One of the biggest boons that has ever come to me is the realization that, in all too many cases, laziness is not the problem for me. Clarity is.

I don’t want to generalize this to all of humanity on the drop of the hat but it feels to me that that is likely the case. 

It is hard not to think so when it is obvious that people have ambitions inside them and how obviously a part of them was pushing them to accomplish the things that their ambition dictated. The desire existed within them, a push of the soul, if you will, to say that they never really wanted to accomplish the things that they aspired for is, I suppose, to negate the driving force of that initial will.

Implementation is a much more difficult thing than mere wishing and most people never cross that boundary in a true or Sufficient way, and of course this can happen in the way that so many other failures happen for a million different possible reasons:

– Diversion because of life events

– Actual flagging in willpower

– Lack of a system

– Deviation from one’s word

– So many other things

Unfortunately, the world tends to collapse all these things into laziness. If only a person had tried harder, then they would succeed. To be fair, such a mentality is entirely psychologically coherent and understandable. You were unable to succeed. The method did not avail itself. You could have done a whole list of things in order to make sure that you would actually accomplish your goal.

The thing about these could-haves is that they lie in a future that was not realized, and that seems subject to a possibility only if. Also, if you weren’t able to accomplish your goal through a series of linear steps, one after another, I suppose it is normal to then blame yourself, even as you never reach the outer edge of what is really necessary. 

I suppose one of the problems here is that when we talk about success, we have a tendency to imagine causation in an incredibly linear way. You worked hard, therefore you succeeded. You did not succeed, therefore you did not work hard enough. It is a very clean story and perhaps that is part of why it is so attractive. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the world has any particular obligation to make itself quite so clean for us.

Consider hard work for a moment. Obviously, hard work matters. It would be absurd for me to suggest otherwise. But it is equally obvious that hard work by itself cannot be sufficient for success. You can work extraordinarily hard at something that does not work. You can spend years implementing a terrible plan. You can possess tremendous discipline while moving in completely the wrong direction. You can even do almost everything correctly and discover that some circumstance outside your control has decided that none of it is going to work anyway.

Planning seems to suffer from precisely the same problem. A perfect plan that is never implemented accomplishes nothing. Implementation without a plan can result in a great deal of movement without a great deal of progress. Clarity without action is useless. Action without clarity may simply allow you to become extremely efficient at accomplishing something that you never actually wanted to accomplish in the first place.

So perhaps the mistake is to imagine that any one of these things is the thing.

This was what led me back to something that the philosopher J. L. Mackie called an INUS condition, which is one of those philosophical terms that sounds considerably more complicated than the idea that it is trying to express. Mackie describes a cause as an Insufficient but Non-redundant part of an Unnecessary but Sufficient condition.

That is quite a mouthful, but the underlying idea is remarkably useful.

Suppose that success requires, in one particular case, hard work, planning, competence, feedback, persistence, and the right opportunity. Hard work by itself is not enough. Planning by itself is not enough. Persistence by itself is certainly not enough. Yet remove one of these things from this particular combination and perhaps the whole thing falls apart.

At the same time, this particular combination need not be the only possible route to success. Somebody else could arrive at exactly the same destination with more talent and less planning, more capital and less time, better connections and less effort, or through some combination of circumstances that was never available to you in the first place.

This, I think, is where the idea becomes extremely important.

Hard work can be genuinely causal without being sufficient. Planning can be genuinely causal without being sufficient. Clarity can matter enormously without being sufficient. All of them can be indispensable parts of one route while still not being indispensable to every possible route.

And once you see success in that way, the statement that you simply “didn’t try hard enough” begins to look rather strange.

Perhaps you didn’t. That certainly happens.

But perhaps effort was never the missing condition at all.

As I move forward with the entire constellation of different things that I’m learning at the moment and the goals that I’m trying to compress and distill my time for, I suppose I’m hit up for a few possible causal configurations. It is not always certain to me which new ones will take shape, but what is clear is that a lot of this is coming to me intuitively, even as the structure materializes with increasing clarity each day. 

Today I thought I’d write a brief blog post on Mensa, the organisation that I’ve been a part of for the past couple of years. It’s been a long time since I really thought about this, but a lot of things have really changed. 

As Carl Jung once said, “We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives. If we had, we would know everything–but at most that is only a pretense. At bottom we never know how it has all come about. The story of a life begins somewhere, at someparticular point we happen to remember; and even then it was already highly complex. We do not know how life is going to turnout. Therefore the story has no beginning, and the end can only bevaguely hinted at. The life of man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually, it is so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and develop at all. I was impressed by that fact long ago, as a youngmedical student, and it seemed to me miraculous that I should not have been prematurely annihilated.”

I joined Mensa when I was a teenager of 17. Insecure, lacking identity, and wanting to try something new. 

Imagine my joy then when I took the test scored a pretty decent score and ended up joining the Society, finding it to be a safe harbor for myself in a strange world.

I thought it was a natural thing to do – to find myself a spot where somehow I wouldn’t feel so alone, to be in the presence of people who were the brightest in the world, who could change that world and make it a better place. There you see, a whole bunch of pivotal assumptions, many of which I learned were wrong:

First of all, I realized that Mensa was definitely a place that gathered people. It wasn’t necessarily a place where the feeling of loneliness would disappear. After all, a person can be alone but feel completely at home, yet live in a sea of people but feel lonely and longing for the connection of kindred souls.  

I learned quickly that Mensa was not a place of the brightest; instead, it was a collection of strange individuals here and there, some of whom liked puzzles, others of whom just enjoyed attending events – it was then that I realized that the idea of intelligence was not necessarily the same as intelligence. In its inchoate form, it manifested as an ennui, a disillusionment, and an unhappiness in a crowd that I was now a part of – but that I realize was not filled with what I consider even remotely transformative.

Secondly, I realized that Mensa was not for changing the world; indeed, that didn’t align with how everything was set up anyway, given that the very bylaws of the society themselves say that the society as a whole has no opinion. Still, I was there, just spending time thinking that it would be interesting and that I would find some meaning inside from the people around me – Only to find disappointment, although I should say, that that disappointment was the fruit of my own expectations. 

The last of these realizations is something I came to only recently and that took more than ten years to realise… But I think it is quite important. 

Like anything in life, Mensa is what you make of it – your expectations, the people you encounter, the conversations you have, and the moments that you share with others. All of which subsist in an infinitely collapsing probability wave function bearing enormous possibilities. That’s not unique to Mensa; that’s true of everything in life. It’s just that Mensa was one of the places where that lesson was learned – an academy in which multiple ridiculous premises came together to form and fashion an arena for the competition of my ideas with the reality that surrounded it.

There are so many other things I’ve discovered about Mensa. Dramas, fights, wars over things that seem apparently meaningless. Holiday gatherings one after another, friendships, meeting people. Realizing that not everybody holds the same image of intelligence. Realizing that you’ve found a safe space to talk about intelligence. Realizing that you can talk about anything and just have to bear the consequences in the many forums that the organization sets up. For those of us who are lucky enough to score in the top 2% in a local test. 

Mensa is not a place for changing the world. It never has been and perhaps it never will be. If it does change the world, it is not because of the society in itself, but rather it would be because of an accident and people who came together either by an act of chance or an act of god. 

Despite all of the self-doubt, contemplation, and everything in between, it has become a kind of home and a home that I appreciate, a place where there is more to discover.

It is for that reason and for no other reason that I continue to take joy in it. To enjoy the friendship of those whom I’ve met within it – For in it I know; there is more to go.