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.