Shoot Your Shot

In biology, there’s a concept of r/K selection. Reproductively, an r-strategy involves an organism trying to produce as many offspring as possible, with low resource investment in each individual descendant. Meanwhile, a K-strategy involves producing few offspring which each receive a large fraction of the parent’s resources to ensure that descendant’s success.

This is of course a spectrum, and the greatest extremes are across biological kingdoms. For example, fungi reproduce via spore dispersal, which is the most extreme version of throwing individual cells into the wind and hoping that some of them live maybe. Meanwhile, while some animals are very r-selected, the most K-selected species in nature are generally animals (eg, whales).

Humans are among the most K-selected things out there. Because of our huge brains, we gestate for nine months. (Compare rats, which gestate for about three weeks, or mushrooms, which just tell individual cells to fuck off and probably die.) Plus, we invest years in raising our children until maturity - and then we delay natural maturity a couple more years to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on them going to college.

Of course, even among humans, there’s a spectrum. As with most species with two fixed sexes (reproductively speaking), males can get away with a more r-like strategy, because in theory they don’t have to invest a ton in offspring. However, with few exceptions, males can’t actually get away with too much of this, because that nine month gestation period puts a hard ceiling on how r-strategy females around them can afford to be. So instead we tend to do pair bonding and families and all the other shit mushrooms would be baffled by. (Except they can’t be, because they don’t have our big expensive brains.)

OK, so this post isn’t really about reproductive biology. It’s about human psychology. Specifically, the fact that the r/K split in how willing one is to engage in [high output | low investment] vs [low output | high investment] can be generalised across way more domains than making babies.

In the biological model, organisms generally lean toward r when the environment is very high-variance. In such a situation, the amount that you invest in individual offspring matters far less than luck (ie, environmental factor’s beyond the parent’s control). Like, fungi can’t really change the concentration of dead logs in the area - the best they can do is hope their spores fall on some.

Likewise, if you are engaged in any pursuit where how well a given attempt goes has more to do with unpredictable conditions than with your own level of investment, r strategies are better. Meanwhile, K is ideal for the reverse. The only problem is, for some reason (I would guess due to some mixture of culture and biology), most people are stuck on K.

Call this perfectionism. Call it fear of failure. Whatever it is, a lot of people are unwilling to act unless they’re confident that any individual attempt will succeed - even when they can make an unbounded number of attempts. They just seem unable to comprehend that failure is low cost - or they’ll come up with a bunch of justifications for why failure actually is high cost. “Oh, but people I’ve never seen before and will never see again might laugh at me!” Excuse me, but what? The fuck?

All my observations seem to indicate that very few people actually shift their strategy between the r and K poles based on the circumstances. r/K becomes a feature of them - not of the optimal environmental strategy. Case in point - women in general tend to be less willing to do things they might fail at, no matter how soft the landing. I see this all around me. My male and female acquaintances are, in general, about equally competent - but the men do while the women practice and practice and practice and are never good “““enough”””.

The reason the world isn’t run by perfectionists is because perfectionists won’t get out of bed. The reason the world is run by men is because (many) men will shoot their shot at anything. Do you think Donald Trump would have run for president if he was only willing to do things he thought he’d succeed at? Are you not going to run for office because you might lose? Well, congratulations - now you know why bullshit floats.

And almost everything is like this! The modern world is made of soft landings. Almost nothing truly hurts you these days. Embarrassment doesn’t mean getting thrown out of the tribe - it means you can just do the same damn thing tomorrow and it’ll probably work. If you think you’re not good enough, you are almost certainly wrong, because few things today have a “good enough” - it’s just whether this time the right person/company/algorithm was impressed. Why are they impressed some times and not others? Honestly, this hardly matters - just keep shooting out spores and eventually they’ll land on wood.

Most people won’t put their art online because they don’t think people will like it. So??? If they don’t then they… Won’t look at it. If they do, you’ve just got both fans and information on what kind of stuff those fans like. I don’t think I’m a particularly great writer - I’ve met tons of people slaving away in obscurity who are clearly better than me. But I wrote my way to America because I wrote where Americans could read it - while my obscure acquaintances don’t let their writing out far enough to get a response.

Likewise, when I go to a concert, I’m generally the first person on the dancefloor. It’s rare that anyone else will visibly move their body until I’ve proven that it’s “safe”. Safe from what - who fucking knows? In reality, nothing. That’s why I don’t hesitate to bust a move. In the minds of everyone else - death, I’m guessing. So, of course, they all dance less expressively than me, in the hopes that no one will notice them. Meanwhile, I’m not an especially skilled dancer - I’ve taken two dance classes in my life - but at the end of the night, all eyes are on me. Of course they are - there was no one else to look at.

It’s hard for me to overemphasise the degree to which every. thing. is. like. this. This particular psychological bug is one of the most frustrating things in the world to me, because sitting over here on this heap of utility it just feels so obvious. Yes, you should ask people out! Yes, you should apply to that job! Yes, you should submit that manuscript! Yes, you should post your sketches on Deviant Art! Yes, you should try antidepressants! Yes, you should stop curtailing your life and start winning! More than half the time, the main obstacle is an unwillingness to lose cheaply.

Any time you’re considering doing something, you should ask yourself what the minimum viable product is. What is the lowest effort version of the thing you want to do that might maybe work? And how easily can you just do that repeatedly until it works? If you haven’t Googled a list of a few dozen companies in your industry and spammed them with your portfolio, why not? Because one might reject you? There are billions of people in this world and millions of companies that have never heard of you. You are not going to run out of options if you’re willing to cast a wide net.

Of course, the psychological bug in question is extremely deep, so I know the vast majority of people reading this will just feel briefly uncomfortable with their life choices before moving on and continuing to shoot themselves in the foot. That’s fine. Luckily, thousands of people read this blog, so hopefully a couple of them will get shaken up enough that they’ll be willing to stop screwing themselves out of success. And a couple people living better lives is as much as I’m aiming for.

In the meantime, I’m going to walk through some business districts in SF today and hand out my resume. Feel free to wish me luck, but I shouldn’t need it. Whether I succeed is just a matter of how much paper I can print on.