Author Steven Pressfield said most people pay attention to their careers, communities, finances, etc. “Not me,” he says. “I put my attention on the unknown or as-yet-unrevealed content of whatever book or story I’m working on.” If you’re in the creative or entrepreneurial realm, “what you’re interested in is something that doesn’t exist yet. Or, perhaps more accurately, something that does exist but whose contours have not yet revealed themselves.”

The idea of what doesn’t yet exist, which is this email’s theme, has shown up in recent stories I’ve read…

The Next Most Necessary Thing

On December 15, 1933, a woman named Frau V. asked Carl Jung how to best live her life. The short answer: no one can tell you. “One lives as one can,” Jung replied. If she wanted a definite answer, a definite path, she “had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what.”

The individual path, he explained, is never prescribed. You won’t know what it is in advance. It doesn’t yet exist. All you can do, he said, is the “next most necessary thing”; put one foot in front of the other.

The next most necessary thing. That’s how you live your life, how you make your own way. That’s how you create what doesn’t yet exist.

What Could Be

Coach Hal Mumme revolutionized American football. From the beginning of his coaching career in the late 70s, Mumme was obsessed with creating the perfect pass. He traveled the country in search of information, picking the brains of forward-thinking coaches who weren’t afraid to throw the ball. He learned Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense. He studied Glen “Tiger” Ellison’s radical yet brilliant run-and-shoot offense, which involved spreading the field and forcing the defense to cover more ground. He learned Darrel “Mouse” Davis’s pass-heavy, option-friendly improvement to the run-and-shoot. He studied the films of BYU—one of America’s greatest passing offenses in 1985. From the Canadian Football League’s second-winningest coach, Don Matthews, he learned the power of the 2-minute drill. (Mumme would sometimes run the 2-minute drill throughout an entire game, demolishing stronger and faster teams in the process). 

What pushed him to keep learning, experimenting, synthesizing, and creating was the feeling that there was still something missing. He had a vague notion that these ideas could be made into a repeatable system. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but by keeping his attention on what could be, on what did not yet exist, he would eventually develop this system, the legendary Air Raid offense (parts of which are used today by everyone from the Bowling Green State University Falcons to the San Francisco 49ers), and forever change the way football is played.

The Art of Living

Marcus Aurelius says to himself, and us, “You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere—not in logic, nor in wealth, fame, or in any indulgence.” Where, then, is the good life found? In actions based on the principles of justice, self-control, courage, and wisdom.

Like Jung, Marcus said life’s meaning is found in action. It’s not found by asking a wise person, or by reading thousands of books. It’s certainly not found in idle pondering. The meaning of life, as Viktor Frankl said, is not our question to ask. Life is asking us the question, at every moment.

We answer through our actions. We answer by doing the next most necessary thing, putting one foot in front of the other, imagining what’s possible, and moving closer to what could be.

Early in his career, professor and philosopher René Girard was asked to teach literature. For the first time, he read classic novels by authors like Dostoyevsky, Proust, and Flaubert. During his readings, Luke Burgis tells us, he noticed a pattern: none of the novels were plot-driven or character-driven; they were desire-driven. The object of the characters’ desires? Other characters’ desires. We are hardwired to imitate. Our desires, he realized, are mimetic.

Models of desire are all around us, which is why I’m using mimesis as this week’s theme…

To Be or To Do

The best American Fighter Pilot in history, John Boyd, first gave his famous “To Be or To Do” speech to the young Captain Raymond Leopold: 

“Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road, and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” He raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody . . . you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something—something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself . . . . you may not get promoted . . . .  and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superior. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.”

To be somebody, or do something. To work for a title, or for a cause. To want what other people want, or what you want. To think mimetically, or purposefully.

Torches of Freedom

In 1929, the president of the American Tobacco Company asked public relations expert Edward Bernays to help rid the negative stigma around women smoking in public. Bernays agreed and decided on the perfect time and place: the Easter Day parade in New York City. The parade was a way for high-society New Yorkers to sashay down Fifth Ave, showing off for the feverish media and lower-class onlookers. Bernays convinced a few of the parade’s influential women to smoke while they strutted down the street. He made sure that the photographers and journalists covering the event referred to the women’s cigarettes as “torches of freedom”. It worked. Women began lighting up in public, a celebration of liberty. Within a year, sales of Lucky Stripe tripled.

Peter Thiel’s $500,000 Bet

Our tendency to model behavior is what makes Facebook so influential: it’s full of billions of models of desire. It’s not celebrities or pro athletes that influence us most, it’s the people who look like us. When asked about his $500,000 Facebook investment that earned him $1 billion, Peter Thiel told Luke Burgis, “I bet on mimesis”. 

Find Yourself a Cato

Roughly two millennia before Girard put a name to it, Epictetus saw mimetic desire firsthand. As a slave in Nero’s court, he witnessed the endless cycle of competition and conflict. He watched as people fought and conspired over power, money, and fame—things they wanted because other people wanted them.

Five hundred years before Epictetus, the Buddha recognized our proclivity to mimic what we see. We’re on the constant lookout for change, he said, which is why desires and cravings seize us from moment to moment. As Karen Armstrong writes, the Buddha understood that “we are consumed and distracted by the compulsion to become something different.” 

We’re inclined to become something different, but we’re also inclined to become something better. That’s why we have ambition, why we want to grow, why we work so hard: to become who we’re capable of becoming. And the best place to start? Choosing a model worth following, a person whose values align with ours, and whose example teaches and challenges us.

Seneca advises us to “choose ourselves a Cato.” Choose someone whose high standards encourage us to raise our own.

“If, at any moment, you are unable to name a great man who is, or has recently been, having an influence on your conduct,” Ernest Dimnet said, “you will be passing the verdict: ORDINARY on the quality of your own thought and existence.”

Find a model whose greatness inspires your own.