Daeus Jorento

Let us pretend that all skills and abilities are malleable. There are no fixed strengths or weaknesses, only things we develop and things we neglect. Developing them takes effort, so I have to choose which ones are worth cultivating.

The same attribute can be a strength in one setting and a weakness in another. For example, stubbornness. When correct, it is a marvelous trait. When incorrect, it is a massive liability. Often, we don’t know which is which beforehand.

I never quit. Hell, I’ve been smoking for 30 years.
– Dale Gribble (King of the Hill)

What is Drive?

One trait I value extremely highly is doxastic openness: the willingness to change my beliefs when I encounter new, better evidence. It is the foundation of critical thinking: forming and updating conclusions based on evidence. But to gather enough evidence, I must keep moving long enough to find out. I’m calling that drive.

Drive is forward force under constraint and resistance. It gets me over the first few hurdles before I decide whether a direction is worthwhile. If I wanted to learn something, I would give it a few tries, even if it did not feel immediately rewarding.

Drive still requires reasonable judgment. Doxastic openness helps me change my method or direction when the evidence tells me to. With that guardrail, I want a higher tolerance for friction: the ability to sustain more effort before my brain demands a reward.

I used to expect purpose to come first and guide me through the fog. I’ve found that it is usually discovered through motion and only fully understood afterward. The friction itself can create the drive to continue.

Cultivation

One mistake I’ve made when trying to cultivate a skill is getting mad at myself for not already being good at it. That rarely works or motivates me for long. Rewarding progress gets me engaged much faster. It is like hitting a bullseye the first time I play darts or getting a strike at bowling and thinking, “Maybe I’m good at this.” The key is turning that first win into an incentive to practice, rather than proof that I am naturally good at it, which falls apart when the novelty and beginner’s luck wear off.

I cannot cultivate drive without applying it in some direction, but the “how” matters more than the “what” here. The specific activity matters less than practicing the process of starting, tolerating difficulty, and continuing. Once I put in some effort and see progress, my ego becomes invested in continuing. Sometimes, though, I need social reinforcement.

One thing that has always helped me is being on a team. Spending time around people who are better at something gives me something to rise toward. Ramp is full of people who are very, very driven at what they do. My college swim team and a few other teams I’ve been on were similar. I want my team to win, and my team keeps me motivated. Winning alone has never meant much to me for very long.

During low points, it hurts my ego to be a weaker member of a strong team or to need disproportionate support. I can take some solace in seeing that ego hit as part of the price I pay for a place among people who challenge me to improve. Everyone has high and low points, and my relative standing is not something I can directly control. I can learn from other people what to focus on, how to practice, and which barriers I can remove.

Friction

Here’s the contradiction: I don’t actually want friction. I don’t want resistance or obstacles between me and a goal. What I really want is the capacity to keep moving when things get difficult. I want more drive. Easy tasks tend to fade from my attention and become boring routines. Challenges give me something to push against.

A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.
– John A. Shedd

Strength training makes the role of resistance easy to see. When I first start lifting, even bench press can indirectly improve my squats by building my general capacity to exert myself, brace under load, and recover. Early on, the exact program matters less than consistently lifting something I can recover from.

I felt the same thing in swimming. Ten years after retiring as a competitive swimmer, I finally put into words what I loved about the sport: gliding. Water resists every movement, but also gives me something to push against. The effort creates forward motion, followed by the reward of the glide.

No friction, no drive. Too much friction, no motion.

The contradiction makes more sense when I distinguish between the friction that prevents me from starting and the resistance I encounter after I begin. I want to lower the first barrier, usually through scaffolding rather than willpower. Sometimes, when I feel existentially overwhelmed, the entire problem narrows to going for a walk, or even just sitting up. Once I am moving, enough resistance can engage my drive and sometimes create a feeling of flow.

Lowering the barrier to start does not make my capacity unlimited. Like lifting, too much resistance wears me down and becomes a debt I need to pay off with rest.

Rest & Balance

If you want to draw water you do not dig six one foot wells. You dig one six foot well.
– Reza Aslan

Once I find a challenge I can stick with, it is still easy to become diluted. There are always side quests competing with my main quests.

I’ve noticed that highly ambitious people who push really hard in one direction often live predictable lives outside of it. They keep everything else simple enough to go deep.

Going deep also requires some reason to believe the problem can be solved. Otherwise, I am just hitting my head against a wall.

Investing too heavily in one direction can be devastating when that pursuit ends. I need some balance between depth and breadth, between investing in my present and my future. Drive is something I can carry from one quest to another.

I also need fuel. I need breaks, rest, and time off. I cannot run my brain at redline indefinitely. I want to remain as undiluted as I can for as long as I can in a world not designed around my happiness. That requires leaving enough space to recover.

Wrap Up

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality
– Andrew Solomon

Drive gives me something deeper to cultivate and helps me detach from outcomes that can feel like my whole world. Sometimes drive leads to flow, which can be energizing and restorative. I’ve written a lot about avoiding traps and defensive productivity. Here, I wanted to write about offense: what I want to build toward.

Focusing on the pathway helps me engage with what I am doing instead of constantly fighting uphill toward an outcome I cannot control.

In the end, I just want to spend my limited energy well. Cultivating drive means doing that deliberately, taking in new information, and giving what I care about an earnest try. It helps me avoid walking away prematurely just because I tripped in the doorway.