“If I don’t know what to do next, I try to always follow one rule. - A rule? - If given a choice: a formless object or an object with form, choose the formless one. That is my rule. When I ran into a wall, I always followed it, and if I took my time, it always led to good results. Even if it was hard at the time.” I was absent-mindedly reading Haruki Murakami’s “Tokyo Legends” at bedtime last night, when suddenly this fragment surprised me, rousing my mind and chasing away sleep. Outlandish advice, eh? There is a desire to reveal it carefully and unhurriedly, like a fragile birthday present, wrapped in many layers by people dear to you.
As a business therapist, I deal with a variety of dilemmas all the time. Therefore, I can easily imagine a “fork” or, as some say, “horns of a dilemma”, which was insidiously thrown by fate or a person created it for himself. The peculiarity of such a choice is that essentially there is no choice. If at least one of the alternatives met expectations, the decision would be obvious. But as it is, on each side there is only, “Yes, but…”. So the man agonizes, crucified on the horns of a dilemma — it is impossible to choose, and impossible not to choose.
The advice of the hero of the story is curious in that it asks you to assess the degree of formation of options X and Y. Each of them, by definition, is far from ideal. Therefore, it makes sense to choose the variant whose optionality is high. After all, the formed object X does not promise anything new — it is defective and will remain so. A shapeless object Y is quite another matter. It has room for maneuver, degrees of freedom, and secret potential. Of course, all indeterminacy is ambivalent, that is, it promises both “minus” and “plus. But with Y at least there is a chance to jump into another orbit, while X is knowingly unacceptable and boring. Also, the finality of X makes you passive, whereas Y invites you to become a creator of your own volition.
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
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”Who are you and what do you do?"
As a business therapist, I help tech founders quickly solve dilemmas at the intersection of business and personality, and boost company value as a result.
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