One dark lockdown day, I bought a spider plant for my kitchen. I had never kept a plant alive before and my knowledge on purchase day was something like: this is a plant, I will need to water it.
Years later, I own dozens of houseplants, and can spot the difference between a monstera, philodendron, and pothos from some distance. Our cupboard is packed with plant foods and growth serums, I have a preferred brand of potting mix, and I finger the tips of leaves when I visit friends.
This is the art of finer distinctions. You might not be a plant nutter, but you've had your own version - starting a new course or job, or picking up a hobby or interest. You go from "what is this and what do I wear and isn't golf just hitting a ball and walking around?" to owning three different outfits and discussing your grip type in no time.
I first met this idea in a Benjamin Hardy book. Until you get stuck in and go deep on something, you simply don't know what's possible. It's one of many reasons why detailed long-term plans usually don't work out - you don't know enough to make accurate predictions.
In psychology literature, this process is called "perceptual differentiation" and it's the foundation of expertise. We become an expert in something by turning a big amorphous blob of a category (like plants) into ever-finer slices (species, leaf type, fertiliser needs) as we learn. These distinctions compound over time into deeper understandings and connections.
Distinctions get finer through practice. If we don't regularly do things, we lose our eye for differentiation.
In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, Cory Doctorow warns against making humans AI-output checkers because of skill atrophy and the low-prevalence effect. Radiologists who look for small errors on AI scans rather than making the initial diagnoses miss tumours. TSA agents are excellent at finding water bottles but terrible at detecting actual bombs.
What we become an expert in shapes the world we live in: what we notice, who we hang out with, and which opportunities come our way. These are known as affordances - possibilities in our environment that only appear to us relative to our capabilities.
A skateboarder walks a different street than me, because of what they can do with it. I don't notice the rail but he can already feel the grind. Until I knew about plants, there was no opportunity for a bushy fiddle-leaf fig, just a skinny half-dead plant in the lounge. (Tip: prune to the join, and it will branch out.)
In The Expectation Effect, David Robson describes our brains as prediction machines. Our wildly complex mind, Robson argues, sees and experiences the world as it expects to - and will go to great lengths to make those expectations a reality.
If we think we're taking morphine, our brain manufactures opioids. If we think ageing makes us weaker, our joints stiffen and tire. Just as knowledge shapes our perceptions and presents affordances in our environments, our expectations co-create reality. Who we are changes what we do. What we do changes who we are. Chicken. Egg. Chicken.
Our initial worldview and subsequent choices are powered by default settings - installed by our families and encoded in communities. Left to compound, we'll live in a world that confirms our existing ideas. We'll have the careers we expected to have, prop up the systems we think are normal, and butt up against the constraints we expected to find.
When we feed our prediction machines with different ideas, people, environments, and knowledge, we reveal new and surprising things about ourselves, our lives, and our possibilities. Each one offers a new rabbit hole to leap into, and finer distinctions to make.
I was chatting with my plumber recently and he asked what I did for work. Like a good New Zealander, I responded in embarrassed apology.
"Oh, all sorts of things, random shit, haha. I, um, write books and essays, speak at conferences, and train people in thinking and planning."
He was bemused. "How the hell do you get into that?"
I mostly cocked my answer up but did manage to land a useful metaphor.
"I sort of just walked through one door, then another one? I had no idea this work existed when I started. But first I did some consulting, and then I wrote a book, and then I talked about the book, and then I learned other things, and met other people, and every room I went into had a new door in it."
He had a similar story to tell about how he'd gone into business, and how he'd specialised over time. I've been thinking about it since.
We don't get to choose the person or perception we start with. But we do get to choose what we do, where we go, and who we hang out. Our open tabs, the course we've signed up to, and the books next to the bed are building a world, and a person to live in it.
If we walk through one door, then another, then another, we'll end up somewhere we couldn't have imagined from outside the house. It won't necessarily be better. Depends on the doors.
Til next week,
A x