I’ll start this one off from a quote:
“There’s a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path.” —Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)
Sometimes it can be a good thing that we don’t see everything about something we choose to pursue, at the point when we are just getting involved with it or just considering getting involved with it. This may seem counter-intuitive, since the neutral, deterministic approach dictates that if we knew everything that was involved with pursuing something, that we could theoretically optimize our actions to maximize the benefit to ourselves. The issue with that approach, is that it assumes that one’s motivation to pursue such endeavor is set in stone. It doesn’t take into account the notion that the capacity of a person’s willingness to handle certain aspects of the endeavor changes depending on how deeply along the endeavor one has progressed.
In many cases, if we knew everything that was involved with pursuing something beforehand, we might not pursued it in the first place. This is because we would assign nominally equal weight to both its positive and negative aspects since we haven’t experienced them first hand, and that may not be strong enough of a case for us to be motivated to starting such a journey.
Often times, however, the more deeply that we get involved with an endeavor, we become more willing to deal with some of the associated unfavorable aspects than we would have been at the outset. This is because as we progress, we can encounter positive aspects and growth that we start to value more strongly than we did at the outset because we have experienced it first hand, or because it has affected us in ways that we didn’t expect at the outset, even if we knew of that aspect’s presence. This renders us willing to deal with the negative aspects of the endeavor more so than at the beginning, and overall we start assigning more weight to the positive aspects. It is this imbalance of weighting that gives us reason to keep being involved with an endeavor and see it through to the end.
But before getting involved, how do we convince ourselves that pursuing something is ‘worth it’ when in a lot of cases, we really don’t know?
That’s where idealization comes in. For better or for worse, we sometimes have to artificially suppress our objectivity or scope regarding our evaluation of an endeavor in order to convince ourselves that it is worth pursuing and therefore develop the requisite motivation to do so. That is, we start hyping up the potential benefits and playing down the potential disadvantages and risks at a point that since we haven’t experienced them yet, we don’t really know whether we’re being accurate or not. The exact way that we hype and downplay aspects respectively is strongly based on our previous experiences and our developed approach for interpreting and assimilating information. This sometimes results in pleasant surprises, and sometimes results in more grievous losses. The same principle applies for convincing ourselves against pursuing something, where we hype up the negative aspects and downplay the positive aspects. Colloquially, this is known as ‘fake it until you make it’.
Once we do get involved though, we can often find that our initial assessments were inaccurate to some extent, large or small. This isn’t always a bad thing, since the way in which they were inaccurate can be good or bad, and naturally we have to be able to adapt our assessment to what we experience, and continually evaluate whether the endeavor is worth it to us or not.
So in that context, the question is posed:
Do we have to initially idealize the benefits of an endeavor, at least partially, in order to develop the motivation to pursue it? What about vice-versa?
Is there another way of developing motivation that doesn’t require a ‘raincheck’? If so, what are they and how would they work?
Once again, if your answer is long, send it via the ‘Message’ tab.
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