Aaron Renn made a mistake early in his career. He attended Indiana University in Chicago, and he started his career in mid-tier corporate consulting. At the time, he didn’t have a clear perspective on the possibilities outside of his small town. He writes, “My choices were extremely high ambition by the standards of that community, but in that era I almost certainly could have gone to Harvard or another elite school. Nobody ever told me to think bigger, and my default choices had a major negative impact on my ability to have public impact and influence.”
In other words, he didn’t bump into someone who could raise his aspirations of himself. In hindsight, he believes would have qualified to study at an elite college. If he had done that, moved to New York City, and started his career in software programming, he would be in a much better position to spread his ideas today.
Aaron writes his main takeaway from this reflection, emphasizing, “Choosing the ladders to climb, choosing the game and league to play in, has an enormous impact in where you are going to end up in life. It doesn’t determine what you can achieve, but plays a huge role in it.”
In other words, Aaron picked a good ladder, but not a great one—and this has limited the opportunities available for him, decades later.
While I can relate with Aaron’s experience, I find this perspective limiting. I agree with Luke Burgis’s and Paul Millerd’s responses, who suggest that the skill of climbing the right ladder or hierarchy also happens to be correlated with an approach that crushes the human soul; it actually discourages talent.
You’d think that finding and climbing a hierarchy sounds simple enough, but it can actually be quite difficult—certainly a full-time job on its own. You’ll need to find patterns of careers that are replicable and relevant. That’s all time that you are taking away from your actual craft. By this I mean: every minute, hour, and day you are climbing the hierarchy of a traditional author—learning the ladder, meeting with people, calibrating relevance—you are not actually improving as a writer. Unless you plan on writing about the hierarchy of writing, you’re neglecting the craft of writing.
I know this all too well because I lived it. In the 2010s, I was trying to grasp the ladder of a traditionally published author. I’d identified multiple different paths, and tried to climb them in spite of resistance. It felt like I was constantly bumping into an invisible barrier. I write in Creative Doing:
After years of learning and applying rules, you might live within these constraints even when they don’t actually apply to you. You’ll feel like you’re bumping into invisible walls. For me, a huge invisible wall was the traditional publishing system; I felt like I needed to have a book agent, write a book proposal, and build an audience, all before I could actually start to write a book. For years, I tortured myself with that idea that I needed the system’s buy-in before I could write a book. This fixation on being accepted by the traditional institutions distracted me from the clear vision of what was in front of me and the valuable experiences and ideas I already had.
Perhaps in some ways, I also made the same mistake as Aaron—I chose the wrong ladder to climb. Maybe I didn’t understand it well enough, or I chose to play in a league that was too competitive for me, or maybe… maybe… maybe…
It’s easy to fall into this trance of hesitation. For me, the progress I made was to put the ladder out of my mind. I wish I could say something epic, like I mentally burned it down, but truthfully I just stopped looking at the world through the lens of this hierarchy. I’m not saying the imagined reality of the traditional publishing industry doesn’t exist (it clearly does!). I’m saying that I just looked somewhere else. Instead of focusing on the hierarchy (and ensuing prestige, profit, and opportunity), I focused on the work.
I focused on writing. I focused on researching. I focused on making as good a book as I possibly could in a short amount of time.
And this focus led me to do something I could never get done before—which is to actually write a book.
I still occasionally look at this hierarchy, and I can see myself moving up. I worked with a publisher. All my family and friends and peers can see the book, so they treat me differently—not someone who is climbing the hierarchy of being an author, but someone who has earned the title of being an actual author.
If mental constructs like hierarchies and ladders energize you and make you feel liberated, then by all means choose to keep climbing them. However if this mental hierarchy does not work for you—if you find them governing and constricting your work—you can change perspectives, you can decide to put them down. It’s a big world out there, and you can just do stuff!