very directly challenges this illusion. His statement illustrates that everything impressive that has ever been done was done by someone who does not differ in any material way from you. The immediate implication is that you too can do impressive things.
Many of us grew up with adults, books, or movies telling us we could do anything we set our mind to. I struggled with this and I think it’s because as someone who is chronically skeptical, it’s easy to dismiss this as an empty platitude that has no evidence to support it.
Jobs’ formulation inverts the lesson. He isn’t telling the interviewer that they could do anything they wanted. Instead, he is pointing to the endless proof that we see every day that people do impressive things. He is reminding us that things we might be tempted to take as features of our environment are actually the result of someone’s (usually many someones’) effort.
When you look at the world through this lens, it pushes you towards this habit of mind where you replace helplessness with curiosity. Instead of saying “I can’t”, you ask “How can I?”
Once you start asking this question you start to collect recipes, big and small, for how things come to pass and you can start to extract patterns from that. Through examining my own thought patterns as well as those around me, I’ve noticed that we use “I can’t” to mean two entirely different things:
The second meaning of this is both far more common, and far more pernicious than I think most people give it credit for. I’d even argue that this second interpretation is often upstream of the first.
Very often the solution to “I lack the ability” is just to figure out how others have abilities you do not. Yet still, many people will eventually get stuck on some step where the outcome is uncertain and they are afraid to try. I would claim that large swaths of my own life have been tacitly governed by this exact fear. It’s this fear, uncertainty, and doubt that causes so many people to give up before ever trying something.
I don’t think it’s a novel claim to say that people choose not to do things because they’re afraid. Indeed, there is a large canon of cultural wisdom that courage in the face of fear is foundational to any sense of accomplishment. However, we very often get stuck before we give ourselves a choice to face that fear because we simply say to ourselves “I can’t”. We say to our friends “we can’t”. We say to our children “you can’t”. This language disguises a personal fear as a law of the universe and it prevents us from doing the things we want to do.
Here’s the thing though,
There are No Rules, Only Consequences.
Everyone I’ve ever met, including myself, operates in a way where they subject themselves to rules. Indeed, one of the important features of civilized society is that people respect the laws of the jurisdiction in which they live. More familiar than that, it almost always requires some social cooperation to get any of the things we want. This means that people grow up with a reinforcement loop that orients them towards treating these rules as something that must be followed.
By “rule” I am referring to a felt obligation to behave a certain way. When people feel this sense of obligation either to restrict some behavior (or to perform it), they are choosing to do or not to do something they are capable of out of the fear of consequences.
But what are the consequences? You probably have no idea. Maybe you do. But probably not. Have you enumerated the possibilities? Have you thought about how likely they would be? Have you weighed them against the benefits and determined you actually don’t prefer that outcome? Have you looked?
I think that just being in the habit of looking is the secret to winning at life. Sometimes, after looking, you’ll arrive at the same conclusion as those who said “I can’t”, but you’ll have a richer understanding.
It’s not that I can’t skip this party, it’s that I might disappoint a friend if I do. It’s not that I can’t miss this deadline, it’s that it will erode my customers’ trust. It’s not that I can’t say what I think, it’s that I may be less popular among a certain group.
When you consider the consequences directly, what once felt like an obligation is now reframed as a choice. Maybe you still wouldn’t choose it, but by anchoring it in your own preferences you restore your agency and reinforce a world view where you see more options in front of you and reinforce a self-image where you happen to life.
At this point, you may be starting to get a little uneasy. Wouldn’t adopting this methodology of thought just excuse a number of actions I find morally abhorrent? After all, I can murder someone. I can steal someone else’s property. I can cheat on my partner. I can use slurs in conversation. Am I just giving license to sociopaths to do whatever they want without respecting the laws and norms of the culture?
Not really. Exploring this in full is worth its own essay but it suffices to say for now that this practice is not incompatible with any framework of moral reasoning. If the reason that you “can’t” do something is that you believe with conviction that it is morally wrong to do so, you have still done the analysis. You’ll know that restricting or performing the behavior in question has very real effects and an outcome you do not prefer. However, many of our unexamined inhibitions do not genuinely rest on moral conviction, but instead on a hazy unarticulated fear of the effects of our actions.
The process of transforming this hazy fear into a clear chain of cause and effect allows us to make choices with clarity that honor our preferences, whether those preferences carry the weight of moral judgements, or are simply fulfilling our more immediate desires. When we do this, it is shocking just how often our fears are not justified by a careful consideration of the consequences.
