Jordan

A lot of people I know who do interesting things started with a diving board moment: they stood on the edge of a big project and made the leap despite being terrified. With me, this happened at 17 with my Eagle Scout Project. I found myself in charge of building a boardwalk through the woods at my summer camp. But I had never done a construction project in my life. The leap wasn't really by choice. I moved through the ranks of boyscouts, getting merit badges for learning how to set up tents and shoot rifles and so on and it was all very straightforward. And then, right before college, you get to the final rank and suddenly you have to become a project manager. I did not know what this entailed, so I went for it. In my case, building a boardwalk turned out to entail making engineering diagrams, managing a big team of builders, operating heavy machinery, and – most terrifying of all – cold-calling random businesses to ask them to donate free wood and cinderblocks. I'm lucky I was unaware of how daunting all this would be, because if I knew in advance, I probably wouldn't have jumped off the diving board. But once I was in the water, so to speak, I was shocked at how malleable reality turned out to be. I called up strangers and they gave me free stuff. I asked adults to do the woodwork and they said yes. People lent me their drills and hammers and hours. This shattered my conception of social reality, which was previously based on the theory that Things Happened in the world because of institutions and their rules and employees. It was sort of an initiation into the very idea of personal agency. Having discovered it, I had dramatically less fear the second time I jumped off the diving board, and even less the third, until today where doing things like starting companies or running festivals or whatever still feels daunting, but not paralyzing. Compare how much less intimidating the second time having sex or driving a car is to the first time. It's like that. It also helps that I've failed a bunch of times after jumping off. I've discovered that failure, while embarrassing, does not come with existential stakes. I survived. And, sure, sometimes there was reputational damage, but it blew over in time. I write about this because I know a lot of people who haven't reached the potential I see in them. Usually, in my opinion, this is because they haven't yet had their diving board moment. I know literal geniuses who rot in their day jobs because of a habit of stepping back from the diving board. For many of them, the action of stepping back might be so habitual that making the choice to jump off feels too ingrained to be a choice. This is especially true for those I know who are making lots of money doing normal jobs they hate. I do not want to tell them "just jump from the diving board!" That seems too simple. But maybe one thing I might say is, "Ask someone who loves you to push you off."