I learnt to ski when I was 231 and I can’t stop thinking about it.

A common experience of those fortunate enough to learn to ski as an adult is the edge-of-control nerves of skidding down a mountain face going ten miles an hour and it feeling like a hundred. All whilst countless toddlers overtake in their merry little conga lines, carefree and booking it.

The art of it, or rather, the knack2 is to face down hill with your weight forward. That is, the trick is to do exactly what you’re scared of doing. Move your weight forward, towards the abyss of death. Moving your center of balance over the front of your skis allows them to catch and dig into the snow. Letting you steer safely sideways across the face of the slope and not straight down the harshest incline at dangerous Mach speeds.

Being an adult and up to your waist in the knowledge of your own mortality and self consciousness, your instinct is to lean back. Away from the drop and towards the safety of the slope close to your bum, hugging the mountain near. Your weight moves back with you, the tips of your skis rise, steer-ability drops. Chaos and a tangle of limbs ensues. It all ends in tears.

The children whizzing by have not developed any such sense of self preservation, albeit faulty in this scenario, and are natural experts.

This phenomenon that committing to something, leaning into the scary thing, actively makes it easier I now see everywhere. Whereas being timid, careful and cautious as a safety mechanism has the perverse side affect of making the outcomes worse.

Think too hard about catching a ball, and you fumble it. Going faster on a bicycle makes it more stable.

I think about this a bunch at work, almost in reverse3. The way you feel and think about stuff impacts outcomes. Unsure about a project or don’t believe in an initiative and they will be more likely to fail. Committing to them helps them succeed. I like to think you can reverse engineer this and choose or influence how you feel4.

Yes you can’t get things done through wishful thinking alone, but this implies it can be a key ingredient. Doing something by sheer force of will, being positive, looking for the hows and not the why not gets things done. Leaning down the mountain of work drives you forward, and makes things easier, even if it feels unintuitive at times.

So that is the fable I tell myself to balance out my cautious nature. There’s probably a metaphor out there for the naturally-born self-assured but that’s not me, instead I just think to myself:

You’ve got to commit5.

Notes

  1. I’m 33 at time of writing, so it has been a while. ↩

  2. Missing the ground is also important. ↩

  3. The link in my head is an odd observer effect which says that when you measure something, you affect it. In this case, when you think/feel about outcomes, you affect outcomes. ↩

  4. An important belief I have is that you can exert control, or at least influence over your own feelings, which is based of some formative reading of stoicism I’ve latched onto. Not always possible or desirable but I feel it’s an important pursuit. It let’s me believe I have control in life and not just a mass of chemicals in my brain sweeping me along. ↩

  5. Commit! is also something I say at myself and others during climbing. When I can’t do a particular move in climbing, 90% of the time it’s not my muscles or finger tendons giving way at the apex of strain, it’s that I instinctively take my feet off the footholds. Aiming to land comfortably when I think I might not make it, which itself causes the failure. ↩