Detach From The Outcome

I was sitting with a friend in a library-esque room and he was telling me that he was actively interviewing for a new engineering role. He was practicing LeetCode religiously mixed in with some distributed system design questions. However, he was facing an obstacle. He said performance anxiety during technical interviews was leading to rejections. The constant stream of rejections then dropped his motivation to continue doing LeetCode and study for interviews.

I'm sure this sounds familiar. We've all had moments when a lot was on the line. Perhaps a championship title in a sport. Maybe, a job that if you didn't get would leave you homeless. Or even a musical performance that your career depended on. Thinking about performing well in these cases might have led you to failure.

The solution to this is simple although counterintuitive: you need to detach from the outcome.

A concert pianist when playing a song for a large crowd doesn't think if she is playing the song correctly, hitting all the keys, at the right tempo, and with proper dynamics. Instead, she is thinking only about the current and following sections of the song. Thinking about the overall performance as she was playing would have led her to play incorrectly. The outcome, in this case, the audience enjoying the song, can be reflected upon after it has been determined.

Seneca says we often suffer in imagination than in reality and this is what it is. We are concerned about failure before we have even failed. We don't need to suffer twice. Just once and that is only if we fail. Thinking about it will surely increase those odds.

Don't worry about failing the test as you are writing the test. Don't worry about giving a horrible musical performance in front of a crowd when you are in the middle of the performance. Don't worry about flopping the interview when you are in the middle of the interview. Don't worry about your book not doing not selling well when you are still writing the first chapter.

Detach from the outcome. Focus on the process.

What I've consumed the past week:

I got a copy of Steven Pressfield's latest book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be. It's a short book that gets straight to the point. If you want to do any kind of meaningful work you need to put your ass on the line for a long period time. You also need to put it in a physical location that will give you the most chance of success. Do this long enough and the Muse will notice your work.

Bonus: I listened to portions of Andrew Huberman's podcast episode on Dopamine in which he explains how doing a task for the reward causes you to feel less and less motivated to do the task, and perhaps another reason to detach from the outcome.

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