Process of Elimination
I figured out what I didn’t want to do with my life in the summer of 1982. In between my junior and senior year of high school I worked in a downtown office for an oil company about 20 miles away from the small town where I lived. I dressed up every morning, made the commute, then sat in an office for 400 hours a day logging numbers for something that had to do with drilling, though I can’t for the life of me remember what. Mostly what I did was sigh a lot and pray for five o’clock to roll around.
I was seventeen and head over heels in love with basketball. And though I thought I wanted to coach and teach, the world felt pretty wide open. So I dipped my toe in “professional” life, and discovered very quickly that fluorescent lights, the same four walls, and filing weren’t for me. The confinement made my skin crawl. I needed NOT to sit at a desk all day. Or deal with numbers (I need words!) And I needed work that had blank pages instead of columns and a bunch of tiny lines. I wasn’t convinced of what my future would hold, but I knew without question what it wouldn’t.
The confinement made my skin crawl. I needed NOT to sit at a desk all day. Or deal with numbers (I need words!) And I needed work that had blank pages instead of columns and a bunch of tiny lines. I wasn’t convinced of what my future would hold, but I knew without question what it wouldn’t.
Knowing what you don’t want is sometimes just as valuable as knowing what you do.
The process of elimination is a conceptual strategy that works pretty much anywhere it gets applied. It’s a help-along when deciding where to go to dinner: “I definitely do not want to drive all the way across town. Seafood sounds awful right now. I’m not in the mood to talk over a lot of noise….”
It’s a game-changer when deciding what to wear: “That skirt goes with open-toe shoes—need a pedicure—skirt is out. No white pants--it rained last night. I don’t want to fool with tucking in a shirt….”
It works when trying to separate the chaff from the grain while dating, too, and it can play a pivotal role in helping you figure out how to spend the days of your one and only life. It has transformative application to both the little and the big.
A lot of my friends and peers are making professional transitions right now. They’re leaving the safety and security of careers that have spanned decades for the new lane of “they-don’t-know-yet.” And as they prepare to make this jump, they think a lot about what they can do. As in, “what am I capable of?”. Can matters, but a better compass is probably want. “What do you want to do?,” I ask them. Because life is short (and theirs, like mine is often more than halfway over), but also because we’re usually pretty good at the things we enjoy.
And mostly they look back at me bewildered. The horizon is so expansive they can’t see anything but space.
“What would you do if they didn’t pay you for it?” I used to ask my players when they were trying to decide on a career. The question so obtuse, sometimes they’d answer “sleep”. So, often I’d reverse engineer the deal: “What do you not want to do?” And that simple flip of logic would grease the gears. Nine times out of ten they’d start with “math.” But identifying borders is a starting spot. It helps you get your bearings. From there you can fill up a page.
For people who have done the same thing for a very long time, deciding to switch horses and change streams can be precarious. “I’ve only been a banker, I’m not sure I know how to do anything else.” “I’ve always been a coach, I don’t know what else I can do.” The list of transferable skills emanating from both of those (and most all others, if we’re really being candid) is lengthy and everywhere applicable, but time can sometimes coax us into looking through a straw.
There’s this old movie called At First Sight in which Val Kilmer stars as a blind man who undergoes a breakthrough surgery to restore retinal activity. When they first take the patches off his eyes after surgery, everything is so overwhelmingly big and bright that he instinctively squeezes his eyes shut because it hurts to see. He can’t make out any of the images. What he sees doesn’t even really qualify as images, and if it did, he wouldn’t know the names to associate with them. It's just a bunch of chaos that doesn’t make sense to him. So, the doctor tells him to find a thing—anything—it doesn’t matter what it is. And look at it hard. That focused attention will eventually start to bring all the fuzzy stuff into view, too.
So it starts with a place to start. And the easiest reach is often those things we abhor.
Identify, step opposite, and follow the breadcrumbs. Things will sort themselves out on the way.
Sherri Coale
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