Do what you can do

In lieu of a complete New Year’s post detailing all the happenings from the previous year and the lessons I learned… I first want to highlight one of the most helpful “slogans” I’ve been turning over in my brain on the blog, partially so I don’t forget it myself.

I am quite liable to forget about the need for simplicity (another lesson learned) - it’s easy to overlook things that seem obvious or simple when you spend most of your waking hours trying to understand complicated things. I find the phrase

“do what you can do”

is one such simple phrase, with a surprising depth to it. I think this phrase has at least three meanings, which we can highlight through a little bit of linguistic trickery:

(1) Do what you can do.

That is,

focus on tasks which are well matched to your current ability or capability at the current moment.

For example, I feel that in the world of research, it is quite easy to find a paper you can’t understand or methods/tools that you are currently incapable of using; and subsequently it’s quite easy to get discouraged about your own ability to eventually do those things or master those techniques. It helps to remember that you just can’t do those things right now, and if it means that you need to spend more time studying and practicing to get there, this is what you can do now.

Of course, knowing whether or not something is beyond you requires a little effort too. One should still try to determine the limits of one’s knowledge, and if indeed the problem’s solution falls within the purview of your skills, that is also something that one can do now.

I feel like it’s sort of like RPGs that make you backtrack to open treasure chests (Zelda?). You can sometimes see the goal in plain sight on some inaccessible ledge, but you’ve got to go further into the dungeon to find out how to access it, or come back later once you’ve gotten your double jump or hookshot. One shouldn’t worry excessively about the unopened chest (because, after all, you can usually beat the game without it), but when the realization dawns, it’s also a nice moment. What seemed so difficult and unattainable in the past becomes significantly easier. Of course, though, sometimes there’s no way forward but to figure out how to flip that switch or open that chest…

What I’ve described here seems to roughly correspond to Vakil’s comments on “backfilling,”, in the sense in which it might apply to research in mathematics, but I feel like this is generally applicable as well, which is to be discussed more in the next interpretation.

(2) Do what you can do.

That is,

given that your time and energy is limited, focus on doing things which you actually can achieve within the physical limitations which you have, and don’t cram more than you can handle into a day/week/semester.

Raise your hand if you’ve not done this one… (guilty as charged!) How many overloaded semesters have I done where I haven’t really focused on any of the individual classes I was taking, and just kind of scraped by?

This thought became a bit more concrete after I recently read Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. I think the salient part is that given we do have finite time (in each day, in each week, and ultimately on Earth), one should stop trying to operate under the illusion that we can do everything that we want to do. Because of our finite nature (indeed, he cites Heidegger to say “we are time”), this observation is simply an inevitability. Trying to do everything just means that we sometimes don’t consciously choose to forego certain things - they’re just an inevitable casualty of the overloaded schedule. There’s more to say about this, but for the sake of brevity, I think I’ll defer to the book.

So, instead of just overloading yourself under the illusion that you’ll be able to do everything, maybe the goal is consciously pick which things to forego. I personally find this extremely difficult - I wrote once in one of my journals some years ago that I would “grieve for all the versions of myself I’ll never be.” That line still sticks with me. I think this is the “larger-timescale” expression of the same anxiety in which 24 hours is not quite enough to complete everything on the to-do list. The days turn into years, and so on…

But slowly, I’m getting at least more conscious of it! I know I only complete a certain portion of my to-do list, so I think I overshoot by the right amount so that I get enough done. It remains to be seen whether that’s actually a sustainable method long-term. On the other hand, the day I write down exactly what I intend to do and do exactly just that (no more, no less) will be a amazing one, indeed.

(3) Do what you can do.

That is,

if something is within your ability and your capacity (in the sense of (1) and (2)), do it - don’t wait.

(with, of course, the qualification that doing so would hopefully be beneficial to you and others).

Again… seems obvious, right? Well, I think this ties back to another “slogan” I had written for myself in a previous blog post - “don’t be afraid.” I would consider this to be the corollary in some sense (or perhaps a restatement, or revision?)

It’s not that one shouldn’t be afraid or nervous; fear and anxiety is a natural reaction to the cloud of uncertainty that seems to hang over events that we care about the outcome of. But we shouldn’t let that prevent us from doing these things that we actually care a lot about. Once we know that we can do things, we should try to do them, to the best of our ability. I feel that often, I haven’t done things because of the reasons above. This is also a natural reaction - we can regain control over the uncertain situation by not trying at all, and thus we now know the outcome.

This is definitely one of the stickier ones for me, because the doubts often have a voice that says I’m not prepared enough in the sense of (1) and (2) - I have neither the skill, nor the time, nor the time to acquire the skill.

Again, I think all of these things are all well known by this point. But somehow, these simple things are so easy to forget in the thick of things. Internalizing and practicing these is something that needs to be developed over time, and is helpful in daily life as well as with research. Hence, the blog post (writing helps me clarify my ideas). Hopefully it can serve as reassurance to others who may read this (if you do, and it helped, let me know!)

To end on an invigorating note, I suppose….

go forth and do what one can!