So what might we do to rigorously examine our fear of the consequences? Let’s walk through a concrete scenario to make this easier to follow. Let’s say you are going for a job interview and they ask you your salary expectations. You currently get paid US$100k/yr, but you’ve wanted to be making US$200k/yr. You might think you “can’t” tell them that’s what you expect. Are you sure?
Let’s examine.
To decide whether our fears are justified we first have to name them. So it stands to reason that the first step of this process would be to enumerate the outcomes we fear. There could be a single feared outcome or many, and after naming one it’s worth asking a follow up about whether your list is exhaustive, or at least covers most of the space of possible outcomes. If we can’t actually name a single concrete scenario we fear, should we really be surrendering our agency over it?
This is the first opportunity for our fears to dissolve. It doesn’t matter at this stage of the analysis whether the fear is absurd or reasonable, just that you can articulate it. If we apply it to this scenario, what might we come up with? The obvious ones to me are embarrassment in the moment, losing the opportunity, offending the interviewer, burning social capital with whoever got you that interview, and getting blackballed from the industry or profession. Nameless fear prevents reasoning further, and it’s the first trap of many that keeps people stuck.
Now, let’s suppose you can name at least one as we did above. How can we determine if that fear is justified?
For a fear to be justified, it has to be genuinely costly. Therefore we owe it to ourselves to ask if the outcome we fear actually is. Oftentimes we might fear something we can name but upon inspecting it, and really imagining it, we find out that it really isn’t a big deal.
Maybe it’s temporary, maybe it’s permanent but trivial. In either case, it’s at least worth considering as a course of action. In our case study, the embarrassment is a few moments of discomfort, losing the opportunity leaves you no worse than you are now, offending the interviewer on its own is irrelevant except to the extent that it loses you this opportunity or gets you blackballed. The only truly costly outcome here is the blackball.
So we’ve found a costly outcome. Does that mean we should abandon the exercise? Well, something feels a bit absurd about this scenario on inspection. Am I really going to get blackballed if I ask for too high a salary?
This is the right question to ask. Technically, it’s possible. You could hypothetically get blackballed from an industry or profession if you violate some social contract within it and that could very meaningfully impact your livelihood.
But even though it’s possible, it still feels absurd. Why? Because we haven’t factored in uncertainty and probabilistic reasoning into our analysis of the causality chain. Put simply, there isn’t a single deterministic through-line from “ask for 200k” to “become permanently unemployed”. Instead there are branches of possible sequences of actions, each with some kind of likelihood attached to it. Each action has many possible reactions, not just one.
If an action has many possible reactions, none of them are guaranteed, which means each one occurs with some probability less than one. If we accept this, there are two interesting questions that come to mind.
Although I phrase it in terms of probability, the actual number is both unknowable and unnecessary. What matters instead is a rough ordering of outcomes in terms of their likelihood as well as a sense of the order-of-magnitude of each outcome’s likelihood.
In our scenario, the most likely responses by the interviewer are to ask what you make now, to give you a salary band for the current role, or perhaps just to tell you that it is an unrealistic expectation for it.
Getting a sense of the likelihood of possible reactions requires experience, but you will inevitably acquire that as you go about life, whether you want to or not. Even without experience, though, it’s good to remember that almost by definition, extreme consequences are usually unlikely, precisely because they are extreme. This is not always true: if you jump off a cliff, the most likely outcome is death. However, most social ramifications are costly to the people trying to enact them. So to justify that cost, they would need to benefit accordingly and they usually don’t.
At this point, we’ve thought pretty hard about what could go wrong, but there’s still work left to do. We need to consider what could go right. After all, we could get the thing we want and it may be very likely, very beneficial, or both. Once you have a concrete cost in mind that you’re weighing against, any benefit that exceeds it becomes interesting.
In our scenario the benefit is obvious: you make the 200k. Perhaps less obviously, it could open the door for a more senior role altogether because it communicates to the interviewer you may be better suited to a different level of responsibility.
Like the cost analysis, we have to factor our assessment of likelihoods into our benefit analysis as well. If we only ever reasoned through the costs of a decision without considering the benefits, we’d never do anything.
Usually for any given action we’re considering, there’s an obvious benefit for which the action was specifically chosen, but it’s not always the only consequential benefit, and we may also find that some of the other benefits are very likely.
