Weekly Musings II - The London System
“It’s just part of the fabric of who I am, how I was made. To not be able to see where the last chess piece lands - that’s what excites me.”
The London System is known as one of the easiest openings in chess, for white, where you play only logical moves and can almost always play the same moves no matter what black plays.
Sometimes I view life as this game of chess or just one huge logic tree that is much more akin to some nondeterministic algorithm. You can probably break down most tasks, and even most jobs, to a few key skills or tasks that most of humanity can replicate. And if you can understand the game well enough, you can probably game the system.
Admittedly I think about this much more than I should. When I’m showering I think about most things we have to do in a day are relatively straightforward tasks if we can muster up the energy, and sometimes courage, to do it. Writing an email. Doing laundry. Getting groceries. Going to the doctors. Keeping in mind, I’m not accounting for mental and physical energy, or how I’m doing emotionally that day. I’m speaking from the perspective of just each individual task.
In some ways, it’s comforting, because it also gives you a clear idea of what’s in your control. You can control booking the doctor’s appointment and going to the doctor - but you can’t control the outcome of the appointment. There’s some level of comfort in knowing that you showed up in the ways you were required to.
On the flip side, it can be crippling, as I also find myself disinterested or bored in pursuing certain hobbies, startup ideas, or jobs simply because if I can break down either the job or industry to some degree in my head I lose interest. In no way am I trying to sound pretentious - just honest. An example of this is creating a candle company similar to Function of Beauty. If you tune it just right - you probably could find a great product-market fit. It would make money, and make many people happy, but I can’t be motivated to actually work on it for sheer lack of interest because the initial product idea isn’t complex enough.
Then there’s the more complicated portion of life, this is the part of life that much more replicates a nondeterministic algorithm. Research, science, discovery, innovation. None of these categories have straightforward tasks or outcomes, they’re all highly volatile.
And I’m recognizing more and more that that’s where I want to be. It’s just part of the fabric of who I am, how I was made. To not be able to see where the last chess piece lands - that’s what excites me. Perhaps it’s the adventure, the unknown that attracts me. Or maybe it’s just my inherent human curiosity. The reason is hard to pin, but the point I’m drawing is I crave complexity, I crave the unknown. But perhaps that’s all of us to some degree, and perhaps that’s part of what makes us human.