I was at a business networking event recently with several people roughly my age that I was meeting for the first time and someone asked me “what do you wish you knew when you were in high school or when you were about to graduate college?”. It’s an innocent question, and often a very good one – but here it felt weird because we were all pretty much at the same point in our careers. So what am I supposed to say? The person can’t go back in time and do anything differently anyway. I ask that question when I want to glean potential insights from people with more experience, since I can then adapt before it is too late. By that point, I had shared that I graduated from Harvard along with some other details, and I got the feeling that I was being given too much credit and that perhaps based on the resulting impression made I ‘must’ have some answers or secrets they did not.
I did not think I possessed such answers. If it was meant as a get to know you kind of question or as a what sort of things allowed you to do that sort of question – then really that’s the kind of question that should have been asked. Perhaps it was just the wrong question. I tend to take things more literally than not, and in that instance I just couldn’t understand why they cared what I wished I had done differently. The issue is I didn’t want to give a useless answer and also imply that I accepted any relative superiority I was perhaps being given the leeway to take on. That would have just made an ever so slightly (self-created) awkward situation into a conversation that would make me cringe at myself. Like listen to me, this is what you should have done. Ew.
So, while it was not my intent to behave this way in a formal / work-type setting, I decided to think, and took a more abstract path. You ask what I wish I knew. I say I wish I could know! I wish I could understand (completely) then what I know now, in general. A lot of the thoughts that drive me these days wouldn’t even have made sense to past versions of myself – my understanding was just too small. Which is funny because even at 18 I thought I knew so much. Maybe not facts, but I definitely thought I had a deep, penetrating understanding of the world. The me of today confirms I was wrong. It also makes me a bit embarrassed and ‘found out’ to myself when I have the audacity in the present to think I know – like I’m not going to think I’m an idiot as soon as a year from now. I’m in this trap pretty often.
Let’s say I ignore the future and fix myself at this moment in time. Even if I were able to consolidate all my life learning into one powerful thought / theme / message / insight, I have a strong feeling high school me would not have grasped it entirely. Like cupping some water as it swirls down the drain, it was there and now it’s gone. I do think my teenage self would have retained some of the message, but not the full message. The elephant in the room is time. Time is the culprit. We can’t understand without context and other tools of knowledge, and it takes time to acquire these. When you are young you have nothing. Think of collecting knowledge like a mini big bang. Spark, and off you go, expanding and expanding. Everything is new so you think you are filling a space. No space is being filled, that’s the illusion, you are just seeing a little more of what was already there. It is after you have expanded so much that you reflect and actively work the other way – to condense and simplify, which is just as hard.
You can only condense what you have first encountered (this includes the offshoots of creativity inspired by things encountered). So (1) a younger person with fewer experiences has some natural limit on their insight and (2) there is an infinite potential of experience meaning whatever I put my mind’s arms around and claim as mine, it’s enough only for a meager understanding. Of course, there are no absolutes, older people are not necessarily better off etc etc. I’m not really going anywhere specific with this one, so I’ll slightly touch on a couple of related thoughts.
Some things just take time to learn, and I am not sure why. If we could put people in simulators could we accelerate the development of wisdom, or does it need to be based on real experience? The knowledge is already there (in the world, somewhere, existing), but we don’t have the perspective to pluck it out of day to day life and guide it more directly into the part of the brain that houses understanding. I mean, why can’t I take my mentor and copy paste his knowledge into my head? If he tells me his most profound thoughts, why do they not stick? Time…
This is one area where AI is particularly interesting. I value deep understanding / knowledge. It’s hard for me to attain. It doesn’t take AI much time to ‘get it’, all at once. If indeed it does get it, then what does that make me? A waste of time? Does that invalidate all the weight I put on the possession of the knowledge I am capable of acquiring? The knowledge that is literally sitting on that server in that data center. An interesting time to be human.
Another question, again things take time, when will I know let’s say ‘a lot’? A hunch tells me I will know when it is a bit too late and out of season to know. Life is a sort of double sieve, experience is flowing in one direction and knowledge is flowing in the other direction. When young, we experience a lot and know little. When old, we will know more (generously let’s say a lot but probably this is not true) yet literal experience is on the decline, we are dying. Perhaps depth of experience increases but mental stuff only counts for so much in a physical world. It feels like I will never have a peak amount of each. Fair?
I wish I could understand and be wise now, but I’m only ever going to be so wise and understand so much. That does make me sad, but it’s such an impractical problem that I can’t even justify lingering on such sadness – so I shed a tear and move on with life. This sort of internal debate about how to spend my time (how much do I live in the moment vs. thinking and planning for growth) has been more present over the past year than any other time in my life. Since I don’t have the answer, my rough rule of thumb right now is to air on the side of experience when I can since I’m not getting this time back. After all, it’s my baseline to be more in my head anyway. So to answer the original question posed to me, I would tell my past self good luck, you can do this, knowing that it doesn’t matter if he can or not because he’ll never find out. But he doesn’t know that.