With our cost-benefit analysis of the endgame scenarios in hand, it may be tempting to stop there and make a final decision. However, it is usually the case that inspecting the endgames of our scenario requires us to make simplifying assumptions and this lossy transformation blinds us to the possibility of averting our favorite disaster at a later step. The simplifying assumptions very often take the form of eliding steps where you have the opportunity to take another action. It is in these subsequent action opportunities that we have the ability to further tilt the field in our favor.
There are many things we can do to interrupt the disaster sequence, but I want to draw attention to a special flavor of subsequent action, namely “undoing” the original action. This means that it isn’t a singular decision you make followed by fate deciding whether or not your nightmare is realized. You almost always have the opportunity to recover.
We can reason through this by considering the immediate response to our action, and imagining what we might do in response to that. If we can get back to a stable state fairly reliably, we’re in good shape. If we can’t, then we have to iterate out further until we reach some equilibrium. Almost no action we take yields a permanent disaster. In our scenario, if the interviewer seems offended, you can simply apologize and offer understanding for the interviewer’s position, and you’re more or less back where you started.
Now, after all of this thinking we might find that we “can’t” ask for 200k. Maybe because it’s super likely we can agree to 150, unlikely we agree to 200, and that asking for 200 makes it hard to land on 150. It doesn’t in this case, but there are plenty of scenarios where this shape of argument can make sense. We might care about progress more than the actual goal at this stage. We might determine that this immediate opportunity is a springboard for better long term growth and this interviewer is influential enough that being in their long term good grace is worth it. However, it is extremely important not to assume any of this is the case.
If, at the end of our reflection, we arrive at the decision that we “can’t” ask for 200k, which is really us saying “asking for 200k yields non-optimal results”, then at this point we’ve earned the right to say it. Not because the statement is true, but because it’s a practical shorthand for “I’ve thought about it, and it’s not the best way to proceed”.
At this point you may be onboard with the approach, but still skeptical how often these types of decisions come around. Does it really explain the efficacy of the hyper-competent? I chose the above example because it’s familiar and it’s the type of situation that readily invites serious thought from most people, but these types of traps show up in our lives all the time in ways we barely register.
As an example from my own life, I was at dinner with a friend and as the restaurant was closing down for the evening, we left and began walking back to my house. We got about two blocks away before she realized she was missing her purse. We determined that she left it at the restaurant, so we turned around. When we got back, the front door was locked. At this point she said to me, “I’ll call them tomorrow about it”. I, having spent some time with this idea of “no rules, only consequences”, noticed that there were still staff members in the restaurant and that the patio door was still open. I hopped the patio fence and went inside, talked to the staff about the purse and grabbed it for her before we left again. Not a single negative thing transpired in all of this and it meant my friend didn’t have to return to the restaurant the next day to get her purse.
This may sound like a trivial case but the arena of life provides us with constant scenarios that allow us to exercise this habit of mind. You may object that this level of reasoning I applied in the protocol above is too mentally exhausting for something so simple, but the more trivial the scenario, the less depth of analysis it requires. The shape of our reasoning, however, remains the same, and it’s this shape that is of utmost importance.
The trivial example above illustrates what it looks like when you’ve exercised this mental muscle to the point where it becomes intuition. The more you do this, the faster and better you can apply it. If you do it enough, it’ll be so embedded in your psychology that people will wonder how you accomplish so many things they didn’t think were possible.
When I observe hyper-competent people up close, this stands out as something they do quickly and pervasively as they go about life. It’s ingrained in them so deeply that it happens unconsciously until you ask them why they made decisions you would be scared to make. It’s not that they have some superpower, they’ve just internalized a process that looks very much like this and they execute it whenever they have to accomplish some goal in front of them, allowing them to not preemptively cut themselves off from choices that you may have never even considered. When Jobs said that “life was made up by people no smarter than you”, that you can “change it” and “influence it”, this is what he meant. People who make life what it is are running some version of this mindset. So can you.
I do my best every day to only use “I can’t” as a shorthand for the compressed result of an analysis that looks similar to this. Otherwise, it’s simply an unexplored corridor that, upon inspection, could lead me exactly where I wish to go. A real “I can’t” should be earned, not assumed. And a discipline of earning your “I can’t”s will earn you far more “I did”s.
What’s funny to me is that I’m trying to figure out the best way to end this essay. I keep thinking I “can’t” end it in any particular way because everything that comes to mind is either too abrupt or falls flat. But hey… there are no rules, █
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