How to start building with resources you didn't realize you have
Yesterday I thought to myself…
“Honestly, I think I could write an article every day. Seth Godin does it. I’m placing limitations on myself because of the way I’m looking at writing. It’s just a matter of perspective.
So many things happen every day, my attention has plenty of things that it floats towards.
With the right outlook there is more than enough to write about.”
Today, I’m testing that theory. So we are on day 2.
After sitting here for about 30 minutes without any threads of inspiration coming to me the best intro I could come up with is what you just read.
Which cues me into an interesting insight that went on to inspire the title of this article.
Resource Discounting
This is a habit I notice in myself and others.
We have a strong tendency to be confused about what resources (skills, knowledge, information, physical assets) we currently have and what we can do with them.
As a result, we discount these resources in our mind, and begin to seek out new resources.
I tried to ask Claude if there is an official name for this, but there isn’t. There is something called “Arrival Bias”, which is the tendency to believe happiness or fulfillment lies in some future achievement, which leads to undervaluing the present.
But we’re talking more about resources specifically.
So we will create a name for it.
We will name this tendency “present-resource discounting”.
How it Works
What this actually appears to be is a miscalibration occurring between a handful of different elements.
What resources we currently have available to us
What those resources can do/what effect they can create
What resources/effects we need to get where we want to go
This sounds a little bit philosophical but you can observe it very practically if you think of any time you’ve stagnated when you’re starting something.
People who want to start writing will start to look at writing software, nicely designed notebooks and journals, pens, and other writing accessories.
People who want to start making videos on social media will start to obsess over cameras, audio equipment, tips, tricks, and hacks.
No writing gets done and no videos get created.
Even though we all have access to paper, pens, and pencils. Computers with notepad software, google docs, microsoft word. And the camera on the vast majority of phones is high quality enough to record with. The audio is even fine unless you’re in a really disastrous location.
New Hobby Hyperconsumption
This feverish purchasing cycle that we enter when we start a new hobby is a state of hyperconsumption.
Which has been softly referred to as “shiny object syndrome” and more aggressively referred to as “gear-acquisition syndrome” or GAS. Where we will start buying a bunch of starter supplies, gear, and educational materials to “set ourselves up”.
This is, in a more subtle form, the reason that I struggled to start writing this morning.
Instead of using resources that I already had, like the information that I came up with just yesterday, or the thoughts that are actually on the top of my mind, I wanted to try to write about something new and shiny.
In writing this is an especially punishing mistake.
Because blank pages don’t provide you with any prompting or context.
How to Fix This
The way to fix this problem is simpler than you can imagine, literally.
You have to turn your attention toward things that you have.
The concise description for what is going on is this: We are misinterpreting our present knowledge and skill as insufficient because we have associated them with the aspects of our life that we dislike.
Let’s use traditional work as an example.
Someone who has worked 40 to 80 hours a week for the last few decades might reasonably hold negative feelings toward their job and their whole experience of work.
But this creates a dilemma.
Because that activity, and the information and knowledge associated with it represent a huge stockpile of resources that can be processed and shared. It is a fantasy to think that a new, equivalent stockpile will be built in a few weeks or months by undertaking something new.
Which is why people get stuck. They do not realize how far along they really are and believe they would rather be farther along somewhere else.
This makes sense from a certain perspective. But what it is really doing is throwing away all of your leverage. You will struggle tremendously if you don’t accept your years of experience and expertise and attempt to forsake them to develop entirely new ones. Even if you write about how you’d rather not have that experience, or how that experience is motivating you to branch out and build a new path, that is the storehouse of experience that you have to utilize.
Doing this takes radical acceptance and humbleness
Radical acceptance and humbleness open the door to considering the possibility that experiences you have deemed distasteful, worthless, bad, or otherwise holding you back in life, can be used directly as leverage to begin putting yourself into the position that you want to be in.
This shift in perspective will trigger your intelligence to start searching for, and creating ways to use it to do just that.
The whole trick is that you aren’t trying to find the right path, you are trying to aim your mind properly to create the right path.
Leave a comment with something you’re trying to build, or your experience looking externally for resources you already have internally.