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.